Sarah's A2 Media Blog

The settings of many horror movies are small communities that look ordinary but that are hiding secrets. Other times there is one house that is isolated from civilisation, an old abandoned house which a family moves into and experiences paranormal activity.
In some movies a small community of houses are built on an ancient Indian burial ground.
Most of the houses are large with lots of different levels such as an attic and a basement for secrets and something horrific to be hiding. Houses with lots of rooms and large areas are used so that there are many places for the victims to run and hide from whatever it is that is after them.
For psychological horror movies it is based around religion, heaven vs. hell (angels and demons) located around a church or also in hospitals where people have died and their spirit wanders the earth.
The camerawork is very expressive as strange angles are used to make the audience feel uncomfortable while watching. There are many point of view shots used to let us feel like we are identifying with the victim and we feel the fear that they do, as if the audience and the victim are in the same situation. However when the point of view shot is from the monster, going after the victim this puts us in an uncomfortable situation where we are made to feel tense and wanting the victim to get to safety or are stalking the victim, especially when we are watching them from behind and they are unaware. Or it makes a normal everyday scene feel very eerie and tense because we are then made aware that there is actually something watching the victim.
Extreme close ups are also used so the audience can identify with the fear that the victim is feeling, also we then cannot see where the threat is because it is out of the frame making it more terrifying since their location is then unknown. ECU’s of the monster initiate terror because it is an invasion of personal space but also a shot of the weapon that they are holding adds to the terror because there is an extra danger involved.
Jumpy editing from long shots to close ups are unsettling as the audience thinks that something is about to happen even if there may not be any sign of threat at that time.
The lighting used for horror movies are not usually natural, lighting from below to make things appear more terrifying than they may be in normal daylight. Light which shines from the bottom may be signifying hell or fire which is mainly used to show the bad character in a film. For example in the trailer for The Haunting In Connecticut when the spirit is about to attack the person’s face is lit up by candlelight so that we can see the “monster’s” shadows more clearly, even though in real life when we are sleeping there is usually no light at all.
Most of the props in the scene are something religious such as crucifixes, or bladed weapons, blood, masks, signs of supernatural behaviour such as moving objects.
In a typical supernatural horror a family with children move into a house with a bad past that is not known to the family when they move in. Strange things happen but they start off small at first so some go unnoticed by all of the family apart from one member who is seen as crazy if they try to communicate what they have experienced to the other family members. Eventually something dramatic happens which catches the family’s attention and they realise there is something supernatural happening. By this time it has usually gotten out of hand and a family member, usually the teenage son/daughter, is near death. Religion is usually involved, symbols, crucifixes are in the scene and a priest may be involved to perform an exorcism even though doing this rarely solves the problem. (‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’)
In gorier horrors like the ‘slasher’ movies there is quite a different storyline. Most of the time the main characters live in a normal village, usually a small hamlet or housing estate in which everything seems perfect, everybody seems to know each other and is the desired place to live. However there is always a hidden past or secret which is waiting to appear. There may be one person who lives there that nobody knows and is never seen who usually turns out to be the villain. The houses are quite large so that when the villain attacks there are lots of places for the victim to run and hide. The villain usually carries a weapon of some sort such as an axe, a knife or uses anything they can find in the home of the victim at the time of attack. Usually people who are sexually active in the movie are the ones who are killed, as if there is some kind of religious message ‘no sex before marriage’ because the virgin is the one that usually lives and becomes the ‘final girl’ like in ‘Halloween’. Most of the time something bad has happened to the killer in their childhood which makes them become psychotic, ‘the return of the repressed’. Bad memories that they have tried to forget about (repress) have returned because something has recently happened which sparks off this memory and they seek revenge.
There are always similar character types in every horror movie: the main protagonist who is usually the victim in the beginning becomes a hero towards the end of the movie. In ‘Halloween’ there is the final girl who is the only one out of her friends who survives. Typically she is the virginal, boyish one who is never looked at in a sexual way, whereas her friends were all seen having sex so they were punished for this. However in ‘The final destination’ the hero and the main character is a teenage boy who saves the day by warning everybody about what is going to happen because he can see the future. The twist to that movie is that they cannot get away from cheating death and all die in the end anyway, so no one was the hero after all. This is quite a rare example of horror movie because in most others there is a ‘happy ending’ where everything becomes resolved and the main character survives. The police never seem to be able to do their job properly because they are slow at acting if something happens. ‘Disturbia’, even though it is a thriller not so much a horror, it is a perfect example of when policemen make a scene so tense just because they can’t be bothered to do their job. A policeman is sitting in his car eating a burger when he is called out to take care of a 911 call. However he doesn’t think it is important and takes a lot longer to get to the scene than he should have. By this time the murderer is going after the main character to kill him. The audience is left shouting at the screen about how stupid this policeman is, especially since in this example he gets murdered by the villain.