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.

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.

British film production and the horror genre

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnny Walker
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Home Video ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Distinctive Aspect ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Audience Demographics ◽  
New Millennium

Chapter 2 contemplates why British horror was revived at the dawning of the new millennium, and also considers some of the reasons why British horror films produced in the 2000s and 2010s can be viewed as constituting a distinctive aspect of contemporary British cinema. I discuss the establishment of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2000 and contextualise the contemporary British horror film in the international film marketplace, drawing parallels between British horror and British film production more broadly, British horror and international horror production, and the audience demographics targeted by distributers and film production companies. This involves examining British horror’s shift from a theatrical genre to one associated primarily with the home video and online market.

Polanski and Horror: Rosemary’s Baby

Macbeth ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Rebekah Owens
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre

This chapter considers Roman Polanski's approach to the genre and horror output before the film Macbeth. It discusses Polanski's 1965 work Repulsion, that centres around Carol Ledoux and her disintegrating sanity, which is expressed from her subjective viewpoint. It also mentions how Repulsion showed Polanski as a master of the craft of psychological horror. The chapter looks at the Gothic aspects of the horror genre that is recorded in Polanski's autobiography, where he wrote of his experiences watching horror films in Paris. It details how Polanski decided to make a horror film that was designed to make people laugh, rather than the unintentional merriment that Hammer horror had provoked.

Kubrick and Horror

The Shining ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Laura Mee
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Popular Work ◽  
The Grotesque

This chapter discusses Stanley Kubrick's relationship with the horror genre. The Shining (1980) is a clear example of Kubrick's status as ‘an artist of complex and popular work’—rather than being exclusively one or the other. Many approaches to understanding the film see it as a ‘serious’ work by a master filmmaker operating without commercial imperative, or elevated above a disreputable genre. This overlooks a number of important contextual considerations, not least the fact that Kubrick had been clear in asserting that he wanted to make a supernatural film and liked a number of horror films. Moreover, Kubrick, whose films ‘repeatedly mix the grotesque and the banal, the conventions of Gothic confessional morbidity and the self-conscious involutions of modernist parody’, was ideally placed to make a horror film. If The Shining is in many ways typical of the Kubrickian style, then it surely follows that the Kubrickian style was ideal for horror. His auteurist style—the use of black comedy, his artistic approach to mise-en-scène and cinematography, an interest in the uncanny—all lend themselves to the genre.

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.

scholarly journals Terrors of Girlhood

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Casali
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Adolescent Women ◽  
American Horror Film

<p>Since the birth of the genre, American horror filmmakers have posed female characters as prey and objects of sexual desire. Adolescent women in particular act as both the victim and as eye candy for viewers. From the damsel in distress to the rape victim seeking revenge, women in horror films exist to be antagonized, and so often, their exhibition of femininity and sexuality determines the severity of their suffering. Moreover, though the popular horror film narrative tends to explore the fringes of human nature, few horror films openly deal with the fears and concerns of women outside of threats to their physical being.</p> <p>In the past decade, the horror genre has produced a new crop of young female characters who challenge the tropes of traditional horror films by trading in their role of damsel in distress for the role of the antagonist and anti-hero. What’s more, these films deal with themes relevant to young women, such as body image issues, tumultuous relationships, and sexual repression. In this thesis, I analyze the popular American horror film <em>Jennifer’s Body </em>(2009), which features two violent female protagonists and explores the horrors of adolescent female friendships. In my analysis, I examine whether or not the re-imagined female characters in this film are a progressive reconstruction of gender, and identify ideological conventions of the horror genre that continue to denigrate femininity and female sexuality.</p>

I’M SCREEEEEEEEAMING!!!!

2019 ◽  
pp. 59-88
Author(s):  
Adam Charles Hart
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Film Viewing

Chapter 2 looks at jump scares and the fad of “screamers” found across the internet: brief videos or gifs designed to cause an unsuspecting browser to scream and jump. They appeared when jump scares were ascendant within the horror genre thanks to video games; screamers’ online popularity led to importation into the cinema through films such as the Paranormal Activity series. The chapter develops the importance of shock to the horror genre and the similarities between engagement across mediums. Shock is a challenge to viewer/browser/gamer mastery and self-control. Screamers offer the opportunity to reassert one’s own self through repetition and sharing, showing how similar processes are central to the experience of horror film viewing and gameplay. It discusses “elevated horror” and the tendency to disparage sensation in opposition to traditional virtues of narrative cinema. The chapter’s counterpoint for this assumption is with close readings of “elevated” horror films, The Witch (2015) and The Babadook (2014).

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.

Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Keith Booker ◽  
Isra Daraiseh
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary American Society ◽  
The Way

Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is an entertaining horror film that also contains a number of interesting interpretive complications. The film is undoubtedly meant as a commentary on the inequity, inequality and injustice that saturate our supposedly egalitarian American society. Beyond that vague and general characterization, though, the film offers a number of interesting (and more specific) allegorical interpretations, none of which in themselves seem quite adequate. This article explores the plethora of signs that circulate through Us, demanding interpretation but defeating any definitive interpretation. This article explores the way Us offers clues to its meaning through engagement with the horror genre in general (especially the home invasion subgenre) and through dialogue with specific predecessors in the horror genre. At the same time, we investigate the rich array of other ways in which the film offers suggested political interpretations, none of which seem quite adequate. We then conclude, however, that such interpretive failures might well be a key message of the film, which demonstrates the difficulty of fully grasping the complex and difficult social problems of contemporary American society in a way that can be well described by Fredric Jameson’s now classic vision of the general difficulty of cognitive mapping in the late capitalist world.

Don't Look Now

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Different Order

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) has been called “a ghost story for adults.” Certainly, in contrast to the more explicitly violent and bloodthirsty horror films of the 1970s, Don't Look Now seems of an entirely different order. Yet this supernaturally inflected tale of a child's accidental drowning, and her parents' desperate simultaneous recoil from her death and pursuit of her ghost, Don't Look Now is horrific at every turn. This book argues for it as a particular kind of horror film, one which depends utterly on the narrative of trauma—on the horror of unknowing, of seeing too late, and of the failures of paternal authority and responsibility. The book positions Don't Look Now within a discourse of midcentury anxiety narratives primarily existing in literary texts. In this context, it represents a crossover or a hinge between literature and film of the 1970s, and the ways in which the women's ghost story or uncanny story turns the horror film into a cultural commentary on the failures of the modern family.

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