With the resent passing of Wes Craven and having noted numerous times the effect his film Scream had on me as horror fan, I felt it would be inappropriate to not set aside this month to cover his films. So I decided to start with what I would argue to be his most influential work. Sure Nightmare on Elm Street spawned more sequels then you can shake a large stick at, but by the time Freddy arrived on the scene the Slasher was already cemented as a sub-genre unto itself. The Last House on the Left on the other hand is, as far as I know one of the founding rape-revenge films with only Straw Dogs (1971) predating it, but as film history is long I may be wrong and if so please leave a comment. It's considered a groundbreaking film and often talked about in film text books, that said. I'm not a fan of this sub-genre of horror films. By the time the revenge aspects …show more content…
The rape-revenge film shares many of the same sentiments I have with the gore-porn, in that revulsion alone does not make for good horror. Last House on the Left opens with us being introduced to Mari Collingwood (Sandra Peabody) on her seventeenth birthday. She plans on going to concert with her friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) in a nearby town. Mari's mother Estelle (Cynthia Carr) disapproves of both band and her friendship with Phyllis, but Mari's father Dr. John Collingwood (Richard Towers) agrees with his daughter and allows her to go. Mari and Phyllis head to the concert and on the way a news report plays over the radio announcing the escape of Krug Stillo (David Hess), his son Junior (Marc Sheffler), Fred "Weasel" Podowski (Fred J. Lincoln) and Sadie (Jeramie Rain) a group of rapists, murders, psychopaths, and child molesters. Phyllis and Mari try to find someone
Too many horror films provide scares and screams throughout their respective cinemas. Not many viewers follow what kind of model the films follow to appease their viewers. However, after reading film theorist Carol Clover’s novel, watching one of the films she associates in the novel “Halloween”, and also watching the movie “Nightmare on Elm Street” I say almost every “slasher” or horror film follows a model similar to Clover’s. The model is a female is featured as a primary character and that females tend to always overcome a situation at some point throughout the film.
Scream 4’s brilliance was that it took old tropes and remixed them, a blending of old and new. Director Wes Craven was already accomplished, he directed films such as The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and A Nightmare on Elm Street- and the previous three Screams before Scream 4 came
The short story “To Set Our House in Order” by Margaret Laurence displays the elements of fiction in a compelling way. The story is set in a town made up by Laurence called Manawaka and is located in Manitoba. This represents the town that she grew up in called Neepawa. The story is based during the Great Depression, which has many effects on how their family functions. This, in turn, makes the whole MacLeod family need to live with Grandmother MacLeod in her large brick house.
Finally, horror became ‘Slasher.’ The 1970’s became obsessed with realistic news stories and characters and films became more stylize and followed similar storyline conventions. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978) and Night Mare On Elm Street (1984) where full of psycho villains, teens in danger and the sole survivor leading to plenty of sequels. The only other horror genre or thriller genre focused on suspense, movie...
To begin with, some people would say they enjoy a horror movie that gets them scared out of their wits. They go see these movies once a month on average, for fun, each time choosing a newer sequel like “Final Destination” or “The evil Dead”. King says “When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie we are daring the nightmare” (405). As a writer of best-sel...
Alfred Hitchcock is known for his masters of works in the film industry. The film he is most famous for is Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock`s Psycho was critically acclaimed not only in the horror genre but within the entire film scene. It encompasses several key themes, which are portrayed through cinematic devices such as camera movement and sound, sound, lighting and costume and set design. The subject of madness becomes increasingly evident as the film progresses, centering on the peculiar character that is Norman Bates.
