Horror

Final exam study guide

Vocab review from last time:

Stop-motion animation

Hand-drawn animation

Cel animation

Computer-generated images, or CGI

Horror

The major questions we’ll consider:

How do horror films use mise-en-scene? How has this changed over the course of the genre’s history?
How do horror films use off-screen space, which is to say, the implied space outside the mise-en-scene? How does this relate to the use of off-screen sound (e.g. the schizophonia effect)? How has this–the importance of the “off-screen”–changed over the course of the genre’s history?

Another way of framing these questions is to keep the following passage from Bazin’s “The Evolution of Film Language” in mind:

“To sum up: both the plasticity of the image and the resources of editing have endowed cinema with a broad arsenal of techniques for imposing on viewers an interpretation of the event being depicted” (Andre Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,”90).

Remember that “plasticity” refers to all of those manipulable elements of mise-en-scene: decor, set design, make-up, costume, lighting, and blocking (which refers to the positioning of the actors in front of the camera)

Pre-history of the horror film:

Stage shows and magic theatre:

German Expressionist film:

1930s-1950s: An emphasis on the monster’s body and mise-en-scene (the plasticity of make-up and costume design)

1960s-1990s:

An increased emphasis on the victim’s (wounded) body throughout the film, and the graphic violence committed against it. Why? Films in general tend to get more violent in the 1960s. In many films of this period, this also means that the monster’s body now no longer takes center stage, remaining unseen,offscreen, outside the mise-en-scene, for most of the movie, and is shown in increasingly more revealing displays as the film develops
More importantly though: we start seeing a more focused attempt to create anxiety about the space immediately outside the mise-en-scene; or, paranoid viewing

Interesting counter-example (victim’s body is the monster’s body):

The Exorcist (1973)

2000-present: Two major tendencies in contemporary horror film: “torture porn” and found-footage films (not the only tendencies, but the main ones)