Horror isn’t really the genre I would go for personally, unlike a lot of people I know I don’t enjoy being scared while watching a film and can’t see myself enjoying a horror film much less rating my favourite ones. So thankfully the lecture from Victoria McCollum was less about specific films and more on the subject of horror as a film genre. The topics she discussed were things I would have never even considered myself like the effect 9/11 had on the horror genre as well as its history and how it evolved to suit audiences preferences throughout the years.
Victorian also talked a lot about post 9/11 stuff and it’s effect on horror films, an example of which is the beheading of the statue of liberty in the movie cloverfield as well as bush and post 9/11 patriotism and how the patriotism act was basically a do-whatever-we-want-and-get-away-with-it pass.
I learned that horror films, much like any other genre of film, can have underlying messages and hidden themes and often draw on inspiration from real world issues that are occurring arounds the time the movie is made for example vampires becoming a popular film plot around the time of the aids crisis and as I mentioned before, USA and freedom being threatened by invaders in the form of aliens in movies like cloverfield.
“If movies are the dreams of the mass culture then horror films are the nightmares” – Stephen King, Danse Macabre
If i’m speaking honestly I’ll probably reiterate here that I’m not a horror fan although I can appreciate what they’ve done for the movie industry mostly in form of the developments made in makeup and prosthetics based effects because the more you can do in-camera the better. I great example of this is John Carpenter’s The Thing and its effects work by Rob Bottin ,I haven’t seen the film, only learned about it from other sources.
EWAN BECKETT 