Horror Movie Genre

The Horror Genre: Unmasking Fears Across Generations

Horror films push social boundaries and exploit Americans worst fears in a way that excites, challenges, and makes viewers obsessed with terrifying themselves. The horror genre is a vehicle that allows people to cope with their worst fears, such as death outside of their everyday reality. Horror films provide us with unimaginable or impossible situations making our own fears seem less terrifying. Horror films caricature the current social problems that preoccupied people’s concerns during that time period and create their “monsters” to embody the current fears. In the films Cat People (1942) and Rosemary’s Baby (1963) the social unrest that resulted from World War II (classical era) and

In horror common myths include, a woman in peril and an ignorant man who commences the real danger. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary is very clever and independent, but she has a debilitating need to please and like most women in horror films falls victim to people who take advantage of her kindness. The one time Rosemary was in need of help she turned to her former doctor, Dr. Hill, to help her. Unbeknownst to Hill, her claims of her husband and current doctor being involved with witchcraft was true. Therefore when she sought refuge in his office, he called her husband and they followed through with the demonic plan. Throughout the film, the viewer experiences the plot through rosemary’s actions and stream of consciousness, typical of a modernist film. Modernists uses stream of consciousness, which places the audience in placed in her mind and the viewer feels the same emotions of dread and frustration as Rosemary. The audience knows that she is justified in her fears, but no one that isn’t hurting her is believes her and it seems like an impossible situation to escape. In Cat People Alice is the classic weak woman in need of a man to save her. She turns to both Oliver and Dr. Judd to rescue her from the jealous attacks of Irena’s cat side. Dr. Judd attempts to prove Irena wrong by kissing her and showing her that she will not turn into a cat because there is no curse place on her. However, comparably to Rosemary Irena felt a sense of alienation from the rest of society because no one believed her and the kiss proves that her fear was legitimate as she attacks Judd in his office and kills him. Although Judd was confident that the curse was fictitious, his actions caused her to do the one thing she tried to avoid. According to Bordwell and Thompson, in Classical Hollywood storytelling is done in the objective point of view, where the audience is