Research - How does the Psychological Horror Subgenre Publish?

    Hello everyone, I'm back here again to talk about some research I did on the psychological horror again. This time, I wanted to dive deeper and see how does the psychological horror publish its films.

    Going straight ahead, I started with the simple search of "How does the psychological horror film published?" With that, I was able to immediately get source that specific to my question and gave insight to how a psychological horror film is created.

    Now, based off this portion of the article, the person does give a bit more of their opinion on what they think certain elements are not what create a psychological horror film. One of them being graphic horror, which for me personally doesn't always seem to be the case since there are psychological horror films that have some graphic scenes within the story while still maintaining the psychological idea. An example of this is the Human Centipede, the plot of the movie is a German surgeon who kidnaps and manipulates two American women along with a Japanese man into creating what the surgeon called his "life-long fantasy" of connecting their bodies together so the people form as one creature. 

Elements of Psychological Horror

    Next, when I kept reading the article, it gave a run down of what gives psychological horror its uniqueness; one of these elements being "the mental." What does this mean? Well, what the article explains it as is when we as the audience is feeling the sudden pressure that the protagonist would feel as well as the rising tension between them and supernatural. In many cases, this can give us, the audience, a need to question and try to figure out the meaning of certain symbols or objects shown inside of a film. The article gives an example of how this can been seen when the opening scene of Hereditary displays weird doll houses, a grandmother, or a strange symbol. This would give the audience something to ponder about and would then allow for people to create questions about these specific details.

    Moving forward, I found another element that is spoken about that I believe is very important to creating a psychological horror film. This element is "the emotional." Again, it's very vague at first, but the article goes into more detail about what it means by that. Basically, the idea of using emotions is strong suit that many horror films have in common, however, for psychological horror films it's very important to have this. The reason why is that since the point of psychological horror films is to focus on the mental state of characters and how they are affected by the events that happen within a film. This would make it crucial that the audience is very aware of this and is always on their toes on what might happen next because of the character's mental state. 

    

    Finally, I learned one last important element that is mainly exclusive to psychological horror, that being unique characters. At first, this sounded bit strange since every story usually has a unique character made; it's quite literally what makes every story different. But, what the article tries to entail is much more deeper than that. Looking more into the article, I understood that in psychological horror films, a lot of characters would posses certain characteristics that other horror films wouldn't. These can range from traits such as mental health-which is obvious-to other traits like receiving consequences or karma after triggering an event within the plot.

    So, overall, this article was very informational as to what I should expect from a psychological horror film and what makes it so unique compared to other subgenres of horror. Keeping these specifics in mind, is key to having more success in creating a psychological horror film opening in the future.

Citations

https://litreactor.com/columns/storyville-writing-psychological-horror

Research - Who is the Demographic for Psychological Horror

    Hey everyone, welcome back to another post. For today, I want to talk about what I found out about for the specific demographic that psychological horror is targeted towards. When it comes to talking about the demographic for psychological horror, there are different ways to interpret this.

Statistics of the Demographics

    Starting off, I simply searched up "What kind of demographic is psychological horror targeted towards?" This would then lead me to clicking the first website I saw which had statics and graphs explaining the age groups that are the most interested with horror in general and psychological horror specifically. 

    Looking at the graph, the general audience that is the most interested when it comes to horror or thriller is shown to be between Gen-Z and Millennials. Now, looking at the rest of the chart, it explicitly shows that horror and thriller only comes in 3rd and 4th place for most watched genres within the three generations given in the chart. While reading the article, there is mention of why these two genres would later become more prominent throughout the years; the reason being that streamers have almost unintentionally promoted more horror films than others allow for companies to gain more profit from recent films. There is also the inclusion of celebrities having special appearances on advertisements to promote these movies which would also boost the overall interest of the demographic for horror films.

    Moving on, I wanted to confirm these studies for the overall enjoyment of the horror genres, specifically psychological horror. So, I turned to another source that would give more statistics on the topic of how can the previous statistics I mentioned can affect companies and producing films.

    

    After looking closely, I learned that in most cases, horror films can have very low budgets for their productions but still have huge profit made off of them. One of the reasons why this has been the case is due to the "die-hard fans" that would go and watch these movies regardless of the quality of the film and give good ratings which boosts the profit the film would make. This can be seen with other genres like superhero franchises or, as an example, the Star Wars spin-offs where the fandom would go out of their way to watch these films or shows and still give good ratings because they value the franchise very highly. This came as a shock for me since in many movies created today, would have high budgets and would still have somewhat made good profit from the box office. However, as I have been reading through these graphs and statistics, it showed me that a film or show does not always need to have high budgets to be successful in the box office since movies like Friday the 13th only had very low budget of $550,000 and made an estimated amount of $39.7 million in the box office.

