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