Horror as a genre.

Horror
The populairty of horror as a genre has carried on throughout the history of popular cinema. The origins of this came from the gothic novels:
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr Hyde by Rbert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Although early film adaptaqtion exist, the most notable early horror fimls were made in Germany in the 1920's. Two of the most outstanding are Nosferatu and Dr Mabuse by F.M. Murnau. The films are said the reflect the state of Germany during this decade, which were times of poverty, chao's and corruption. Productions of gothic horror movies proliferated in the USA during the 1930s by Universal Studios. Many contemporary examples illustrate how 'horror feeds of horror' with frequent intertextual references to other horror movies.
Horror films can also be classified into 'wet' horror - blood, guts and decomposing bodies and 'Dry' horror, which is more psychological or deals with the supernatural or occult.
                              Horrors setting is usually Small communities or an isolated place, these places often have a past which will return and playces for secrets and the past to inhabit. Basements are a common place than connote our primitive instincts and attics our repressed terrors. Night time and out of hour times are also places of innocents but when out of horrors anything can happen. Camerawork is EXPRESSIVE rather than naturalistic. Extreme close ups are used alot in horror for the shock factor and to give people an instant fright, sudden ECU's feel like an invasion of our personal space. Camerawork often makes us of depth of frame eg. protagonist in foreground unaware of a monster emerging in the background. Sound is very important whether its loud and expressive or if its silent, it may be used to create an atmosphere or to create tension a really good example of it creating tension is when you hear a heartbeat pounding. The music in Jaws creates a lot of tension just before the shark strikes and it really sucks in your audience.
                            Visualsignifiers of genre are readily apparent. The colours black and red connote things like the darkness, evil blood and danger. You dont find many bright colours in horror films because once again they symbolise innocence. Lighting is the same rarely do you find a lot of bright lighting in a horror film, its usually very low key and with a high contrast so that you see shadows and like.
                           The narrative structure of a classic hollywood film is commonly (normality-enigma-path to resolution-closure) horror films don't always stick to this. The clear unambigous hero of the classic HOllywood narrative is somewhat problematic in many horrors - as a main protagonish, the 'final girl' of the slasher and many other horror films is a victim/hero rahter than a simple hero and thus provides a point of masochistic identification for the spectator which is more complicated than in many other genres.
The narrative of some horror sub-genres, such as the slasher, are very formulaic. Childhood psychotic event creates killer who return to a past location on an aniversary or special event to kill again. This is the sort of thing that usually happens to a group of quite dim and stupid teenagers with one of the group and over zelas female who survives and gets the title of 'the final girl'.
                          Character types often a victim or a hero, they are usually the ones that the entire films bases itself around. The other types of characters are monsters with a hidden secret or made psychotic by an earlier event, the stupid immoral teens tend to get killed aswell because they don't understand the situation. Children in horrors aren't as innocent as they might be if they were in a Romantic comedy, they tend to be evil and quite frightening. The police in horror are useless, when comparing them to the normal police you wonder how the horror police even get the job, but then again nothing in horror can be looked upon as normal, you need certain aspects of horror to fail so that it paves the way for another.
Overall horror has come along way since the start of film, special effects and the way in which you can film are all 100% more advanaced than before which means that horror can be more real than ever, people still enjoy it because they enjoy the thrill of been scared by something supernatural.