Wes Craven

Born on August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio, Wes Craven went on to direct horror films like Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and Swamp Thing before helming the infamous Nightmare on Elm Street. He scored another major hit with Scream, which spawned three sequels as of 2011.

Craven made an impressive film debut in 1972's The Last House on the Left, which he wrote and directed. The movie mined human cruelty to fuel the horrific tale of teenage girls abducted by deranged prisoners. The evil that people can inflict on others provided the central conflict for another now-classic Craven film The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

Craven's works tend to share a common exploration of the nature of reality. 'A Nightmare on Elm Street', for example, dealt with the consequences of dreams in real life. 'The Serpent and the Rainbow' portrays a man who cannot distinguish between nightmarish visions and reality.

In 'Scream', the characters frequently reference horror films similar to their situations, and at one point Billy Loomis tells his girlfriend that life is just a big movie. This concept was emphasized in the sequels, as copycat stalkers reenact the events of a new film about the Woodsboro killings occurring in 'Scream'. 'Scream' included a scene mentioning an urban legend about Richard Gere and a sex act involving a hamster. Craven stated in interviews that he received calls from agents telling him that if he left that scene in, he would never work again.

Conventions of a short film

Characters - Short films usually stick to 2 or 3 main characters.
Twist - Short films nearly always contain a 'twist' to make it more interesting.
Budget - Short films typically have a low budget.
Length - Short films usually are maximum 35 minutes long, however they are typically 5-10 minutes long.
Situation - Short films usually take an everyday situation that we can relate to and then flips it in some way.
Todorov - Todorov's Theory of Equilibrium is typically applied to short films.

Uses and Gratification

The basic theme of Uses and Gratification is the idea that people use the media to get specific gratifications.

This is in opposition to the Hypodermic Needle model that claims consumers have no say in how the media influences them.

The main ideas of Uses and Gratifications model is that people are not helpless victims of all powerful media, but use media to fulfil their various needs.

These needs serve as motivations for using media.

The IMR and The 'Primitive Style'

The IMR
The key code is the international language of film or the Institutional Mode of Representation. In film theory, the IMR is the dominant mode of film construction, which developed in the years after the turn of the century, becoming the norm by about 1914. The IMR is characterised by the attempt to create an entirely closed fictional world on screen. The audience is completely imaginatively involved in the film, instead of being distant from it and seeing it as an object to be examined.

The 'Primitive Style'
The 'Primitive Style' of movie-making predated classical Hollywood's continuity system (or IMR). 
Techniques include frontal staging or a tableau style, exaggerated gestures, hardly any camera movement and no Point-of-view shots.

Theoretical Approaches to Horror Films

Philosophy of horror (Noel Carroll):
Noel's big idea was attraction/repulsion. We are both repulsed by gore and transgression and also attracted by it.  We enjoy killer POV shots yet identify with the killer, we fear vampires but fancy them and we can’t stand looking but can’t stop looking as well - attraction repulsion.

Laura Mulvey - 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema':
Laura's big idea was the 'male gaze'. The film positions us as a male eye, spying on the female and objectifying her, this is shown clearly in the film 'Halloween'. The audience simultaneously empathizes with the victims on screen while occupying the killer's point of view. There is a shift from seeing the world through the killer’s eyes to seeing it through the Final Girls, which is interesting.  

Freud - The uncanny:
The Uncanny is something secret and disturbingly strange. The uncanny is ought to have been secret but that has come to light within the unconscious or subconscious mind. It is essentially the return of the repressed and it is projected onto objects, people and places. The uncanny valley is also very interesting.

Jung - The shadow:
The shadow is a projection of all we fear and dislike onto an external figure. The horror film 'monster' is all the worst parts of us.

Adam Lowenstein:
Adam's big idea was spectacle horror - the combination of special effects, camerawork, gore music etc. They create a medium that is much about appreciating the art of the genre as it is about darker motives.

Cynthia Freeland:
Cynthia argued that graphic violence and gore are so over the top and exaggerated that they create a 'perverse sublime'. They are so far-fetched that we can enjoy the film on an aesthetic, entertaining level. This explains why a lot of people don’t like horror ‘too real!’.

Horror Genres

Sub-genres of horror

Action Horror - Combines the intrusion of evil, an event or the supernatural in horror films with the gun fights and frantic chases that are performed. These include most commonly zombies, along with demons, gore, vicious animals and vampires, e.g. Dawn of the Dead, From Dusk till Dawn and Blade.

Body Horror - Where horror is generated from the degeneration or deconstruction of the human body. Limbs are used to create monsters out of human body parts or unnatural movements and dysfunction to create fear, e.g. Teeth, The Invasion and Cabin Fever

Comedy Horror - Comedy horror is a literary and film genre that combines elements of comedy and horror fiction. Comedy horror has been described as able to be categorized under three types: "black comedy, parody and spoof." The genre almost inevitably crosses over with the black comedy genre,
e.g. Scary movie, Shaun of the Dead and Gremlins.

Psychological Horror - Relies on character fears, guilt and belief, emotional instability and at times the supernatural to build the tension and further the plot, e.g. The Shining, The Ring and The Exorcist.

Gothic Horror - These films usually includes features such as castles, ruined landscapes, dungeons, extreme landscapes and magic/supernatural, e.g. Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy.

Science Fiction Horror - Usually uses paranormal and sometimes can involve experiments going wrong, e.g. Alien and The Mist.

Slasher Horror - Slasher films involve a series of violent murders or assaults by an attacker armed with weapons such as a knife or razor, e.g. Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween.

Zombie Horror - Zombie films portray viral reliving corpses/mindless humans that feed off the living, e.g. Night of the living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and I am Legend.

History of film

1895 - The first films ever shown were the Lumiere Brothers films

1902 - Le Voyage Dans la Lune by Georges Méliès

1915 - Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith)

1927 - The Jazz Singer by Al Jolson (First film released with sound)

 

History of horror movies:

The first known horror movie was 'The house of the Devil' from 1896. After this film was released, many more horror films were made. Such as Frankenstein from 1910 which has been remade multiple times. The most influential horror films through the 1920s came from Germany's expressionist movement, with films like 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' and 'Nosferatu' influencing the next generation of American cinema. Universal Studios entered a Golden Age of monster movies in the '30s, releasing a string of hit horror movies beginning with ​'Dracula and Frankenstein' in 1931 and including the controversial 'Freaks' and a Spanish version of ​'Dracula'.
No decade had more seminal, acclaimed horror films than the 1960s. Reflecting the social revolution of the era, the movies were more edgy, featuring controversial levels of violence and sexuality. Films like ​'Peeping Tom' and ​'Psycho' were precursors to the slasher movies of the coming decades, while George Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead' changed the face of zombie movies forever.
 Exploitation movies hit their stride in the 1970s, boldly flouting moral conventions with graphic sex and violence, this latter reflected particularly in a spate of zombie movies such as 'Dawn of the Dead' and cannibal films such as 'The Man From Deep River'. The shock factor even pushed films like 'The Exorcist' and 'Jaws' to blockbuster success.