Senseless 61721/61740: Genre Deconstruction

Monday, 18 April 2016

Representation of Men within Horror

Within the horror genre, there is a typical representation of men.
The characters in horror films, across all sub-genres, that are male tend to have similar characteristics.

For example, the villain or killer in horror is more often than not a man. This conforms to the common representation of men as being strong, violent and dominant. This can be seen in the slasher horror 'Scream' where the killer turns out to be not one, but two teenage boys.

The same can also be said for psychological horrors, where the antagonist can often be seen to be a man with a dark psychological trauma. This can be seen in 'Se7en', where the antagonist is a middle aged man with an obsession with the seven deadly sins. In this way, the killer conforms to the common representation of men as being a killer, however there is more to him than just mindless violence.

Men are commonly represented within horror films as being the strong character that protect others in the group, primarily women.
This can be seen in the slasher horror film 'The Cabin in the Woods'. The character in the varsity jacket, Curt, is one of the films protagonists and he is responsible for the trip to the cabin. Whilst there he is also dominant and makes choices, such as suggesting the group split up. Having a man take the leadership role of the group conforms to the common representation of men within horror films.

This view is subverted, however, in the comedy horror Zombieland, where the male protagonist is weak and is outwitted and protected by a woman. There is a male character in the film who conforms to the common representation of men as being violent and aggressive, however this is more of a caricature for comedic purposes rather than a realistic representation.

Monday, 16 November 2015

Deconstruction and inspiration from Se7en opening credits

The first thing to appear in the opening credits to Se7en is the production companies name. This is pretty much always the case with every film as it identifies by whom the film was produced by.

The opening credits quickly move on to include creepily detailed drawings/photographs of human body parts that have been manipulated/mauled to immediately give the audience the idea that this certainly won't be a product aimed at young children looking for a funny film to watch.

The use of close up shots is already becoming apparent in the first 20 seconds of the opening credits. this is to indicate that the film takes place in a close and personal setting such as a house. This close up in particular shows the "killer" as we can only assume is featuring in this clip, is removing their finger prints by using a razor blade to slice them off which not only suggests that they want to hide evidence of them killing someone, but also indicates that there might not be something right with a person that would rather slice their own fingerprints off instead of just wearing gloves. This is a key point to take note of for our production to decide whether our killer will wear gloves or if they'll just remove their fingerprints altogether and how we'll show this.

The killer/protagonist we focus on in the opening credits seems to be keeping a diary of their killings/sick and twisted surgeries they carry out on their victims. We can see this very easily as the protagonist is writing pages of words and then sticks newspaper clippings or photos from medical journals on brain surgery which indicates that they know what they're doing which adds to the fear factor, that the killer knows that what they're doing is done in hospital yet they're wanting to do it for themselves at home and make diary entries about it.

Something else we can take away from the opening credits, is that the soundtrack is very parallel to the sequence as it is slow paced and has a dark eery feel to it which is very common amongst psychological horror films as they want to have the audience constantly on edge so the effects of certain scenes is amplified.