Wednesday 27 January 2010

KG - Genre Analysis: Horror Conventions

Conventions of the horror genre include:

  • Blood
  • Death
  • Killings
  • Villains
  • Victims
  • Haunted houses and isolated settings
  • Monsters
  • Evil
  • Supernatural
  • Weapons
  • Darkness
  • Storms
  • Chase sequences
  • Gore
  • Violence
  • Screams
  • Ghosts
  • Threatening
  • Obscured vision
  • Camera angles and movement
  • Lighting [low or limited or stylised]

The conventions of horror films are similar to the iconography in them too. Iconography means the visual, aural or oral signifiers which indicate a particular genre, for horror they are seemingly more mise-en-scene than anything else. More specific examples of iconography are:

  • The moon
  • Blood
  • creaking
  • dark figures
  • cobwebs
  • howling
  • screaming
  • forests
  • fog

Are we following the conventions?
I think to a certain extent we should follow the conventions, but I want to experiment with them and interpret them myself, and have a chance to play around with them to create something that is fittingly a horror but is in a new and innovative style, that we can adhere to call our own. So we can create our own conventions rather than confining ourselves to the constraints dictated by more industrial cinema. So I think we should overlook the blood and gore as I don’t think that will be fitting to the type of style we want to create. I think we should be focusing more on the psychological sub-genre particularly as we are using a child as our main focus.

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