His experimental and unique perverse screenwriting has shocked and inspired numerous people. His aesthetics painted horror vividly and presented itself dramatically. His musical and cinematic vision was a healthy extension of his devilishly, clever, and demented mind. His modes of publication with music, film and print, had and still a tremendous fanbase. He has gained our attention in every media related forum and we can’t look away, even if we try. He has left us cheering, screaming and on the edge of our seats. We leave feeling bad about ourselves for watching his visual storytelling unfold. “You know, it’s like, I’m going to sit here for 90 minutes and watch these guys get fucked up with no hope. That’s what I love about these films, you walk out feeling bad about yourself, saying “Why did I enjoy that? What does this say about me as a person?” It is a cathartic experience that horror lovers can have again and again. Not acting on those horrific urges, but instead, becoming one of his characters that were just never really understood and that evil is real. Evil never dies and revenge always wins or at least in horror
The genre of horror films is one that is vast and continually growing. So many different elements have been known to appear in horror films that it is often times difficult to define what is explicitly a horror film and what is not. Due to this ambiguous definition of horror the genre is often times divided into subgenres. Each subgenre of horror has a more readily identifiable list of classifications that make it easier to cast a film to a subgenre, rather than the entire horror genre. One such subgenre that is particularly interesting is that of the stalker film. The stalker film can be categorized as a member of the horror genre in two ways. First, the stalker film can be identified within the horror genre due to its connection with the easily recognizable subgenre of horror, the slasher film. Though many elements of the stalker film differ from those of the slasher film, the use of non-mechanical weapons and obvious sexual plot points can be used to categorize the stalker film as a subgenre of the slasher film. Secondly, the stalker film can be considered a member of the horror genre using Robin Wood’s discussion regarding horror as that which society represses. The films Fatal Attraction, The Fan, and The Crush will be discussed in support of this argument. (Need some connector sentence here to finish out the intro)
Reflecting back on the most iconic figures in the history of horror cinema, characters like Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees still shine brighter than all the rest – even despite their current lack of utilization. In the meantime, an array of other “big bads,” ranging from Ghostface, Jigsaw, and Annabelle, has attempted to climb the proverbial ladder into the (imaginary) horror hall of fame.
The Importance of Aesthetic Distance in American Horror Movies What then do we make of American horror movies? In the canon of horror pictures they almost always come second in respect to foreign horror movies and any American horror film that is considered to be artful is the one with the most aesthetic distance. Upscale slashers like Johnathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or David Fincher's Seven (1995) are both gruesome and bloody borrowing many of the same shock techniques as their lower budget counterparts (for example, Russell Mulchahy's Sevenish thriller Resurrection (1999)), both focus on the body and its violation, either through sexual means or violent means, and both feature villains who fit easily into Carol Clover's
Inspired by the life of the demented, cannibalistic Wisconsin killer Ed Gein (whose heinous acts would also inspire THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, 1974 and DERANGED, 1974), PSYCHO is probably Hitchcock's most gruesome and dark film. Its importance to its genre cannot be overestimated. PSYCHO's enduring influence comes not only from the Norman Bates character (who has since been reincarnated in a staggering variety of forms), but also from the psychological themes Hitchcock develops.
At a time when the stalker movie had been exploited to all ends and the image of mute, staggering, vicious killers had been etched into society’s consciousness to the point of exhaustion, a new kid entered the block. The year was 1984 and it was time for a new villain to enter into the horror genre. A villain that was agile, intelligent, almost inviolable yet viscous, and by all means deadly. A Nightmare on Elm Street introduced the distinctive presence of Fred Krueger to the horror industry and to the audience. Freddy Krueger took the center stage and with him a new era of horror films began. This horribly scarred man who wore a ragged slouch hat, dirty red-and-green striped sweater, and a glove outfitted with knives at the fingers reinvented the stalker genre like no other film had. Fred Krueger breathed new life into the dying horror genre of the early 1980’s.
Each of the teenagers in the group plays an archetypal role that can found in many of the horror films of the last thirty years. Jules plays the role of ‘The Whore’, Curt ‘The Athlete’, Holden ‘The Scholar’, Marty ‘The Fool’, and Dana ‘The Virgin’. The remaining two in the third act of the film, Marty and Dana, discover that the order in which they group dies can be flexible, as long as ‘The Whore’ dies first and ‘The Virgin’ lives or is the last to perish. This revelation for the characters partly acts as a critique of the moralistic view of sex as resulting in death in the traditional slasher movie. For example in films that established the slasher in the horror genre like John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ (1978), all of the characters that engage
A Brief History Of Horror Movies. Ezine Articles. Spark Net, 10 Aug 2010. Web. The Web.
When one watches films such Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm– 1979 it's hard not to think or not see Argento’s affluence in that movie, even though Don Coscarelli did not come out and saw that Argento’s was an influence. At the end It's hard to estimate how much Dario Argento actually contributed to the horror films because everyday more and more films are coming out that show some of his