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

Popular posts from this blog

Pans's Labyrinth Pale Man Scene

How Far Does Winter's Bone Rely Upon An Understanding Of Its Social Context