Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Reflect on the presentations on the genre tropes of Horror and Movie Reviews
This is a post combining the movie reviews and the reflections on the entire Horror Trope presentations.
Being a die-hard horror fan that gets his kicks from horror films and games, I spent my holidays re-watching all the horror movies I have watched before. I have picked out 3 horror movies I would like to highlight to you all:
The Maid
Shutter
Black Sheep
The Maid is a local horror film where a maid away from the home for the 1st time comes to Singapore to work and ends up in a seemingly normal household, caring for the elderly couple and their mentally challenged son. However as the days pass and the month of the hungry ghosts comes, strange things start to happen, and the maid eventually discovers a horrifying secret the family is hiding from her…
Shutter is a horror film based in Thailand, where a male photographer starts to experience weird paranormal events around him. Ghostly visages start to appear in his developed photos, he starts to see scary figures and nightmares of someone constantly pursuing him. Determined to solve the problem, the photographer and his girlfriend decide to do some research. Eventually the girlfriend suspects her photographer boyfriend of hiding something from her…
Black Sheep is set in New Zealand, where two brothers growing up on a farm are suddenly fatherless due to an unfortunate incident. Years later, the younger brother comes back to the farm to sign his portion of the farm to his elder brother, having left years ago due to the trauma (which also led him to be deathly afraid of sheep). Unknown to him, a couple of environmentalists unwittingly unleashed a flesh eating virus when they released a lamb foetus infected with it, biting one of them. It eventually bit a sheep wandering nearby and it spread to the large amount of sheep in the surrounding farmlands…
While all fiction seeks to get the audience to identify with the characters of the story, to empathise with them, but in horror fiction the audience must be able to feel the same emotions as the characters on screen.
Whether they are ghosts climbing out of your television or zombies rising from the graves to devour your tasty brains, the intended reactions to these horrors in question comprise of emotions like fear, nausea, shuddering, repulsion and revulsion (not to mention lots and lots of screaming!). This kind of ‘mirroring-effect’, where the audience feels the same emotions as the characters when they see the horror is an important key feature of horror fiction.
All three horror movies have in common in that their horrors (what I will be calling the ghost/monsters/zombies from now on) are threatening, either physically or psychologically.
They are also impure, violating generally accepted schemes of cultural categorization.
Objects that are without form, incomplete representatives of their class (e.g. rotting flesh, missing shapes from a whole object)
In The Maid, the ghost is severely burned, especially on her face (impure). She disturbs the maid, even in her sleep, where the maid tossing and turning in fear finally opens her eyes, sees the horrifying sight of the burnt ghost being hung on the ceiling fan and swirling slowly with it, its eyes staring straight at the maid (threatening).
While in Shutter, the ghost is horribly disfigured, her neck at an awkward angle (impure) and in one of the scariest horror scenes ever, she chases the photographer lead up a flight of stairs, and eventually up an emergency ladder. But as he is halfway up, he glances up and sees her gliding down towards him, bleeding hollow eye sockets and all (threatening).
Finally in Black Sheep, the horrors in question are the flesh devouring sheep, which in my humble opinion, is ****ing screwed up on so many levels. Ahem. Where do I begin, alright the fact that these sheep are normally docile herbivores that grace serenely, when they become infected, they become bloodthirsty(impure), actually leaping in the air to sever human throats, violently crashing through wooden doors in attempts to devour the leads(threatening). And the fact or should I say twist, is that when humans get bitten, they turn into weresheep that prey on humans.
This is quite an interesting turn of events where these two disparate entities, where one being changes into and back from at different times, the werewolf for example which in our eyes, is impure, and that the fact that it is now a weresheep that feeds on human flesh makes it even more impure and threatening in our eyes.
Quoting from Noel Carrol’s philosophy of horror, the horrors must be regarded as both threatening and impure. If only threatening, then the emotion is fear. If only impure, the emotion is disgust. But, if both, the emotion is horror.
On an entirely new yet similar note, I have detected a trend in horror movies.
They tend to cast females as the ghost, or portrayed as antagonists, which can be seen as a reflection of men’s pathological fear of women, their power, and menstruation, resulting in castration and power anxiety.
In a discussion I had with classmate, I explained to her that due to our society where women are systematically suppressed and invisible, when you put them in a position of power (as a ghost tormenting the lead) which is unfamiliar to us we are more frightened as men, where women will also be horrified as they can empathise with the female ghost as the emotion they convey (revenge, cannot letting go) are very much in tune to what they feel on a daily basis. Men especially will find this threatening, and impure due to the very disfigurement they show.
The prevalence of women ghosts in so many horror movies so far can be seen as due to that freakish state brought on by repression, where writers know by tapping into this, they can bring the audience deeper into the ‘world’ they are writing, and better feel the sense of horror.
The female subject is shown in horror movies in different ways through time. Women are beginning to come into their own in the horror genre, showing that they are as strong as men and are not the sexual objects they were once perceived as in classic horror (Dracula anyone? Where helpless ladies are being charmed by the Count and turned into vampires sensually).
In The Maid, the maid not only puts asides her fears of the ghost, and even goes on to solve her cause of death and proper burial of the ghost’s remains, even in the face of danger if being found out by the couple and killed.
Horror is a genre that rarely features women in a non-exploitative way whether in games or in other media, and will continue to be. In implementing this, putting females in our future games as antagonists and even ghosts, we can better thrill the gamer, and hopefully letting they know why.
Before we end, I would like to highlight one last point: the key difference of horror in games and other media such as films and movies. Movie audiences are a passive audience, where the story doesn't change no matter what they do, the movie doesn't care if you scream, yell or shake your trembling fist at the screen; the movie trudges on, oblivious as the result remains the same, not being influenced by any factor. This is a loophole of sorts, as movie audiences can easily escape the illusion of horror by simply closing their eyes and cupping their ears. Like the passage of time and the crashing of waves on the beach, the movie ends on its own terms whether the audience wants it or not.
Games, on the other hand, are quite different. Gamers are a direct influence on this kind of media as they are able to interact with the game itself. Whatever gamers do, the avatar they control in the game attempt to emulate to the best of their abilty (or the game engine, mostly), directly affecting how the game plays itself out. I find that it is often scarier to play a horror game as I immersed myself entirely in the illusion, the magic circle. By allowing me to directly affect the game itself, the player is further drawn into the magic circle (I will cover more about this in my post of games in movies and other media =]), whatever scares and horrific creatures will horrify me much effectively than just sitting in front of a screen knowing there's nothing I can do to change the ending, other than just reaching casually over my sofa, grabbing the remote and switching the channel.
But that won't work in a game. As the monster jerks slowly towards you, its arms flailing straight at you, you grip your controller tightly, seeing yourself in the game, being forced to make a decision that has kept we as a species alive for hundreds of generation, to flourish as others died, a hyperarousal that makes you feel as alive as ever.
Fight or flight.
popiah
11:34 PM
0 unpassionate people:
Everything i do, i do with passion