Citations

https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/horror-movie-audience-statistics.html

https://www.statsignificant.com/p/why-do-people-like-horror-films-a

Research - Technical Elements of Psychological Horror Pt.2

 Hey guys, welcome back to another one of my blog posts! I wanna continue off of what I was researching and giving you my feedback on from my last post on the technical elements that you see in many psychological horror films.

Mise En-Scene

    Jumping straight into it, I wanna talk about what I found out about the mise en-scene that you would usually spot in a psychological horror film. When talking about Mise en-scene, there are many elements that should be taken account such as the setting, time, lighting, or even smaller details that only certain people would be able to spot. This can include having very extreme weather to supernatural things that would only occur in a horror/fictional film. A good example of what I mean by this is when in the movie the Barbarian, the location of where the movie took place in was a isolated and quiet Airbnb which was in a run-down house in Detroit, Michigan. I could also see this same idea be put into use when in the movie 2012 there were many natural disasters that had happened all throughout the world and people were forced into leaving their homes to seek higher elevations since one of those natural disasters was giant floods and tsunamis.

Use of Violence

    Now, I wanna move into what other kinds of elements would horror movies utilize to make them more unique than other genres. One of these being the usage of gore or very violent scenes within the horror films. This can shown in the movie IT when Pennywise, the main antagonist, would kill his victims with supernatural powers in very gruesome and gory ways. On top of that, you could also include the Friday the 13th movies since the main focus of the movies is Jason murdering the campers within Camp Crystal Lake numerous times. Besides having gore in horror movies, the horror genre would be known to have a lot of scenes or events that occur to produce shock for both the characters in the movie and for the audience to make the story more interesting.

Uncanniness

    Moving on, there is another element that you would usually only find in a psychological horror film, and that would be creating scenes with an uncanny look. You're probably wondering what I mean by that, so let me break it down for you. The idea of something being "uncanny" is mainly defined as when something or someone makes another person feel uncomfortable or potentially scared. An example of this would be from the movie The Shining when in multiple scenes that had shown Wendy Torrance, she was most of the time very terrified and was crying because of her husband Jack Torrance going insane from being trapped in the hotel they were staying in. This would also tie in the idea of a psychological horror film using other small elements such as manipulation where a character would be gaslighted into doing something wouldn't normally do or peer pressured to the point wanting to commit horrible acts; or the idea of the narrator being unreliable and would cause the audience to question whether or not the protagonist is sane or insane. This, in turn, would create a sense of paranoia within the viewers since there is not enough information to make a conclusion of what is going on and the viewers would not be sure what to believe in.

Distortion of objects

    Finally, I want to bring in one last element that I didn't touch up on before that I would like to be more specific on; I would be referring to the setting and time. Now, I know that the setting for horror movies is very obvious on what it would look like but I don't mean the known things like dark rooms or stormy skies. What I'm talking about is the distortion of normal objects in backgrounds like trees or houses. A movie that would use this a lot would be the Smile movies because, as the name suggests, there is a very creepy entity that would go around and stealing people's bodies to then target the main character who would eventually confront the entity. This entity was created through an incident with a patient as a psychiatrist where the entity would take the form of many beloved people of the main character such as her mother or friends. Many grotesque images can be made by twisting and making normal looking things into more creepy and uncanny objects if they apply the right elements to them so that the audience develops a lot more fear when seeing these uncanny objects.

Citations

https://raindance.org/unveiling-the-essentials-of-horror-key-elements-and-their-cinematic-uses/

https://www.elevated-horror.com/post/uncanny-valley-horror-movies

https://nofilmschool.com/psychological-horrorhttps://www.byarcadia.org/posts/horror-film-series%3A-behind-the-mise-en-scène

Research - Technical Elements of Psychological Horror

     Hello everyone, welcome back to another one of my blogs! For todays post, I wanted to talk about the different technical elements that you could see in the Horror genre. Horror itself is known to have very dark tones along with eerie sounds.

