Joseph R. Daoang
IP 368B
Spring 2009
Module IV

Transforming Horror Film Genre

Horror film is different compare to any of the film genres because guidelines do not have to be met as exactly by the director or, for that matter, the screenwriter. The horror film’s message of terror and death are easily communicated to the audience or conveyed in very intense visual and auditory cues. Other film genres might use control and analytic explanation as their main criteria, the horror film does not purse this standard formula; thus, many cinematic tricks and techniques are available to filmmakers to follow at their individual choice. The result is that the viewer can experience different level of negative effects, from minor irritation to extreme nausea, when viewing a film of the horror genre.
One might agree that the only reason given as to why people watch horror films is that they want to be scared. In fact, this scare drive is so powerfully addictive to some people that they keep coming back to watch these films over and over again, wanting more terror and desiring more thrills with each viewing. Although, a deeper, more psychological explanation can be explain as to why humans have been attracted with gore and bloodshed since the very beginning of recorded history.
To help one interpret this motivating force in the human psyche, one must consider Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic theory of archetypes. Jung believed that all humans are born with a set of primordial images that are contained in the collective unconscious and these archaic images (referred to as archetypes) remain hidden within the unconscious; at an important moments of one’s life, however, they can become conscious and fully expressed through religion, philosophy, art, literature, and, more recently, the cinema. Jung said that the most powerful and perhaps most dangerous archetype of the group is the shadow. By definition, the shadow contains all of humanity’s unpleasant behavior, brutal impulses, and restraint desires.
Early years of horror films focused almost mainly on the hideous, deathlike appearances of the monsters rather than the horrifying crimes they committed against society. The main reason was that the grisly makeup had to compensate for the lack of sound in these features. And so any number of weird and bizarre bogeymen that populated the screen greeted the viewer.
The Universal Studios period of horror films from the 1930s and 1940s continued to infuse most of their special effects budget in the title creatures’ features at the expense of sufficient plot development, noteworthy musical scores, and conspicuous death scenes. Thus, the great works of literature like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein were altered to one-dimensional productions with the ghoulish monster once again controlling the central position on the screen.
The American horror cinema was heavily influenced by the British faces of death, yet was able to convey originality to its less Gothic, more modernized tales of destruction. The insane slasher film became one of the most popular American horror film, starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece, Psycho. Playing both the role of a confused young man (Norman Bates) and his dead mother, Anthony Perkins gave a much needed pathos to the brutal slasher figure that killed unsuspecting women taking showers in their motel rooms.
Another type of horror film capitalized on earlier works both in the United States and abroad and focused on a new death-dealer, the possessed child. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist goes well beyond the limits of acceptable good taste and true nature by showing scenes of the satanic child Regan spraying vomit into the faces of the prostrate priests or masturbating with devilish delight using her crucifix. One reason that The Exorcist remains the highest-grossing horror movie ever made, is that it preys on parents’ fears that they could lose their children to uncontrollable outside forces. The Exorcist is a film that has reorganized the horror film genre and remain to do so.
Many film critics believe that the faces of death within the horror genre will undergo a major change in the twenty-first century and beyond. Known as techno-mythic Destroyers, these new figures will either be created by the technological advances available or use that very technology to victimize people in even more unusual and imaginative ways than before. A few technomythic Destroyers have already surfaced on the screen. In the 1980s when television sets and VCRs were becoming commonplace items in every household, there came to existent a rash of related cinematic terrors. Beginning in 1990s, video games were becoming all the fad, resulting to horror movies mimicking the popular culture fad. Stephen King’s The Langoliers has evil Pac-Man creatures terrorizing a stranded group of airline passengers in an alternate time zone.
Despite these transforming faces of death in the horror film genre, one factor does appear to be unchanging—namely, the mythos of the human destructive potential. The inner side of human nature is filled with so many nasty images and malign figures that eventually will surface in full force. Humankind’s hidden supernatural will continue to give ideas for future screenplay writers and directors in the film industry, and audiences will most assuredly see more of their inner selves on the screen in the decades ahead.