Thursday 26 November 2015

Deconstruction - Actors in a Slasher

All sub genres within the main horror genre, all include the main stereotypical characters (most of the time). These characters include: the slut, the black guy, the virgin, the non-believer, the hero, the hysterical one, the sexed up couple and finally, the killer.


Starting with the slut of the group, they will be typically be the one that irritates the audience the most. She will also be likely to be the female in the sexed up couple, but will also be trying to sleep with everyone else. The slut will usually be blonde, almost always chewing gum, will be wearing minimal clothing and most of all, she will be exceedingly loud and annoying to the audience and will escape death on several occasions to make sure that at least one person in the audience is close to scream "just kill her already".




Has there ever been a black guy in a horror film that has lasted more than 15 minutes? As far as my viewing of horror films has spread, not once have I seen the black character be the last to die until the end with one exception... A parody film called "Scary movie" where the black character, shorty, gets shot in the lung and even then, he tries to re-inhale the smoke he already had in his lungs from smoking marijuana. The fact that they feel the need to parody a black guy dying in a horror film by leaving him as the last main character to die helps to outline the initial point of the black guy always dies first.








The virgin, also possibly the hero of the sequence will be the last survivor and in the case of them being the hero as well, will be the one that eventually brings the killer down. They will typically be a religious as it has stuck all the way through the horror genre that people that have a religion will be saved by god and so they are also the purist character out of them all so will give the killer less of a reason to hunt them down which will indicate that they won't be killed or at least not until the end of the film when everyone else is dead.




The non-believer will usually be the one to die straight after the black guy. They're the one that laughs around and jokes about the killer. Even when confronted with the killer in Scream (1991), Tatum (non-believer) even asks ghost face if he'd like her to play the helpless victim and if he'd like to play the violent killer that nobody can escape from. After a few silent nods of the head to Tatum's questions, ghost face then goes for her by slicing her arm to prove it's not a joke and then eventually kills her by opening up the garage door she's stuck in and breaking her neck by lifting her head up to the roof.




The hero, as the name would suggest, is the one that will save everybody, or the remaining characters if there are any, from the murderer. They won't typically be the one that leads the group and tells everyone what to do. That person will die and the hero will be the one that everybody turns to for last resort of help.




The hysterical one, almost as irritating as the slut if they're separate characters in a particular instance, will be the one that won't stop crying. She'll usually be a survivor from the opening sequence if it involves a murder (which nearly every horror film has) and then for the rest of the film will refuse to go anywhere and will stay home with people keeping an eye open around her house for the killer. However, their 'guards' will be quickly killed, followed by the hysterical character  soon after. They will always be killed alone due to the group going off and looking for the killer which gives the killer a perfect chance to kill her, Or they're killed off one by one which eventually leads down to the hysterical one and the hero being left alive and they either need to triumph and both survive the inevitable bloody battle against the killer as the finale, or they both die a bloody, painful death.




The sexed up couple will be the ones that the audience will shout at a little more than the blonde slut. They will almost always be killed just before they have sex, or whilst they're having an intense make-out session in a parked car in the middle of nowhere. They won't take any notice of the killer even when he's inches away from them because they're too horny to notice anybody else until there's a knife plunged into their chest.




Last but not least, the killer. The killer will be typically masked as the audience shouldn't know who the killer is until the end of the film so as to keep the audience on edge, constantly trying to figure out which member of the group it is that is actually the killer which tends to be discovered within the last 10-15 minutes of the film to allow time for a gory finale.



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