Critical Investigation
Notes and Quotes
WHY HORROR? THE PECULIAR
PLEASURES OF A POPULAR GENRE
‘It is argued that these attempts at posing general explanations of the
appeal of horror are, at worst, inappropriately reductive and, at best,
insufficiently specific, failing to distinguish the diverse pleasures that
heterogeneous horror audiences take from their active involvement in the
genre.’
‘It is suggested that the former, active
and particularistic conception is to be preferred and that this necessitates a
renewed attempt to grasp the diversity of what is, after all, a heterogeneous
audience capable of taking diverse pleasures from their favored genre’
CHILDREN WATCH INSIDIOUS 3
RATHER THAN INSIDE OUT AFTER OHIO CINEMA MIX-UP
Two tentpole titles playing during the same week. Two movies that begin
with the letters “insid”. One slightly distracted projectionist. Such is the
setup for a drama that unfolded in Ohio last weekend, resulting
in an auditorium full of weeping children.
‘In narrative
cinema, conventionally, the audience's desires and terrors are projected into
empathy or hatred for the characters in the film. Surrealist cinema instead
displays a sequence of objects - from eyeballs to donkeys - whose vicissitudes
create horror and comedy. This macabre anti-cinema has poisoned film ever
since, not just in art movies, but in thrillers, horror films, comedy. Instead
of props, actors in surrealist cinema relate obsessively to fetishes’
‘The events that
can happen in such a world are full of passion, comedy, horror; it's just that
they never get resolved and tidied up by narrative explanations. There are
people in the film, but it is not "about" them - it is about us, our
reactions, our disgust and perversity’
DO WOMEN AND HORROR MOVIES MIX?
‘Horror
is the preserve of the sweaty male teen, but the movie industry wants us to
believe women are more and more interested in it all.’
What marks it out in the horror
genre is that almost all the characters are female and that it relies more on
suspense than gore (and even the gore has a female skew - at one point, the
blood on the screen is menstrual, an echo of the Canadian werewolf movie Ginger
Snaps)
Is there a problem with the way
horror films are made? Why does she think there are so few female horror
directors? "There are so few female directors of any genre. I think the
type of horror films women tend to like are perhaps more interesting, more
psychological."
Psychologists have long believed
that our attraction to horror films is that they allow us to explore and
experiment with fears and emotions, but there are suggestions that women
respond to fear in a way that men don't.
"Fear can facilitate sexual
responsiveness in women, whereas it inhibits it in men,"
Says Dr Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at King's
College London.
‘’Horror
films, for men and women, are about learning to cope with emotions that would
threaten to overwhelm us if they happened in reality."
WHY OUR BRAINS LOVE HORROR MOVIES?
‘Films like Paranormal Activity 3 have a pre-registered audience just
waiting for the latest Hollywood bouquet of blood, sweat, tears, and chills to
exquisitely fill our lust for horribly sweet sensations,” Says Fischoff
“Terror as the finest
emotion, and so I will try to terrorize the reader.”
Stephen King described
“One of the major reasons we go to scary
movies is to be scared,” But the scare
we crave—and this applies to haunted houses and spooky corn mazes no less than
to horror movies—is a safe one. “We know that, in an hour or two, we’re going
to walk out whole. We’re not going to have any holes in our head, and our
hearts will still be in our bodies.”
Says Fischoff
There are people who have a tremendous need for stimulation and
excitement,” “Horror movies are one of the better ways to get really excited.”
AGE:
That may explain why horror movies
are most popular with younger audiences. Teens and twenties…
“Are
more likely to look for intense experiences,”
Says John
Edward Campbell, an expert in media studies at Temple University.
That fades with age, especially as
people become more sensitive to their own physiology: middle-aged and older
adults tend not to seek out experiences that make their hearts race, and feel
that real life is scary enough.
Foreclosure?
Unemployment?
Divorce?
They don’t need to get their scares
from movies.
“Older people have stimulation fatigue’’
Fischoff
Life’s [real] horrors scare them, or they
don’t find them entertaining any more—or interesting’’
Fischoff
One of the more counterintuitive findings in the science of fear
is that the stronger the negative emotions (fear, worry, anxiety...) a person
reports experiencing during horror films, the more likely he or she is to enjoy
the genre. Distress and delight are correlated.
“The pleasure comes from the relief that follows. It provides a
cathartic effect, offering you emotional release and escape from the real world
of bills and mortgages and the economy and relationships.”
Says Campbell
Horror was appealing because it traffics in “thoughts and feelings
that have been repressed by the ego but which seem vaguely familiar,”
Freud suggested
Appeal to TEENAGERS also goes beyond
thrill-seeking and catharsis. Horror movies help young people learn to manage
terror.
“They can either succumb [to frightening
images] or learn to manage,”
“By
learning to suppress feelings and display mastery or cling to others in a
dependent ploy for protection, a person learns to cope with another aspect of
his or her environment, a skill that may be useful in dealing with more than
just horror pictures.”
GENDER
MALE: “Teenage boys enjoyed a horror film
significantly more when the female companion... expressed fright,
FEMALE: whereas teenage girls enjoyed the film more
when the male companion... showed a sense of mastery and control,”
Walters argued
ARGUMENT AGAINST HORROR NOT BEING A
POPULAR GENRE:
Why is horror less popular than other genres?
