What is a horror film?

A horror film serves lots of purposes and there are the main of them:

1) Personal - the audiences own identification with the fears or threats of the narrative - tapping into primal fears of:

- The creature/other in the darkness. Body being ripped/mutilated. These are the basic tricks of horror films where presence of more powerful villain and a few killed victims is one of the main rules.
- Emergence of terror but from a safe (vicarious) distance and viewer understands that all sequence on the screen is unreal.



2) Ideological - the implicit (hidden) or explicit (obvious) messages embedded in the narrative. Themes of punishment/redemption and/or revulsion at any subject which deviates from correct 'thinking'.
Beginning from the 'basic' textual messages, for example, the 'virgin and innocent' young girl (primarily blond one to underline her innocence by the hair color). She can be one of the first victims if there is the same innocent but much smarter girl who survives at the end of the film. Because the death of such character will get us more excited and make us against the villain who kills innocent people.

Example of typical victims from the 'Scream' movie trailer:




3) Financial and Industrial is one of the most significant part of continually re-invent and exploit that is why horror franchises are the most popular and the same characters can appear in five or even more part, for example, SAW franchise, Halloween, Friday 13th, Nightmare on the Elm street, etc.
This thing works because in all horror films there are basical tricks which woke up one of our fears despite how many times we watched the similar films. The main thing in horror film is an idea of the villain so if he was created with animalistic/mysterious/superstitious signs who might wear a mask (if villain is a human) to multiply our perception that this character is not like we are and if he wears a mask it creates another fear of something unknown because we don't know what is under the mask and we even can associate this character with demons. In addition from year to year the modern technologies gives directors opportunities for filming even more horrible film than a previous re-make.


Comparison of original Friday 13th and the last re-make.

Friday 13th (1980)



Friday 13th (2009)