Lighting

    The first element that I wanna talk about is the lighting. In many cases, dark lighting is the norm which can be found in many movies ranging from old to very recent. The reason as to why dark lighting has become so normalized in many horror movies is because the way it creates a eerie environment. When I watch horror movies, I usually perceive the whole "dark lighting" as a must in the movie because to me if there's no dark lighting it wouldn't really be a horror movie since it helps create that spooky environment. 

Suspense/Tension

    Moving on, I looked into the suspense and tension that many horror movies produce when the audience watches. This is usually one of the most important things that a horror film should have in them to ensure that the movie can be successful in theaters. My initial thought on this was that not having suspense doesn't necessarily mean that the horror film would be bad, however, I would be proven wrong when I notice many of the movies I watch would always have this whether its a small amount or is shown many times. Movies like Friday the 13th would be a good example of this since at many times would show the teenagers in Camp Crystal Lake doing something and would have the camera angle at a way so that we as the audience would see them through Jason's eyes. To me, this was a pretty cool thing the production company did to really get the audience on their toes since the scene would instantly cut as soon as the teenagers scream at the sight of Jason coming to kill them.

Vulnerability/Isolation

    Finally, I wanna talk about how in horror movies, there's always in some shape or form of the feeling of vulnerability and isolation. What I mean by this is when a character in a film or show is shown by themselves or always seems like their scared of being alone. This can be seen in The Black Phone when Finney, the protagonist, is captured by the Grabber and is locked in the basement where he is shown to be crying and terrified of him being trapped in the basement with only a mattress and black telephone. This insinuates the idea of the psychological horror films always having a character show signs of major stress and shock of the idea of being alone with a murder or someone with strange supernatural powers.

Citations

https://raindance.org/unveiling-the-essentials-of-horror-key-elements-and-their-cinematic-uses/

Final Genre Choice and Thoughts

    Hey everyone, welcome back to another blog post of mine. I wanted to make this post a short and sweet one since I already researched what genres I was looking into in my past blogs. The Horror genre itself was always going to be my choice when I decided to pick the film opening option and on top of have the passion for creating stop motion videos with drawings. 

    In general, horror in itself will always be my top pick when it comes to watching new shows or movies whether it's with friends or not. Now, I will say that horror can sometimes be boring if that movie trilogy doesn't do the greatest job at adding those scary elements throughout the movie. For example, I've watched countless horror movies and a majority of them haven't truly scared me. However, I can say that there has only been a few movies that genuinely put actual fear into my heart. One of those being the IT movies and The Human Centipede movies. These kinds of movies are usually gory and have very graphic scenes and is the reason why I felt really scared when I watched these kinds of movies. The reason why I watched the IT movies is because back in 2018-2019, my uncles came over to stay at our house during the holidays and they were big horror fans. So, one of them decided it was a great idea to make 8 year old me watch one of the most graphic and horrifying movies that was made at the time. Obviously this made me have nightmares for days and could barely sleep. But, as I grew older, I started to love the horror genre by watching movies that weren't as scary but still had some scary scenes. A good example of this is the Godzilla movies, since they were originally made with a more scary intendent but still had some action in them, I discovered a love for those movies.

    Even though I really wanna choose horror for my film opening, I still have some doubts or other thoughts for different genres since horror might prove difficult to make as an film opening. I would say that some other genres I found also interesting was the action genre since many movies I found entertaining were in the action category and also in other mixed categories. Shows and films like Mad Max or Goosebumps really allowed me to broaden my interest in different genres and also showed me that films can have many types of genres all at once. With this in mind, I can't really say for sure that I will rule out any other genre when it comes time to begin the process of creating my film opening. However, I will keep in mind to do a little more thinking and truly decide on what genre to pick and create as my film opening. For now, I do want to do more research and give myself more time to think about what to do with what genre I want to use. In conclusion, I really do want to do horror as my genre pick, specifically the psychological subgenre, but I feel as if there could be other genres to pick that might be better for myself to do or more interesting. That's pretty much all I wanted to say, nothing really crazy or informational I wanted to say. Just my thoughts I have right now as of the end of my research.

Until the next post,

Nikolas Velez

Citations

https://horror.org/what-is-horror-fiction/

Research - Horror Subgenre

    Hello my dear readers, I'm back with another blog! Today I wanna talk about my research that I did for the sub genres that I discovered in the Horror genre. As I had said previously in my last post, I wanted to start doing reviews for finding and picking the genre/sub-genre I want to use when I create my film opening and write my CCR. By the end of my research for this week, I'll more than likely have chosen my final genre that I want to use for my film opening.

