Looking at Gothic Horror

Looking at Gothic Horror

The horror genre remains very popular with cinema audiences even

nowadays because the special effects today make creatures look even

more terrifyingly realistic and it also means that you can film stunts

or scenes like somebody turning into a werewolf for example, much more

easy to film and much more effective. An example of a modern horror

film that consists of very effective special effects is 'Underworld'

that makes use of computer generation to make some impressive

transformation scenes.

The advances in technology give modern horror films an edge over

classics and a modern audience expects a lot more from a horror film

nowadays. Modern horror films consist of old and new tricks of filming

to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. They consist of much

more varied and clever plots and storylines. Re-workings of older

horror films are filmed with the view to appeal to a modern audience

and the audience go to see these horror films with an expectation of

what they think will happen and the good thing about horror films is

they can have plot twists and unexpected events occurring throughout

the film.

We watched two extracts from the film adaptations of two Gothic horror

novels, Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' and Kenneth Brannagh's 'Frankenstein'.

We analysed these two scenes and then compared them to the written

extracts. The two scenes we looked at are the creation scene from

'Frankenstein' and Harker's journey to Dracula's castle and his first

meeting with Dracula from 'Dracula'. For this assignment I will be

analysing the mise-en-scene and iconography of both scenes, the use of

camera shots, li...

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...e way the films use

clever tricks to give suspense, which can be overlooked in some of the

newer horror films that rely on the amount of blood that comes out

rather than clever filming and jumpy moments.

In short, Dracula and Frankenstein were very similar in the way that

they portrayed the typical horror tricks and consisted of similar

camera angles to each other point out various bits. I thought that

Dracula, both the written extract and the film extract fitted the

horror genre a bit better than Frankenstein as it was more believable

for me. I also thought that the film extract was much more scary,

although Frankenstein wasn't bad and had its moments of fright. My

final views were that Dracula was on the whole filmed better than

Frankenstein as it used the different camera angles more effectively

in my opinion.