Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The Psychology Of Scary Movies

By Kennedy Wilson


Scary movies are films in which the ultimate goal is to scare, shock, or induce feelings of revulsion from the theater's audience. The items have been around since the early nineteenth century and occasionally overlap with similar genres such as thrillers. The word "horror" can be used to label all types of different films from ones about serial killers to ones about monsters. Although, what makes some scary movies scarier than others is sometimes difficult to determine.

The first movies of this type were the silent films about cursed locations and demons in the early 1900s. The first ever film version of Frankenstein by Mary Shelly was released in 1910 and was successful in scaring both North American and European audiences. Back then, the majority of the horror movies were produced and made in Germany, who, early on, had cornered the horror market effectively. American filmmakers, by the thirties, started jumping into the game with works such as Frankenstein, Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, and Dracula.

Different things will scare different types of people but the directors and producers of the early thirties and twenties discovered fairly quickly that suspense, sudden plot twists, eerie sound effects, and other factors were more effective at getting people frightened than scary monsters or bloody guts.

Alfred Hitchcock, a world famous director and writer, is attributed with providing the greatest contributions to the horror genre. He pioneered numerous methods and techniques throughout his successful and long career, many of which are still used in psychological and suspense films even today. Most of Hitchcock's feature films are considered classics and the director himself is considered to be one of the world's absolute best.

Alfred's most famous early film, "Shadow of a Doubt" also happens to be one of the first psychological thrillers and the director's personal favorite. The movie was so culturally significant that it was chosen to be included in the National Film Registry so that it's spooky dialogue, overlapping characters, and criminal behavior could be watched and studied by movie enthusiasts for decades to come.

His most famous films, such as "Vertigo", "The Birds", and "Strangers on a Train" were made in the fifties. All of them displayed Alfred's natural gift for scaring people with smart plots, emotionally unstable movie characters, and well chosen eerie music.

Although monsters like Godzilla and King Kong are pretty scary, many of the industry's most frightening thriller and horror films are ones in which the antagonist or 'monster' is never actually seen. "Rosemary's Baby" did a great job with this by avoiding showing the demonic baby which is mentioned and alluded to throughout the movie. Other films such as "The Blair Witch Project" and "Jaws" use this technique as well. By not showing something, directors could ultimately force the audience to fear it even more.

Another popular and useful method involves the kind of sounds that a horror film uses. Sometimes a movie's music is the most powerful aspect when it comes to scaring or terrifying people. Though they might not have known it at the time, the viewers who saw the movie "Jaws" in the seventies were on the very edge of their chairs thanks to the film's infamous score.




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