Horror And The Horror Movie Analysis

In his book, Horror and the Horror Film, author Bruce F. Kawin remarked “horror itself resists formulation and can be difficult and unpleasant to contemplate.” This year was a phenomenal year for both horror and contemplative movies. Two prime examples: Get Out and mother!. Despite being both horror films with subliminal messaging and allegories, they had drastically different reactions and box office performances. To understand why this happened, it is imperative to analyze marketing, storyline, climate, and audience interpretation.
Measuring the success of a film can be an incredibly subjective endeavor. However, analyzing a film’s ROI, or return on investment, can provide insight on how profitable a movie is. Horror films are the most

In regards to the Bible, the most common question one will ask is “what does this mean?” (Powell). With the Biblical undertones of mother! combined with its complicated allegories, this film left most viewers asking the same question. Due to its marketing campaign being shrouded in secrecy, a majority of viewers went into the theater not knowing much about the plot or meaning behind the film. This led to a multitude of angry reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with people stating that they had to Google the meaning behind the film to make sense of it. One reviewer wrote that the film was “horrible”, saying that “if you need to Google search the meaning of the movie when you get home, it was a failure” (Parker). The intensely negative reactions to mother! left people wondering what went wrong, given that the film had an all-star cast and a director previously responsible for other successful films like Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. What distinguishes Get Out from mother! is the ability of the audience to comprehend and digest the meanings behind the film. According to director Darren Aronofsky and lead actress Jennifer Lawrence, the film is an allegory for the role of humanity in the destruction of the environment by characterizing mother nature and God played by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, respectively (Ryzik). Despite critical acclaim, mother! has not been able to shake negative reception from general audiences who did not understand the message of the film. But the fault in this does not lie in the audience, the methods used in the marketing of this film are the likely culprits for its poor ratings and box office performance. By keeping the plot and message behind the movie mostly a secret, audiences were unable to fully comprehend the story and when people cannot understand something, they get angry. mother! relied too