Blog 5 - Evidence of Wider Reading.

The Horror Genre

The genre of horror is nearly as old as the film industry itself,  It was used to provoke emotions out of its target audience causing fear. Even though they wouldn’t be scary today, horror films caused quite a stir in the 1890s when film was without sound, this was known as the silent film era. Whilst the horror genre was as old as film itself, it didn’t feature a monster to the early 20^th century, in the film Quasimodo, which was the first full length horror film.

Even though there were monsters in the films now, they didn’t exactly look like them, so common monsters were always ones that look very similar, like the vampire themed film Nosferatu.  Other antagonists were zombies and serial killers. Most of these monsters drew inspirations from novels such as Dracula and Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein wasn’t adapted into a film to the 1930’s and then became a big hit universally and popularized the horror genre, it also encouraged many actors such as Boris Karloff and Bella Lugosi to make careers in film.

1940s not only brought the Wolf Man but brought better make up and costume designs, they were more convincing to the audience, and made the films a lot more scary.

As technology improved, special effects could be better, and more convincing for that matter. The horror genre shifted towards the science fiction than keeping with the traditional gothic horror that the genre started out with.

Large low budget films featured the human race overcoming threats from aliens from other worlds. It was also used as a way of causing political paranoia, this was portrayed in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers that aliens to depicted the Soviet Union rather than directly attacking them, thus avoiding controversy. 

Horror became more self-mockingly ironic, especially in the latter half of the 1990s. Wes Craven's Scream movies, starting in 1996, featured teenagers who were fully aware of, and often made reference to, the history of horror movies, and mixed ironic humor with the shocks. Along with I know what you did last summer; it boosted the popularity of the horror genre.

The 21st century brought a rebirth to the Zombie sub-genre of horror, and also continued the comical values that can be associated with some horror films today such as the Scary Movie Quadrilogy which are parodies of other horror films.

Blog 2 - Target Audience

Sorority Row

As we can see here on the graph of User Ratings from http:/IMDB.com, the audience was mainly male, judging from the votes.  From this I can estimate that the target audience was mainly 18-19 year old men, with a low percentage of women. This may be because of a all mainly female main cast, and the feature of parties and alcohol.  Compared to Jennifer’s Body (Below) it probably wasn’t as popular it didn’t have the obviously prominent actors in its main cast.

However it did have the daughter of Bruce Willis, Rumer Willis, and Carrie Fisher, who is famously known for playing Princess Lea in the original Star Wars movies. So this may have attracted the Action and Sci-Fi fans.

It wasn’t surprising to see that the number of aged under 18 to voters was low as this film was rated as an 18.

 Jennifer’s Body

Like Sorority Row, Jennifer’s Body has a much larger male target audience. Again because it is rated 18 we see that the age group is 18-29.

This tells us that the film was aimed at mainly men, who were probably attracted to the fact that Megan Fox plays a promiscuous role in the movie. However, surprisingly it has been voted an average of 5.3 by men, and 5.7 by women.

This may have been because some of the target audience hadn’t found it gory enough, or it was too similar to other films.

Compared to Sorority Row, and judging by these graphs, Jennifer’s body was more popular, this may have been because the target audience may have been interested in its lead cast. However most that liked Sorority Row liked Jennifer’s Body.