Horror Movie Genre - A Deconstruction

"I've always thought that there are great similarities between directing horror and directing comedy. With both, you're building up tension and curiosity. The audience is asking, 'what possibly could the punchline be here?' It's the exploitation of tension and that's what horror is all about. You've got to create a situation that's unbearably tense and the audience knows that something's going to happen. That the guy in the black is suddenly going to leap into the frame. It's a very unifying thing in a cinema"

These are the words of Wes Craven, director of the 1984 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street. Some would say he is one of the initiators of the horror/slasher genre that spurned a flurry of unnecessary sequels and myriad clones. Others would say that he helped implement a level of excellence on the teen horror flick that was only ever reached again recently.

Horror films are designed to invoke our worst hidden fears and to draw out our human insecurities that lie deep within. Horror effectively focuses on the strange and forbidden side of life that alarms us. They deal with our most basic instincts of fear and survival: our nightmares, our vulnerability, our fear of the unknown, of death and our loss of identity.

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Scream scriptwriter Kevin Williamson describes Halloween as "my Citizen Kane". Some may curse Halloween for what followed with the blatant rip-off that was the Friday the 13th series. Without Halloween the world would have been denied the artistic genius that Williamson provides us with his movies. Deceptively simple and sinister (just like the film itself) it appears whenever Michael is near.

Carpenter made groundbreaking use of Panaglide (a version of Steadicam) so we see the vantagepoint from the killers eyes, creating a masterful level of paranoia and insecurity.

There is a close connection between Halloween and Psycho. I spent eight years trying to reach him and another seven years trying to keep him locked up because I realised that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil". Without Halloween we would never have a movie like Scream with its self-referential dialogue and its many "why-didn't-I-think-of-that" moments.

No mention of this movie would be complete without a mention of the score, also composed by Carpenter. You can either ignore it or help me to stop it". Just think, without Halloween we would never even know the rules of horror movies as told to us in Scream.

Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho was a groundbreakingly important film. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. Film historians will say that the use of light and dark in Halloween is very reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcocks work.

Approximate Word count = 1108
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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