    To start off, I wanted to look straight into one of my personal favorite subgenres of Horror which is the Psychological category. This can be seen in many movies that were made from famous books like Stephen Kings series of horror books such as Carrie, IT, and The Shining. The main things that these films have in common, is that one of the main characters in the cast usually has a mental breakdown or is mentally conflicted with the main antagonist or the implications that the villain had put on that character. For example, in The Shining, Jack Torrance the main protagonist finds and lives in a hotel for Christmas with his family. However, as the story progresses, there is a winter storm that proves to be a problem and the family and the guests staying in the hotel are stuck there. Jack goes through a mental breakdown after realizing he can't leave the hotel and his other vulnerabilities such as alcohol abuse, past trauma, etc. This in turn, would cause him to go into a complete rage and try to kill anyone he sees in the hotel with different weapons he finds towards the end of the film.

    Moving on, the next subgenre I really thought was interesting and cool to see in films is the Arthouse genre. Arthouse, also referred to as elevated horror, is a subgenre of horror that revolves around the idea of having very psychological themes and atmosphere to create a certain style for this subgenre. This can be seen in movies such as The Black Phone, in which, the main character is a young boy who is kidnapped by a buff and very strong man who wears a strange mask and would keep the young boy in his basement to torture him both psychologically and physically. These films can go both ways, either they can have a short, and simple plot with good cinematography, or they can have a complex plot with stunning visuals to compliment the already amazing plot in that film. By focusing on the visuals more in these kinds of horror movies, it allows for the watchers to have a much more immersive experience rather then sticking to a more basic and traditional horror movie style. For me, the idea of focusing on the visuals, cameras shots, and production of a horror movie is much better only because it can make the movie seem much more scarier than what the plot actually makes it sound like.

    Next, I went to look another subgenre of horror that I'm very familiar with and it's called killer. This subgenre of horror is the most basic and well-known type of horror around the world. Although it's the most typical genre of horror, I still find it to be very entertaining if it's made correctly. What I mean by this is that the movie doesn't have to have a complex plot or have very action-packed scenes. I'm saying that the movie shouldn't have corny jokes that are outdated or overused. This is probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to any other show/film that are made more recently since they try to appeal to younger audiences and most of the time, they use jokes that aren't that funny and for me personally ruins the whole movie experience. Especially, if the movie is a horror film that's supposed to focus on scary events rather than making corny jokes and try to make the audience laugh. Anyways, movies that are typically in kind of horror genre would be Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street which follow the typical tradition of having very scary elements of a horror movie and show little to no joyful or not-so scary scenes to always keep the audience on their toes. These kinds of movies will always have a special place in my heart when it comes to watching horror films even if they may seem cheap and bit old.

Finally, I wanted to end off with a pretty crazy subgenre to talk about, so I decided to research on the Splatter subgenre. Now the idea of Splatter is obviously very graphic and is only for mature ages. This subgenre can be seen with movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Final Destination, or Saw. Now, I have only seen a couple of these movies that are in this subgenre and I can definitely say that they are not for those with a weak stomach as many grotesque things happen that I would not talk about. Of those handful of movies I had saw, one of the ones that I saw that seriously gave me nightmares for days and it was The Human Centipede. Now if you don't know what this movie is, I really wouldn't recommend this to people if you're easily scared. Essentially, two Americans are kidnapped and drugged by a psychotic German doctor Josef Heiter, who wants to surgically connect them together to have them share one digestive system. I know, terrifying, right? I would never wish this kind of thing even on my worst enemy. Anyways, its movies like these that made me really enjoy the horror genre because of the genuine fear that would strike me when watching it. So, when I got the chance to, I decided to add this as one of main subgenres that I find the most interesting and best, in my opinion, subgenres of horror. Overall, this kind of subgenre seemed to me at first very weird and I never thought of finding this interesting or so myself watching any movie that was in this subgenre. But yet, here I am talking about it right now and I can say that it for sure changed the way I see things. The only thing I would say is that The Human Centipede is probably the only movies to truly strike true fear into my heart and when I heard that there was trilogy of this I felt disgusted.

    To sum it up, I really did enjoy looking over my favorite genre in the filming industry. I loved how there are so many different subgenres of horror and that some types have certain aspects they focus on rather than having typical horror scenes. This research also allowed me to see how horror has evolved into something more than just your basic slasher film and turned into something like the Black Phone in where they would mainly focus on visuals instead of the horror to give the audience a more dark presence. Overall, I would totally recommend these kinds of movies and subgenres to someone who loves watching horror films like myself.

