The Cinema Book 2nd Edition - Horror

Horror now days are made everywhere and attracts a big audience to it's genre, but back in 1935 to the late 1940s horror films were banned because of reports of  harmful social effects to people especially on children (no age rating) also was not worthy of even speaking about horror in a conversation, and then in 1950's Hammer studio started creating horror films and the panics once again started. Hammer studio created films like Dracula and Frankenstein but then began to get dull after making a sequel of the same idea, but then problems rose again for horror in the 1970's & 1980's after women protested about violence being used against women in these horrors on a regular basis also these films made women weak and only saw them as sex objects so unfairly treating women.

Their is theories about why do people pay to watch a horror film, I believe people watch horrors to experience being frightened by a horror because they do not poesies this kind of fright in reality and so they watch these horrors for the pleasure of being scared, for example a TV show called Doctor Who he travels in a time machine and defeats these monsters giving him the pleasure of being scared by monsters (especially weeping angels who are undefeated so far)

The other theories such as Freudian, Jungian and  Anthrtopologicalgo on to take societys fears (in the picture these unconscious ideas) and etc, and takes it into a horror film to show the audience the unnatural urges placed into a film for their own pleasure.



<-- This map from the Freudian theory shows the unconscious level and what features in horrors from the unconscious level.




Horror has come a far way from being a problem because of harmful social effects and sequels made by Hammer studios, Physho came out to make the first 'horror of personality' where the main person is the victim and also the murderer, and then Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde & film noir helped contribute to 'horror of Armageddon'  and then The Birds making 'normal aspects of nature that turns abnormal' and finally 'the horror of demonic' these were all sub-genres that Charles Derry categorised.