The horror genre

The horror genre.

The horror genre started in the late 1980s when the film le manair di diable was classed as a horror. Horror films effect an audience by making them feel uncomforting or displeasing emotions they do this by presenting basic or complex human fears for example in the movie Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds as well as the sudden and unexpected jump scares there is also the fear of the unknown by this I mean that you never learn or understand why the birds did what they did and you will never know, the audience is then left to their own accusations and imagination to what may have caused the birds to attack because of this everyone can interpret the movie in their own different ways and this can be scary for some but not for others this is what makes the film so good as well as the jumpy nature of the film there are no facts and you are left thinking about what they might be.

Other horror films such as silence of the lambs by Tomas Harris effect you psychologically it sets of certain fear triggers that instantly make you feel uncomfortable these feelings generally come from basic fears or fear of the unnatural or fear of harm. Personally in silence of the lambs the reasoning for it to be scary to me is the acting skills of the Antony Hopkins who plays the role of the famous Hannibal Lector, the way that he projects his voice and moves around is unnatural. I think that the reason it scares most people is the thought of a human eating another human, its wrong and it makes people cringe almost at the idea of cannibalism. Buffalo Bill is also a main scare for people because no one understands him and he is very gory getting this title by skinning his victims, this is upsetting and puts people right on edge because the villain is so bizarre and disturbing this makes the film way scary knowing that you know nothing about the villain and the only one who does is a also a terrifying villain.

Another terrifying horror is Akira Yumaokos silent hill, this film is completely out of the norm and it plays on the way people see things. A lot of the things that can only be described as creatures are deformed and move in unrealistic and strange ways the movements aren’t human like and freaky to look at, considering a lot of these creatures have the same kind of body structure as a human and walk on their legs and use their arms and hand it grab things it makes them seen more human like this then makes the film unnerving to watch because of the fear of the disfiguration and the questioning of why the creatures have human similarity’s. Things are scarier when you don’t understand them, it makes you wonder how something came to be like that and that can be upsetting to think about making the film significantly scarier.

The grudge written by Stephen Susco and directed by Takashi Shimizo takes a different approach it again like other horrors use unnatural events to scare people, however they do this by the source or centre point of the fear being a supernatural being, in this film there is a seriously large amount of jump scares, a lot of the time you know that something is about to happen and make you jump and scare you, you can usually tell this by the music or lighting of a scene the thing that’s scary is you know something’s going to happen but you don’t know the exact moment, I think that the anticipation that you are going to be scared makes the fear larger than what you would have initially thought if you hadn’t have been aware that a jump scare was approaching.

A recent horror that personally affected me was the horror the conjuring written by Chad and Charey Hayes really upset me with fear, the idea of something possessing something or someone was strange and frightened me the thing that scared me the most was the possession of the doll at the start of the movie it’s not that the scene scared me but the thought of something nice that I used to play with as a child like the doll turned into something twister and sinister, I think that that is how horrors get really scary, when something in it sets of a personal or particular emotion that not necessarily everyone would have or feel, this effects peoples personal fears I think and makes the film a good horror.