Genre Development

Over the years the horror genre has developed from films such as ‘Psycho’ (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) to some of the most resent horror films such as ‘Halloween’ (Rob Zombie, 2007). If we compare these two films the most obvious difference are the killings in each film. In ‘Psycho’ during all the murders you never see the knife have direct contact with the victim only sound effects and splatters of blood, the film being in black and white also means that we never actually see the colour of the blood we just assume it is. This allows the film to spend less time on making up the stab wounds and the BBFC could drop is to a 15 so the target audience would be of a wider range. If we then compare the killing from ‘Psycho’ to the killing of the boys step farther in ‘Halloween’ it is a lot more visual, we see the boy cut the neck and the blood pour out of the cut as he slowly dies. We can see how over the years the brutality of killings in horror films has slowly gotten gorier. A horror film which I didn’t use in my analyses demonstrates the point I am making, the Saw films are all every gory to the point of not being able to watch, for example in ‘Saw 5’ (David Hackl, 2005) the final test they have to do is they have to put their arms into a power saw and fill the a bowl with their blood. During this scene you see all of what happens, the saw cutting their arms and the blood pouring into the bowl and when the bowl is full and they take their arms out you see the man’s arm cut in half from his hand to his elbow. Between the times ‘Psycho’ was made and ‘Halloween’ there has been a lot of other slasher films released such as ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ (1984). This film is a lot more gory and plays with your mind more. For example, at the end of the film when the boy gets pulled into his bed there is an excessive amount of blood used for one person and we as an audience relate our bed as a place of safety. Another film that shows gore but isn’t to over the top with the amount of blood is ‘Scream’ (1996) we see the killer kill his victims in this film like ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ but the blood level used in ‘Scream’ is more realistic which makes the film scarier. Even though the more resent horror film show a lot more gore and have more brutal killings in ‘American Psycho’ (2000) they use the same technique as in ‘Psycho’ even though the killings are more brutal the audience never see’s the murder weapon make contact with the victim. When you finish watching the film you sort of understand why this techniques is used because the killer doesn’t actually kill anyone he just thinks he does because of the mental state he’s in. Even though we don’t see the weapon hitting/stabbing the victim’s because the film is in colour and we as an audience fill in the blanks the effect of the murder has a bigger impact then the murders in ‘Psycho’. Another thing that has become more popular in horror films is non-diegetic music to build up tension, if we look at ‘Psycho’ there isn’t that much non-diegetic music for tension building but in the more recent films like ‘Halloween’ and ‘Scream’ non-diegetic is used all the time for tension. A common occurrence that we see in all of the films i analysed is the time of day the murders are committed, all of them are done during night, apart from ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ (Tobe Hooper,1974). This is a very symbolic stimulus of a horror film because night time is always scarier and when there is non-diegetic music it builds up the climax and being a horror film the audience is expecting something to happen.

In conclusion even though over the years technology has updated greatly depending on director, rating and type of horror slasher film will depend on the amount of gore shown. In my case because i don’t have a high budget i wont be able to do much blood and gore so the technique used in ‘Psycho’ may help me a lot.