Until next time,

yours truly,

 Nikolas Velez

Citations

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7144666/ 

https://total-movies.fandom.com/wiki/The_Human_Centipede_(First_Sequence) 

https://nofilmschool.com/horror-subgenres

Research - Genres to Consider, Film-Horror, Western, and Action

    Hey guys, coming back here again for another post. This time, I want to talk about different genres and how they're successful in their respective roles. When I was starting off my research, I immediately thought to look back on the genre slideshow we did a couple of weeks ago to understand and know the different genre types there are. After looking at that, I began my research with looking into the video games genre since I have a high interest in it.

    Firstly, when I was looking for information on different film types, I wanted to start in the horror genre since I love watching scary movies. So, I began my research and almost immediately found a great website that gives an in-depth definition of what horror is in general and examples of horror movies/shows. When I read the definition provided in the article of what horror means, I was able to get a better understanding of how we as humans develop fear and what causes the creation of fearing something. Saying how "...someone that is feared because they are different or misunderstood." This would imply that we as people can create fear in our mind due to the indifference of someone or something just because we view them as "weird." The Horror genre usually has the same elements and aspects that are shown when watching horror movies. These can range from how the setting is depicted, to how the plot is built upon from the beginning of the movie to the end. Also, many movies such as Friday the 13th have very iconic music that signify fear or the climax of the movie because they utilize it at the right time. This would be very reoccurring in other horror movies from older films to newer ones that still retain that same "spooky" element. Another example of a well produced horror movie would be the Alien movies-created by Brandywine Studios-mainly due to the dark settings that each movie is set in and shared the same concept Friday the 13th movies did when it came to producing eerie music.

    Moving on, I needed dive deeper into the film category and at I quickly thought of researching the Western genre. The idea of western films is to, obviously, portray the 1800s and how life was at that time with movies such as The Searcher or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that both gave rugged landscapes and had themes like justice or redemption. Elements like these are very different compared to the Horror genre where the ideas such as upbeat or more action packed would be put aside and sticks to a more darker and grim tone. The article also explains that in many movies, like the ones I had just said, often show the characters to have specific archetypes. For example, there would the classic gunslinger who often would be the main character of the film and the antagonist could also be a gunslinger to create conflict with the protagonist. With this kind of style of film being more action-packed, it could give the audience a sense of hype or excitement. Studios such as Pixar have made western styled films in the past, most notably Toy Story which is a trilogy about the protagonist and his friends all being toys that go on little adventures and have large themes and aspects that represent a western style due to the protagonist being a cowboy.

 
  Finally, I ventured and researched my final genre which ended up to be action. Action is a very broad genre since you would typically see this in most if not all movies due to their always being a climax and could involve some sort of conflict or fighting. While I was looking for some informational articles, I stumbled upon this one article that was titled "The Action Genre in film and TV." While scrolling through this article, I read a part that gave me the exact definition of what the action genre is and it basically said that action films/shows are usually made with a hero and villain as the main focus. These two characters usually fight each other with one having very obvious good intentions while the other would have much more evil desires. A good example of this would be the film Die Hard which is about a New York cop called John McClane who is labeled as the protagonist since he was forced to stop a group of terrorists from stealing over $640 million along with taking over the Nakatomi Plaza Skyscraper. Adding on, there are some studios that popularized the action genre such as Warner Bros. who created films like Mad Max, DC Universe, etc. The action genre itself is created with the intent to entertain the audience with constant scenes of conflict or fighting to make sure the movie doesn't feel boring or repetitive with other scenes that might focus on more personal topics. Director Michael Bay was able to achieve this trait in his movie trilogy Transformers and he was known for always putting lots of explosions in those movies to really portray the action genre.

In conclusion, I really did enjoy this short research that I did to explore into different genres and I would really recommend that you guys do it too if your interested in films and their different genres. For me, it gave me lots of information about the different film companies that made certain genres very popular along with the movies that started those said genres like for example Warner Bros. and their popularization of the action genre which involved movies like Mad Max, DC Universe, etc. In the future blog posts to come, I want to dive more into the Horror genre and its subgenre to see the specific types that I can research and learn about. 

Until the next blog post,

yours truly, Nikolas Velez.

Citations

https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-horror-definition/ 

https://nofilmschool.com/western-genre 

https://nofilmschool.com/action-genre 

https://screencraft.org/blog/5-companies-that-make-original-action-adventure-films/