Horror Film Codes and Conventions

sourced from(http://www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms.html)

Horror films are known to play on audiences worst fears of tourture, the unknown, death and murder and exagerate them to an extreme in the situation and the action taking place. They then add some entertainment into the piece for the story to make sense and be more appealing and reaslistic to the audience and finish it of with a shocking and most commonly gruesome ending with either none or maximum of 2 survivors of the whole ordeal. This imagery and story being told of our worst fears and hates in the world but in a safe, controlled and comfortable envionmnet allows people to be scared but also know that they are safe from what they are seeing on the screen, is what entises people to go and watch these horror films continously, making this one of the most successful and highest grossing genres of all. Horror films are also known as Chilllers, Scary Movies, Spoookfests and the Macabre.

Horror films were researched and developed out of old scary folktales of witches, ghosts and the devil as these were told on nights such as Halloween to scare all listeners. They then became gothic and victorian novels that would still be influencial to film dircectors over 100 years later and were written by now famous Horror authors such as Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Bram Stoker (Dracula). They were then brought into the world of cinema by silent German films, creating supernatural sequnces of terror for all of those watching. One of the most successful ghost stories of those was Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1919) (aka The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) from director Robert Wiene. One of the most successful and earliset vampire films created by the silent German cinema was Nachte des Grauens (1916), aka Night of Terror

Some Horror films are also connected to another genre aswell to add a sense of realism to the film, such as an escaped prisoner, science experiment gone wrong or a mental patient that had escaped, as all of these are situations that as humans living in todays world, we have a sense that they could come true. In the most successful Horror filsm the horror and danger is usually defeated and comes to and end by the end of the film with the last scene being of the victims or the killer going back to their life of normality and calm, showing the passing of what they had been fighing and their victory in know being able to live a normal and safe life again.