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.
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
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