CI5472 Teaching Film, Television, and Media
Module 7: Film/Television Genres ~ Different Genre Types
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The horror/monster film(see Horror Films and IMDb.com: Horror)(Godzilla, The Night of the Living Dead, Silence of the Lambs, Cape Fear, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, The Shining, Scream, Scream 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Blair Witch Project) and television series genre (Buffy the Vampire Killer) is one of the more popular genres with adolescents. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Horror/monster films/television programs revolve around the theme of a fear of death/mortality or id/sexuality, which is manifested in the zombies, creatures, vampires (Count Dracula: see Dracula’s Home Page and Webquest: Dracula), werewolves, devils, witches, mutant insects, and monsters who threaten to take over and destroy a family, community, or world. The power of the genre, as popularized by Stephen King’s novels, lies in its ability to create an initial sense of stability associated with a realistic portrayal of a familiar, everyday world which an audience associates with their own world. That initial sense of everyday stability is then disrupted by an attack that implies that we are all mortal and susceptible to destruction. In The Night of the Living Dead, an innocent couple is out driving in a rural area when suddenly the female is attacked by a group of zombies who have come back from the dead and need to destroy humans to survive. The zombies represent not only potential destruction, but also the loss of identity/humanity associated with death. In describing his own reaction to the film, Barry Grant (1995) notes that he was shocked by the realization that the film was not simply about the zombies, but that the zombies represented the average person, including one of the characters, Harry Cooper, who is more interested in saving himself than helping save the other characters trapped in a house under attack by the zombies, and particularly when the hero Ben is shot at the end by the sheriff and the posse because he is mistaken for one of the living dead: |
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Similarly, in the Invasion of the Body Snatcher films, the victims lose their sense of individuality and uniqueness associated with being human. The theme of the loss of identity is associated with the issue of the creation of the “human” monster in Frankenstein — and whether or not the created monster is human. The “mad scientist” character who can create the monster links horror to the science fiction theme of the use of technology for destructive purposes. |
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One of the most important of the horror directors was Alfred Hitchcock whose films Psycho and The Birds employed innovative techniques to create a sense of horrific suspense in audiences. More current horror/monster “slasher” films such as Halloween and Friday the 13th employ less subtle graphic portrayals of murder and were marketed for adolescent audiences through sensationalized trailers and ads. Films such as The Silence of the Lambs and The Blair Witch Project deal with some of the basic psychological aspects of horror involved in understanding motives associated with murder. The Blair Witch Project creates a sense of everyday reality disrupted by murder through the use of quasi-documentary techniques of the hand-held camera to create a familiar “home-movie” context for audiences. |
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From an audience analysis perspective, one issue associated with
horror films is the presumed effects on viewers of viewing sensationalized
violent horror film content on. Since the inception of the genre,
critics have charged that violent, sensationalized “slasher”
horror films have a negative influence on adolescent audiences’
attitudes and behaviors related to violence. However, one question
to raise about this critique is the extent to which, contrary to
critics’ “moral panics” about these adverse effects,
adolescent viewers are capable of constructing their own alternative
meanings of these texts.
Henry Jenkins and his son discuss the topic
of “moral panics” and responses to Buffy the Vampire
Slayer in terms of differences in generational perspectives.
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Classic
Horror—the history of horror |
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University
of California, Berkeley Library: Bibliography on horror films |
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For further reading: |
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Gelder, K. (2000). The horror reader. New York: Routledge. |
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Grant, B. (1996). The dread of difference: Gender and the horror film. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. |
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Jancovich, M. (2001). Horror: The film reader. New York: Routledge. |
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Jones, D. (2003). Horror: A thematic history in fiction and film. London: Arnold. |
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Skal, D. (2001). The monster show: A cultural history of horror. London: Faber & Faber. |
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Wells, P. (2001). The horror genre. New York: Wallflower Press. |
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Horror/Monster |
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Teaching activities on genre developed by students in CI5472, Spring, 2004 |
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