Notesale: Turn your study into money

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New Explorations in Horror Film by Category
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This is mostly due to
the fact that post-Exorcist everything became (as 'Jack' from Fight Club puts it) "a copy of a
copy"
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Take a look, no
matter how great and fascinating they are: The Conjuring, Insidious, Sinister and Haunting in
Connecticut contain similar things upon to scare and excite us
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One thing that
The Exorcist had was believability - the 1949 exorcism of a young boy would have been known
to people of the time (as the film was 1973 and therefore, the people old enough to see and
hold out in the film's audience would've been the appropriate age)
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there is a difficulty for modern horror that it replaces with jump scare and odd camera
shifts (i
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the one with the mirror in The Conjuring 2
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What we are going to look at is the different (and more experimental) modern horror that
uses certain elements in order to stand-out from the more mainstream and more
"cultural/religious" horror
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Cinematography:

You saw it, and you predicted it
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The incredible and effective "shaky-cam" that would come
to be polished by the likes of Brian de Palma in Mission: Impossible and then again by
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (because let's face it, none of the other PA films did it
quite like that one!) has had a history of reviews ranging from stating it greatness, to reviews
slating its strangeness of staring at the floor for 5 minutes whilst shouting "where's the map?"
But whatever you think of it, you cannot deny it inspired a generation of overkill and now, has
become an overused, overhyped, over-crazed aspect of horror cinema to the point that we've
gone right back to hating it again
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It was an unrequired sequel to a sequel
witch already happened and everyone chose to forget
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Within the last one, we must appreciate that the technology of the time
supports the film with its lacking
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With the audience of the time, there would be a believability that there isn't today and this is
exactly why the modern version of the film did not prove successful in the reviews
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I, for one,
always turn on my location so that my older brother can track me - just out of fear I may get
lost or I won't be connected
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Just a bit of comic relief there
after all the horror and technical discussion
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With this shaky-cam idea, we have camera angles and zooms
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The Blair Witch Project achieves this because of the type of camera they take
with them - it's old to our day, it's strange and disconnected from the outside world and most
importantly of all, it's heavy
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All in all, the cinematography of this film is not only revolutionary for its day, it's revolutionary
for ours, when it's done properly
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We have become a generation of copy-cats and everyone has run out
of good ideas, especially involving the found-footage and shaky-cam films
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Music Use:

I'll try to keep this up-to-date as possible, but I was going to go with A Clockwork Orange
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The song Looking for the Magic is probably one of the
best examples in modern horror of strange and unexpected music use
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The most-well known examples include the diegetic Singing in the Rain
as articulated by Alex in A Clockwork Orange during a scene of brutal beating and rape, there's
Tarantino's use of music in Pulp Fiction in which the shootings and fighting are done mostly
to Jazz or Rock music and finally, there's the nursery rhyme-esque Tip-Toe Through the Tulips
by Tiny Tim that was used (and remixed) by Insidious: Chapter 2
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The film that's going to be looked it is obviously, You're Next because
of its use of such a strange song that hardly fits with the atmosphere at all
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The film itself has a different storyline to most horrors, except for probably Strangers and The
Purge
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The song itself
creates the home-believable atmosphere and the whole story becomes compressed into this
scene in which such normal music is playing that it seems like nothing is out of place at all
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It
normalises the film's subject and brings the audience back to reality
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Even though the film itself may actually be a thriller, the
connection to reality that religious-based horror does not have, makes it all the more
unsettling when we put a soundtrack over it that may imply normativity
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Many 80s films use music very well, one of
my favourites being the legendary E
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I feel that even though it isn't a
horror film, it is a good film to look to for soundtrack - especially the soft-played lullaby-esque
song Someone in the Dark as performed by Michael Jackson
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Recently, music has become such an important part of horror because the theory had
surfaced that without it, the film would fail to have impact and thus, came by the "sound off"
era
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If you really want
to be out-there, you could go back to the days of Pandora's Box, Dr
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It would be a refreshing change from most - but I think that
if you're looking for soundtracks, then seek out You're Next and the films of James Wan
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I
believe that the more we delve into horror, the more we're going to find that the stuff we're
actually scared of is more psychological than physical
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The first film we're going to explore is the epic French Horror, Martyrs
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I loved the way it was portrayed as being an opposition and unity of science and
religion; the experiment being carried out by the scientists is in the name of religion and the
purpose is to hurt the subject as much as possible but not the kill them
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This is so effective
as it doesn't include the typical haunting, or the typical over-dramatic possession or even the
over-hyped ghostly encounter
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This is repeated and extended in the film The Human
Centipede that recently made headlines as being "banned" for the safety of the audience
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The genre of J-Horror includes some obvious well-known abhorrent
and grotesque ideals such as Living Hell, The Ring and The Grudge
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The "battle"
aspect seems to be enforced by the government and the whole Darwinian "survival of the
fittest" theory is thus given its most extreme habitat in the modern world

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