Genre

2010 ◽  
pp. 19-26
Author(s):  
Tanya Jones
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Box Office

This chapter discusses genre as a categorization of films that have standard conventions. It explains how Genres of film can go in and out of fashion or become reignited because of the success of one particular film at the box office. It also talks about the financial motivation behind genres that dominate a particular period of cinema scheduling, such as the dominance of superhero films like The Batman and Spider-Man franchises. The chapter mentions Guillermo Del Toro's interest in the fantasy and horror genres and his three favourite actors: Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, who are recognized for their horror film credentials. It describes Pan's Labyrinth as a film in which visual elements are designed specifically to engage, shock, and provoke.

Pre-Code in Synthetic Flesh

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan K. Rode
Keyword(s):  
Monte Carlo ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Bette Davis ◽  
Key Driver

Curtiz’s career is summarized during the pre-Code era of Hollywood films. The evolution of the Production Code from the 1922 appointment of Will Hays as the czar of the MPPDA to the lack of enforcement of the Code is contextually chronicled as a key driver of the nature of Warner Bros. pictures during the early years of the Depression. Zanuck pioneered the “ripped from the headlines” gangster dramas that struck a chord with audiences. After he directed The Mad Genius, with John Barrymore, Curtiz’s pay was cut as Warners lost $8 million in 1931.Following The Woman from Monte Carlo and the visually creative Alias the Doctor, Curtiz was assigned the contemporary Strange Love of Molly Louvain, starring Ann Dvorak.He hit box-office gold with Doctor X (1932), a gruesome pre-Code horror film starring Fay Wray, who recounted Curtiz’s cold, sometimes cruel behavior on the set. Curtiz’s production of The Cabin in the Cotton included his racial faux pas and his alienation of Bette Davis during their first film together.His masterly direction of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing concluded a year of worsening economic conditions for the country.

English Gothic

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
Bryan Turnock
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Box Office ◽  
The World ◽  
Iconic Images ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter evaluates the British horror film industry. Given the country's input in the success of the Hollywood horror films of the 1930s, in terms of source material as well as technicians and actors, horror film production in Britain was remarkably slow to emerge. This was due in no small part to the stringent censorship rules of the British Board of Film Censorship/Classification (BBFC), who did their best to dissuade British studios from making such films. The chapter investigates how one studio took up the reins of the genre and went on to dominate it for almost two decades. Matched only by the golden age of Universal in the 1930s and 1940s, Hammer Films produced some of the genre's most iconic images and characters through dozens of productions, while breaking box-office records around the world. The chapter looks at Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the company's first foray into the genre, one which would lay the foundations for their success and set the template for the English Gothic horror film as it flourished into the 1960s and 1970s.

Prequel?

Ridley Scott ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 172-178
Author(s):  
Vincent LoBrutto
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
The Many

After many years had gone by since he directed Alien, and sequels had been released by other film directors, Ridley Scott decided he would finally revisit the original movie in the franchise. Prometheus is the only sequel to Alien not to use that word in the title. The film is a departure from the series in that it is less a horror film and more a philosophical venture into the beginnings of humankind and the meaning of life. Prometheus was a huge box office success despite the fact that the narrative is very convoluted and not all the many questions the film poses are answered. Nonetheless, the realistic and believable production qualities of Prometheus as well as the fine ensemble cast were ingredients for success.

‘Mainstream’ Horror

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-294
Author(s):  
Bryan Turnock
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Stephen King ◽  
The Third ◽  
Box Office ◽  
The World ◽  
Epic Novel ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter reflects on how the year 2017 saw a renaissance in horror cinema, the genre as a whole becoming 'mainstream'. It looks at the parameters of the term 'mainstream horror', and how it relates to the genre as it developed through the years. The chapter then considers a film that succeeded in capturing the imaginations, and box-office dollars, of traditional and non-traditional horror audiences around the world. Capitalising on renewed interest in the work of Stephen King, the 2017 adaptation of his epic novel IT quickly became the highest grossing R-rated horror film of all time. Encompassing many of the themes and ideas covered in the previous chapters, Andy Muschietti's It provides a fascinating barometer for the state of horror cinema as we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Flashback Face: ‘Do You Like Scary Movies?’ Scream and Revitalisation

Scream ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Steven West
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Box Office

This chapter introduces Wes Craven, a film director who has an initial reticence against making one more to-the-wall horror film that was born of his enduring battle against genre typecasting. It describes the horror genre that was widely considered to be in a state of flux during Craven's time. It also analyses Craven's Scream, which experienced a more prestigious release than most from Dimension Films and had specialised in formulaic sequels to established horror franchises. The chapter recounts Dimension's faith in Scream that reflected the confidence in the material and script that possessed aspirations to commence a trilogy and deconstruct and revitalise a genre that was perceived as obsolete. It examines horror films that are renowned for being front-loaded in the realm of the American box office.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Bryan Turnock
Keyword(s):  
Degree Of Freedom ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Dead End ◽  
History Of ◽  
Film Genres ◽  
Over Time

This introductory chapter provides an overview of horror cinema. Since its inception, horror has been one of the most universally derided and dismissed of film genres. Yet at the same time it has consistently been one of the most enduring and commercially popular. While there have been periods where it seemed to have reached a dead end, it has always managed to re-invent itself and rise again. Today, horror cinema is experiencing something of a renaissance, enjoying box-office success and even critical acclaim. The chapter discusses the concept of film genre and traces the history of horror. As with other genres, over time horror developed codes and conventions that became typically associated with what one would now term a traditional horror film. Since the arrival of the 'modern' horror film in the early 1960s, the genre has displayed a degree of freedom from many of its more traditional conventions.

