Horror
Horror Films are unsettling films designed to frighten and panic, because dread and alarm, and to invoke our hidden worst fears, often in a terrifying, shocking finale, while captivating and entertaining us at the same time in a cathartic experience. Horror films effectively center on the dark side of life, the forbidden, and strange and alarming events. They deal with our most primal nature and its fears: our nightmares, our vulnerability, our alienation, our revulsions, our terror of the unknown, our fear of death and dismemberment, loss of identity, or fear of sexuality. Horror films are also known as chillers, scary movies, spook fests, and the macabre.
Some famous directors of horror movies are George Romero, an American film director, screenwriter, editor and occasional actor, best known for his gruesome and satirical horror films about a hypothetical zombie apocalypse. The most famous movies he produced were Day of the dead, Dawn of the dead and Night of the living dead. Another famous director is Tobe Hooper, which produced the famous movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Poltergeist. Stanley Kubrick is a very famous director known for his classic horror movies, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. This director had work on many other genres rather than horror, like comedy, war, crime, and thriller. Finally Alfred Hitchcock, which directed The Birds and Psycho. This man is a more of a thriller director than a horror one. He knew how to create suspense and shocks in his black and white style movies better than most.
By the other hand, some of the best horror genre actors according to the movie critics are Sigourney Weaver famous by acting on Alien in 1979 and also Aliens and Alien resurrection on 1986 and 1997. Jamie Lee Curtis is another important actress for her movies, Halloween (1978),The Fog(1980) and Prom Night (1980). Peter Cushing is also known for acting on Dracula (1958) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).
Basically, some of the techniques that horror films use to frighten the audience are using zoom in on a characters face and put the evil some distance behind them out of focus at first and have them menacingly prowl up on their victim . Have the evil crawl across the ceiling right above the victim use camera angle so the audience sees the monster but they do not. And also shooting as if looking through the evil character eyes. This is basically made to frighten the audience and to show the perspective of the evil character.
For my case study I have chosen The Texas Chain Saw Masacre because it is a perfect example of movie which shows all the main features of a horror film. It doesn’t show many grouse shots and it transmits the audience a lot of fear. Another feature about this movie is that the spectator gets nervous when the victim is running away to escape from the psycho and wants to talk to the victim telling him like for example get down or don’t do that and this makes the audience to be more concentrate towards the movie. Lastly, the feature that frightens more the audience in the horror moment, is the soundtrack as it varies along the movie roles, specially when the victim is going to be attacked, normally the soundtrack heard starts before the action of persecution between the psycho and the victim and starts very low and when the psycho appears and the victim runs the soundtrack is heard much lauder and with a faster rhythm.
