Horror GenreMichael Scotney

Nathan Pudney

Josh Portman

Horror Subgenres & Narrative Set Pieces

• Action Horror – Usually a good guy will end up having a battle with the bad guy.

• Gothic Horror – usually dark and scary. Usually lacks a happy ending.

• Comedy Horror – usually has a main focus which creates fear but is still funny allowing puns and a happy or neutral ending.

• Psychological Horror – it relies on the emotions and views of the characters to create fear for the viewer.

• Science Fiction Horror – usually involves facing a enemy (alien, mutant, super human or creature) which cause a lot of havoc and many people die. The creatures are killed and everything is fine.

• Slasher – has an insane killer on the loose, he is eventually caught and/or killed.

• Zombie Films – Zombie Apocalypse has broken out, story.

- Action Horrors are a combination of the action film genre and the classical horror. Often contains scenes of intense gunfights and chases that combine with a dark, scary atmosphere to make an action horror, often revolving around an evil/scary event such as the purge and the purge: anarchy

- Action Horrors include the ‘Purge: Anarchy’, ‘Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters’ and ‘Van Helsing’.

- The action genre obviously requires action, since none of us happen to be black belts or samurais, this would prove too difficult, not to mention the camera work involved.

Action Horror

Zombie Films

- Zombie films obviously feature zombies, or living corpses that terrorises human characters often in a post-apocalyptic scenario such as ‘The Road’. Jump scares are a huge section of zombie films, used to scare the audience and often are set in urban settings such as the mist, and focus on the protagonist and their families’ struggle to survive such as the happening.

- Zombie films include ‘28 days later’, ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Dawn of the Dead’

- We don’t have the resources to create different zombies, as we would need make-up, someone to actually do the make-up, clothing and plenty of actors willing to play them.

Science Fiction Horror- This genre of horror combines science fiction and horror, often with the use of aliens such as in the film ‘Alien’ and space aggressors as basis for horror to the characters in the film usually, horror is normally created through the power or ‘scariness’ of the monsters/aliens.

- Examples of Science Fiction Horrors include ‘Alien’, ‘The Thing’ and ‘Event Horizon’.

- We decided to not focus on science-fiction horror as a genre as it usually needs a large budget for the effects and aliens and I do not believe that we could make it believable or nearly as effective with our budget and our timeframe.

- The typical music for this genre would be eerie and try to bring tension to the situation.

Gothic Horror

- Gothic Horrors often are set in a dark, gloomy, miserable setting such as in an ancient castle with dungeons or forests and barren landscapes. They often use revenge or ancient prophecies, or the supernatural such as ghosts and curses, and often feature an isolated lone protagonist.

- Gothic Horrors include films such as ‘Dracula’, ‘The Mummy’ and ‘Frankenstein’.

- We thought it would be best to avoid this, as we have no means of obtaining the setting these types of films are in, e.g. a castle or a cave

- Much like science fiction the music would be eerie and would fit the situation.

Comedy Horror

- This subgenre combines horror and comedic films. So called ‘Gallows Humour’ is normally used which is black comedy often referring to death jovially.

- Examples of comedic horrors include ‘Shaun of the Dead’, ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ and ‘An American Werewolf in London’

- We decided to not choose comedy horror as our chosen genre as comedy is a notoriously hard genre to go into, and we are not funny enough to do it effectively, and it would be a dangerous genre to use.

- The music of this genre would be more upbeat to create humour.

Psychological Horror - Psychological horrors are much different from other horror genres. They focus more on the characters/protagonists fears and mind, such as the protagonist from the killing kind, and is not usually as scare orientated or feature gore. There are normally plot twists and often focuses on the protagonist/characters inner conflict or state of mind. Tension is normally not built through scares as in most horror genres, but through atmospheric music and sound effects, and a characters psychology.

- Psychological horrors examples include ‘The Shining’, ‘Pig’ and ‘The Omen’.

- We chose psychological horror as our genre because we felt that it would be both challenging and interesting, therefore we will be able to use all of our skills to create an intriguing piece.

- The music would be a lot more fast paced to fit the mood of the character it is following.

Slasher- Slashers are often referred to due to the intense, brutal violence and gore in a certain film. Often, they refer to a murderer/serial killer or psychopath hunting or chasing his victims and kills them with intense graphic violence and gore. Many of these films are iconic and gain huge success such as the Texas chainsaw massacre, pictured to the left.

- Examples of Slasher films include the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Maniac’

- Although this will not be our main theme, we decided to use certain elements from this genre as we would like to include some form of murderer.