Horror Film
Horror film is a
genre that seeks to elicit fear for entertainment purposes. Horror at the
beginning was inspired by literature from authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Bram
Stocker and Mary Shelly. The
macabre and the supernatural are frequent themes.
-A famous scene from the 1922 German horror film Nosferatu.
Horror films often aim to evoke viewers’ nightmares, fears,
revulsion's and terror of the unknown. The horror genre has been around for more
than a century. The first depiction of horror in film was in 1896 a 3-minute
short film called le Manoir Du Diable known as in English as “The Haunted
Castle”. Some of the most iconic horror films in cinema history are Psycho,
Night Of The Living dead, The shining and The thing. Then some of the most
famous and greatest horror directors are John Carpenter, George A Romero,
Alfred Hitchcock and Guillermo Del Toro to name a few.
One issue raised by horror movies is that they reflect
societal issues such as in Get Out (2017) where the issues of race and rights
in civic life are assessed. The film itself is not just a horror film, but an
allegory for the horrors of racism and the difficulties of relations between
white and black people in the US. Jordan Peele takes different tropes of race
relations and of the meet-the-parents scenario and pushes them to their most
horrific limits to reveal the ways that racism is a horror in and of itself,
something to be escaped. Logan/Andre's encouragement to "get out" is
an urging for Chris to leave an explicitly dangerous situation, but it also
confirms the discomfort that Chris has already been feeling with the supposedly
innocuous parts of staying with Rose's family. The entire film is an allegory
for the horrors of the ways that white people use and control black bodies, and
also appropriate and benefit from black virtues and strengths.
Another issue raised by horror films is inherited
mental illness as seen in Hereditary (2018). Hereditary speaks to a kind of
fear familiar to anyone with mental illness in their blood: the fear that your
life is polluted, that your reality is unreliable, that your mind will one day
turn on you.
He films sense of dread is rooted in Anne’s awareness of her
family history of mental in illness in her mother, father and brother which
leaves her feeling doomed. Despite the stable life she’s built with a
successful career and supportive family By the film’s midpoint, it’s clear that more than inherited mental
illness is haunting the Graham family, unless you choose to interpret everything
that’s happening as an extended case of folie à deux where delusions are transmitted
within a family. But even if you don’t, demonic possession—which takes
center-stage in the final act—has a long history as both a metaphor and coded explanation for mental illness. Even Hereditary’s
gore is psychological; several characters die by having their heads separated
from their bodies, the most physical possible representation of a severance
between mental state and physical reality.
Comments
Post a Comment