Research into opening sequences of horror films and into target

audience

Monika Polak

Horror

Horror films are unsettling movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, disgust and horror from viewers. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres. Horrors also frequently overlap with the thriller genre.

History of Horror

The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by film pioneers such as Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the most notable being his 1896 Le Manoir du diable (aka "The House of the Devil") which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. It was in the early 1930s that American film producers, particularly Universal Pictures Co. Inc., popularized the horror film, bringing to the screen a series of successful Gothic features including Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931).

An influential horror films of the late 1960s was George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). The slasher films A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which met with varied amounts of success at the

box office, but all were panned by fans and critics, with the exception of Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

A larger trend is a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-budget, exploitation horror from the Seventies and the post-Vietnam years. Films like Audition (1999), Wrong Turn (2003), and the Australian film Wolf Creek (2005), took their cues from The Last House on the Left (1972),The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). An extension of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with emphasis on depictions of torture, suffering and violent deaths, with films like The Collector, The Tortured , Saw, and Hostel, and their respective sequels, frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this sub-genre.

Conventions – what we expect to see

Blood- to make the scene realistic; to create the fear and to have a gruesome effectLoud screams/ violence/ killing Pale makeup- to make the actors look scared.Visual styles within horror are often kept the same through out the different subgenres. Things such as shadows, low key lighting, canted angles and POV are commonly used in older and modern horror movies.Settings are everyday places to make the audience fear it could happen to them too. Often however these places are strangely quiet and the victim can feel something is coming.

Target audience

I am going to rate my film as horror scenes are not appropriate for children; they may include loads of blood, brutal scenes, violent language and drugs. I am not going to make it really awful that’s why I’m not going for . Target audience then will be mostly teenagers and young adults interested in horror movies.