Wednesday 30 October 2013

Conducting research into the horror genre

As horror is our chosen genre we have conducted research into this genre. We intend to find out the conventions of horror and want to mimic these in our opening sequence.

Horror History:




Above i have created a time line on the history of the horror genre. Horror orginates around around the 1830's starting from a novel called the Notre-dame de paris. This time line leads up to currents day horror and portrays how this genre has evolved over the years.

Secondly a team member Georgia Pearce created a presentation on Empresser on the conventions of horror films. This includes narrative theories from Todrovo and Claude Levi-Strauss . This is embedded below:


My team member Kala Hill gathered the research for the Iconography of Horror movies . She presented this research as images in a collage, including the typical aspects of horrors.
Below is the collage made on Photovisi (All images are from google and youtube)

This collage contains the stereotypical things that people expect to see in horrors such as blood, knives and weapons. The villains in horrors always have either a mask on or media make up, this is to try and create the scary vibe by disguising there identity. I have also included common horror film scenes for example the big haunted house and being in the shower. All of these images are dark and eery. This represents the basic expectations of a horror film.

Lastly Kala researched into the certificate rating on horror movies and the reasons behind the ratings. All movies have certificate ratings on and when you look at horror movies they 
normally range between 15 and 18, this will be because of the contents of the movie have bad language, violent scenes, sex scenes and horror scenes these things are what cause the films to fall under the category of 18 certificate ratings.
Horror films were very hard to pass as an 18 certificate rating in the past because violence was a problematic situation and caused a lot of moral panic, in order for the film to get the rating certificate and be able to be shown in cinema's they would have to remove the scenes that are inappropriate although these scenes will be shown in uncut video versions. Now days a lot more is accepted in movies, for example until recently actual sex acts were not allowed in any 18 certificate rating movies.
An example could be Cannibal Holocaust this movie had to be cut by 5.44 minutes because of sexual violent scenes and animal cruelty.

Movies such as the saw series are all 18 ratings, this will because of all the blood, gore and violence. Movies like this need to have the ratings because the contents is not suitable for anyone under that age, since saw contains bad language and is filled with loads of different violent ways of killing people. You can also see from movies like this that entertainment has changed so much over the years because the content of saw would not have been accepted even as a 18 certificate rating movie where as over the years they have had to be more lenient and accept more into 18 rating movies because it is what the audience now want to see and they want.







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