Horror- Genre Conventions

Horror-Genre Conventions

Settings

• Small communities or isolated places. More rural than inner city. This offers the opportunity for the community to feel isolated or for them to withhold a secret.
• Can be places with a past that seems to come back to life for example an abandoned house or old lunatic asylum
• Homes or places with multiple places eg. Flats or attics. Attics connote our repressed terrors.
• Can be night time often places of `innocent` daytime fun, but out of hours.
• Religion/medical institutions, possession, demons and psychosis
• Strange places with strange cultures and odd traditions.

Technical Code

• Camera work is expressive rather than naturalistic. Strange high and low angles. Canted camera work common-disorientated
• Extreme close ups on victim to enable audience identification with terror and to exclude threat from frame (more scary as you don’t know where it is). Sudden extreme close ups on monster to connote invasion of our personal space.
• POV shooting very important, subjective, hand-held or steadicam camera work often places audiences in monsters eyes.
• Camera work often makes use of depth of frame- protagonist inforeground unaware of monster emerging in background
• Sound may be very important. Ambient sound for atmosphere, footsteps, heartbeats high in the sound mix.

Iconography

• Visual signifiers of genre are often apparent. Different colours showing obvious connotations.
• Lighting expressive and non-naturalistic motivated, low key, high contrast. To emphasise shadows. Lighting direction often from unexpected angles.eg below to create unfamiliar shadows.
• A selection of the commoner objects in the mise-en-scene would include weapons (particularly bladed), blood, masks, icons of the supernatural (ghosts, moving objects) and religion (crucifixes, pagan symbols)
• Iconography of childhood/innocence- dolls, playground and clowns- children’s songs.

Narrative Structure

• Classic realist/classic Hollywood narrative structure (normally-enigma-path to resolution-closure, or hero-agent of change-quest-resolution-closure) Largely applicable to genre, although there may be `false closures` and the real closure often left ambiguous for two reasons- 1 to suggest mythic quality of the monster and 2 to enable a sequel. This conception of narrative structure is based on Tondorov`s theories.
• The clear, unambiguous hero of the classic Hollywood narrative is somewhat problematic in many horrors- as a main protagonist, the `final girl` of the slasher and many other horror films is a victim/hero rather than a simple hero, and thus provides a point of masochistic identification for the spectator which is more complicated than in many other genres.
• The narratives of some sub-genres such as the slasher, are very formulaic. Childhood psychotic event creates killer who return to a past location on a anniversary to kill again- usually a group of stupid `immoral` teenagers etc, with one masculine virgin female character who survives. ( The final girl).

Character Types

• Main protagonist often `victim/hero`
• Monsters with hidden secret or made psychotic by an earlier event.
• Stupid/`immoral` teens that get killed.
• Children.
• Ineffectual police and `normal` law enforcers.
• The `have a go` hero who gets killed.
• Scientists who do stupid things or over-reach their powers.
• People who refuse to believe.

Themes

• Binary oppositions-natural vs unnatural; good vs evil; known vs unknown.
• Return of the repressed- Freudian theory...horrorr is often close to sex in some way.
• The hidden evil inside
• Science out of control
• What lies on the other side of death?
• Does horror reinforce or subvert dominant ideology??