Horror Genre

Horror movies affect the audience in many different ways, some are terrified of them and others absolutely love them, depending on the person. But there are still many different ways to actually scare the audience without using the actual image; they can use their music to make the audience scared before the jump scare actually comes. Like in “Friday the 13^th” they have a very sharp tune before Jason actually shows up and you then know that it is going to happen because everyone know that tune very well. As well as music they use noise to scare the audience more at the time, even if they were already frightened. For example they use screeching sounds we unconsciously associate with animals in distress. A 2010 study by the University of California found that human sensitivity to non-linear alarm sounds, such as ones made by ground hogs to warn about predators, is being employed by film composers to unsettle and unnerve. In films like Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho, straining strings and over-blowing brass are mimicking the noise of panic in nature. For audiences who enjoy a lush romantic score, a 2011 experiment at Canada's McGill University studied the neural mechanics of why humans get goosebumps from great tunes. Far from being a purely aural experience, scans suggested that the regions of the brain that light up with music are those linked to euphoric stimuli such as food, sex and drugs. Blood flow in the brain is responding to areas associated with reward, emotion and arousal.

In more recent horror movies they are finding new ways to try and scare people, instead of graphic images or very load music, they started to use other features like vibrations! Some film makers are now using infra sound to induce fear in audiences. These extreme bass waves or vibrations have a frequency below the range of the human ear. Low frequency sounds are thought to have created fear in Paranormal Activity While we may not be able to hear infra sound, it has been demonstrated to induce, extreme sorrow, heart palpitations and shivering. Naturally-occurring infra sound has been associated with areas of 'supernatural activity', as well as being produced prior to natural disasters such as storms and earthquakes. Audience members reported feeling disorientated and physically ill after just half an hour of infra sound, leaving before the most shocking visual sequence on screen. In the horror Paranormal Activity, audiences also reported toweringly high fear levels even though there was nothing going on the screen. It is believed this was caused by the use of low frequency sound waves. Also in paranormal activity, the way the camera angles and it’s as if they are being filmed of a very poor quality camera, makes it feel like the family filmed it them self and the whole story is true, even though we know it’s not we can’t help but think it is. More and more films like found footage are being filmed now because of its success in scarring people. Also because they are propped up cameras in the corner you can’t actually see anything around it and it won’t move, so anything could move round the corner without you noticing until it scares you in front of the screen.An article from film maker states three primary factors of the horror film allure. The first is tension, which is created through mystery, suspense, gore, terror or shock. The second is relevance, which includes universal relevance, subgroup relevance, and personal relevance. The last is unrealism. The writer states that, despite the graphic nature of recent horror films, we all know at some level that what we are watching is not real. Haidt, McCauley and Rozin conducted research on disgust, showing students in 1994 a series of gruesome documentary videos and yet these same students would pay to see even worse acts conducted on a movie screen. Why? Perhaps it’s because when we walk into a theatre we know what we’re seeing on screen is fabricated reality. Along with these factors, the writer introduces theories on what attract people to horror. Freud posited that horror is from the emergence of images and thoughts. I found this similar to Huma’s theory from the reading. Huma’s idea states that once a tragic, unsettling event is housed in an aesthetic context, with a momentum of its own, the predominant feeling response, in terms of pleasure and interest, attaches to the presentation as a function of the overall, narrative structure. Like in Saw, most people hate gore and gruesome bits, but many love these films and will watch them over and over again. Maybe this is why people get scarred or love horror films all the time?