1968: A Pivotal Moment in Cinema

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Monteith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
American Film ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Political Cinema ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Rights Issues

This chapter examines how various versions of 1968 in this cultural context provided creative opportunities for social comment in a changing media culture, focusing primarily on American film. Attention is paid to films that proved exceptions to what had become a tentative norm by the mid-1960s such as The Graduate, Wild in the Streets and Easy Rider. As the counterculture found its way on to the screen, Hollywood was slower to see the financial merits of civil rights themes. More revealing is how civil rights issues were used suggestively in different genres, including the big budget musical Finian’s Rainbow and the low budget horror film Night of the Living Dead before finding more explicit dramatization in the early 1970s. The chapter argues that in the late 1960s dissent was more likely to be couched or exploited as melodrama than transformed into high-quality political cinema and box office success.

The Terrible, Horrible Desire to Know: Post-9/11 Horror Remakes, Reboots, Sequels and Prequels

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kendrick
Keyword(s):  
Market Share ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Cultural Anxiety ◽  
American Horror Film

Chapter Twelve remains with the horror genre, but takes a broader overview of one of the defining trends of the American film industry which has progressively gathered pace in the first years of the twenty-first century: the increasing prevalence of the remake. In "The Terrible, Horrible Desire to Know: Post-9/11 Horror Remakes, Reboots, Sequels, and Prequels" James Kendrick analyses the rising cultural and commercial fortunes of the American horror film which experienced between the years of 1995 and 2005 increases of more than 80% in terms of production and 106% in terms of market share (“Horror: Year-by-Year Market Share”). In this decade 2007 was the biggest year for American horror films (it was also the year of the release of The Mist discussed in the previous chapter) with thirty-one releases accounting for 7.16% of the total market share of the US domestic box office (“Horror: Year-by-Year Market Share”) as opposed to just sixteen releases in 1995. Yet Kendrick does not dismiss this development as being purely economically motivated, rather he asks what can these modern horror films, very often remakes of classic horror films of the 1950s and the 1970s, tell us about the cultural and political climate they emerge from? In an incisive analysis of the recurrent tropes in post-9/11 American horror films Kendrick points out that horror's persistent ties to cultural anxiety provide an intriguing insight into their times as they become increasingly darker, more graphic and deny their characters any sense of hope or redemption. Most interestingly, Kendrick observes, the contemporary horror film replaces the ambiguity of the defining horror films of the 1970s with a desire to explain and understand which he suggests parallels American society's need to understand following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Kendrick then turns to Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of John Carpenter's original Halloween (1978) as an articulation of many of the tropes discussed in the first part of the essay offering some surprising conclusions concerning the power of the horror film to reflect cultural unease.

scholarly journals A Data Set for US Horror Film Trailers

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Nick Redfern
Keyword(s):  
Motion Picture ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Creative Commons ◽  
Box Office ◽  
The Us ◽  
Length Data ◽  
Film Style ◽  
Existing Data

Abstract This article presents a new data set comprising audio, colour, motion, and shot length data of trailers for the fifty highest grossing horror films at the US box office from 2011 to 2015. This data set is one of the few available for computational film analysis that includes data on multiple elements of film style and is the only existing data set for motion picture trailers suitable for formal analyses. Data is stored in csv files available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license on Zenodo: www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4479068.

Forecasting US movies box office performances in Turkey using machine learning algorithms

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 6579-6590
Author(s):  
Sandy Çağlıyor ◽  
Başar Öztayşi ◽  
Selime Sezgin
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Learning Algorithms ◽  
Forecast Model ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Gradient Boosting ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Industry Forecast ◽  
The Impact

The motion picture industry is one of the largest industries worldwide and has significant importance in the global economy. Considering the high stakes and high risks in the industry, forecast models and decision support systems are gaining importance. Several attempts have been made to estimate the theatrical performance of a movie before or at the early stages of its release. Nevertheless, these models are mostly used for predicting domestic performances and the industry still struggles to predict box office performances in overseas markets. In this study, the aim is to design a forecast model using different machine learning algorithms to estimate the theatrical success of US movies in Turkey. From various sources, a dataset of 1559 movies is constructed. Firstly, independent variables are grouped as pre-release, distributor type, and international distribution based on their characteristic. The number of attendances is discretized into three classes. Four popular machine learning algorithms, artificial neural networks, decision tree regression and gradient boosting tree and random forest are employed, and the impact of each group is observed by compared by the performance models. Then the number of target classes is increased into five and eight and results are compared with the previously developed models in the literature.

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