“Generally, people anticipate
feeling entertained and feeling good when they leave a movie,” explains Fischoff.
But while horror films excite and arouse, they “often leave people
feeling nervous and unsettled,” despite any catharsis. “This is not a state which
leads to fond memories.”
THE PECULIAR PLEASURES OF A POPULAR GENRE
Brophy: 1986
Suggests in an illuminating if
sweeping generalization, the gratification of the contemporary Horror film is
based upon tension, fear, anxiety, sadism and masochism - a disposition that is
overall both tasteless and morbid.
The pleasure of the text is, in
fact, getting the shit scared out of you - and loving it; an exchange mediated
by adrenalin.
'Why horror' question? To confront
this topic it is first necessary to question the presumed homogeneity of
horror.
After allif horror fans are asked
about the nature of their enjoyment of the genre, their answers vary in scope
and character.
Many such responses relate to
narrative devices, to the fascination of not knowing what is going to happen
next and to the ambivalently pleasurable tension which attends that
uncertainty.
The tension promoted by horror
movies, for instance, is more likely to produce physically manifest responses.
Hiding one's eyes, jumping at moments of shock, holding one's breath, giving
vent to nervous laughter, all are apparent in the behaviour of horror audiences
and are invoked by them as significant indicators of a good movie.
Carroll
(1990: 210)
'The contemporary horror genre is the
exoteric expression of the same feelings that are expressed in the esoteric
discussions of the intelligentsia with respect to postmodernism'
As Crane
(1994: 47)
'For a horror film to work, the audience
must not only suspend disbelief. They have to manufacture particular kinds of
belief' (my italics). It is that productive activity which now insistently
demands the attention of any student of horror.
DEMOGRAPHICS
Whether most female spectators
actually behave like this is another question. Demographic profiles of
contemporary cinema audiences suggest that women can comprise up to 50 per cent of horror film audiences.
Economic
During
times of economic deprivation, as between 1931-1933, horror films like Dracula, King Kong, and The Mummy were
highly popular; ditto for the late 1960s to the 1980s, the era of Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
STATISTICS ON GENDER
Barclay (1961) presents the results of a survey of 2,526 boys
and 2,794 girls conducted by the Scottish Educational Film Association.
The data analysed in this study
suggest that younger girls seem almost as drawn to horror as boys of the same
age (49 per cent of fourteen-year-old boys and 37 per cent of girls of the same
age chose horror as one of the four film types they liked best, 41 per cent of
fifteenyear-old boys and 56 per cent of girls of the same age chose horror).
Girls increasingly professed a
dislike for the genre as they matured (of sixteenyear-olds, the number of boys
liking horror remains steady at '10 per cent, for girls the figure dropped to
25 per cent).
By the age of eighteen, these
figures have fallen to
·
29 per cent of boys
·
15 per cent of girls who liked horror films;
·
30 per cent of boys
·
64 per cent of girls most disliked genres
The survey also indicates that
large numbers of teenagers are claiming to have watched 18 certificated films
and videos from as young as thirteen or fourteen-years-oh
·
88 per cent of thirteen to fourteen-year-olds
·
92 per cent of fifteen to sixteen-year-olds,
·
100 per cent of seventeen to eighteen-year-olds
with no differences observed between boys and girls).
The viewing of adult films
(including but not exclusively horror films) from early or pre-teens does not
seem to be confined to those playing computer games
The stereotypical feminine response
to horror –
Telotte (1980, p. 22) states
that 'the most effective horror films operate from a distinctly visual bias
..., and that this visual participation best explains why we find this
particular genre so satisfying - in short, why we enjoy being scared by such
films.
Obviously,
some successfully socialised women who 'scare easily' and 'can't bear to watch
any fright flicks' cannot deal with this visual participation but still retain
an interest in horror entertainment by reading horror fiction
The report expresses surprise that
women like horror - stating (p. 13) that 'the image of women as "shrinking
violets" is certainly not supported' and 'this apparent steely female
ability to cope with blood and gore better than men'.
That women might like horror does
appear to be a constant source of amazement, however frequently research
reveals it, and again illustrates just how pervasive is the idea that an
interest in horror is unfeminine
MEDIA TEXTS:
INSIDIOUS:
CHAPTER ONE:
‘The build-up is slow and sure, the shocks are
exponential’
‘A pleasant, apparently American couple and
their three small children move into a new house where things go bump in the
night and the eldest child experiences a three-month coma.’
INSIDIOUS CHAPTER TWO:
‘Anyone who has ever watched a
horror movie will have seen all of this before, but Wan's target audience
appears to be people with no interest in the genre, content merely for someone
to shout "Boo!" loud enough to distract them momentarily from their
mobile phones. ’
Paranormal
Activity: The Ghost Dimension scares off cinema owners
Paramount’s bold release plan for
the sixth instalment, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, is a first for
the low-budget series: it will be available to watch digitally 17 days after it
all but leaves cinemas – meaning customers can view it from their homes as
early as six to seven weeks after its release, instead of having to wait the
standard three to four months
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