Horror Genre Conventions

Setting:

• Normally small comunities or isolated places.
• Places with a past, e.g an abandoned house.
• Homes with cellers/attics. Allows secrets and the past to inhabit.
• Night time/out of hour. Places that have contrasting environments from happy daytime to frightening night time.
• Religius/medical institutions. Allows for possession, demons and psychosis.
• Dreams and unconcious mind.
• Strange cultures with weird traditions e.g 'the East'.

Technical Code:

• Expressive camerawork- high/low angles with canted camerawork for disoreintation.
• Extreme close ups. To identify victim and also sudden extreme close ups to suggest monsters invasion of space.
• Point of view shooting- often places us in the monsters eyes.
• Camerawork uses depth of frame- protagonist in foreground, unaware of the monster emerging.
• Fast Editing pace- Jump Cuts from long shot to close up.
• Sounds- Ambient, footsteps, heartbeats.

Iconography:

• Visual signifiers of genre- black, red.
• Expressive lighting, motivated, low-key, high contrast, chiaroscuro, to emphasise shadows.
• Lighting direction- often from unexpected angles e.g below to connote hell.
• Mise-en-scene includes weapons, blood, masks, icons of the supernatural and religion.
• Iconography of innocene/childhood- dolls, playgrounds,clowns.

Narrative Structure:

• Classic realist/ Classice hollywood narrative.
• Often a 'final girl' rather than a simple hero.
• Formulaic narratives- Childhood psychotic event creates killer who returns to past location on an aniversary to kill again.
• Propps theories of narrative.
• Binary oppositions e.g good/evil.

Character Types:

• Main Protagonsit often the vitim/hero e.g the final girl, androgynous, virginal.
• Monsters with a hidden secret or made psychotic by an earlier event.
• Stupis/immoral teens are victims and killed.
• Children.
• Ineffectual police and normal law enforcers.
• 'Have a go' Hero, who will get killed.
• Scientists who make mistakes or over reacvh their powers.
• People who refuse to believe.

Themes:

• Binary oppositions- good/evil.
• Return of the repressed- freudian theory, horror is linked closely to sex in some way.
• Hidden evil inside.
• Out of control science.
• What lies on the other side of death.
• Reinforce/subvert dominent ideologies.