- Kaminsky- That weapons such as knives, are a personal extension of our limbs thus are favourable in preference to guns, due to the killers performance of more personal and intimate deaths.
- Wes Craven- The conduction of a murder within a safe environment, promotes more fear into the audience for example the home. Moreover, the youth that star within the film have inherited parental problems, hence are being punished for their parents misdemeanours.
- Carol Clover- That the murderers themselves are driven by an issue associated with their childhood or alternatively are sexually disturbed at present. This ties with the female killers being renowned for their gender confusion. The motivation itself can either be due to the killers sadism (joy of inflicting pain on others) and/or masochism (joy of inflicting pains on themselves). Additionally, the confining walls that the victims see as safe to keep the killers out, transforms into a prison trapping them in a restricted area with aforesaid killers.
- Stephen Prince- "Like other genre movies, any given horror film will convey synchronic association, ideological and social messages that are part of a certain period or historical moment. One can analyse films in terms of these periods or moments, much like they can do with gangster movies. But unlike this genre, horror also goes deeper, to explore more fundamental questions about the nature of human existence, and other questions that, in some profound ways, go beyond culture and society as they are organised in any given form or period"- He sees horror as an elite genre that includes concepts of "real life" aspects.
- Noel Carroll- Within his essay the "Philosophy of Horror" he created a number of phases included within the horror genre. The initial was the "Onset Phase"-where the disorder is created such as the monster; followed by the "Discovery Phase"- characters of story inevitably discover the disorder; then culminates to the "Disruption Phase"- characters thus destroy the source of disorder in order to restore the normality.
- Todorov- Alternatively, he created five stages towards the horror narrative: the initial equilibrium stage where there is normality or the situation is neutral; then an event disrupts the equilibrium this can be an event or a character or an action; thus main protagonist necessarily recognises the disruption which can happen over time or at one particular moment; therefore they attempt to rectify the situation trying to change what has happened and transform said disruption; due to this equilibrium is restored however due to the transfiguration of that are either good or bad etc, there are differences to the original equilibrium.
- Propp- Kladimir Propp studies the Russian tales of folk etc and concluded that the plots are directed by certain types of characters, from these you can produce 31 possible stages within a narrative shaped by the following 7 roles that any character assumes: the villain who inevitably struggles with the hero; the donor who prepares the hero with a magic or helpful agent; the helper who assists and transfigures the hero; the princess which is the ultimate goal; the dispatcher who sends the hero off; the hero who departs on appropriate search and finally the false hero who claims and appears as the hero yet isn't.
- Claude Levi- Strauss- in order to make sense of the world the people and events that occur are of binary opposites with all narratives transfixed around this conflict e.g good vs evil, peace vs war, protagonist vs antagonist, humanity vs technology, ignorance vs wisdom, domestic vs foreign/ alien.
Horror Micro Features as Narrative Conventions
- Generate strong emotions of shock, fear and revulsion
- Point of View camera shots
- Dark chiaroscuro lighting
- Jump cuts
Horror Characters as Narrative Conventions
- The Monster
"Unnatural relative to a cultures conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it... monsters are in a certain sense challenges to the foundations of cultures way of thinking"- Carrol 1990:34
"It is the idea of 'Otherness' which is the key to defining the horrific element of the monster"- Hutchings 2004:102
"Simply being dangerous is not in itself enough to bestow monster status... these monsters should not only be dangerous but 'impure' or 'unnatural' as well"- Hutchings 2004: 34-5
- The Final Girl- prior to the slasher genre it was rare to discover a female protagonist, yet the final girl is distinguished from other teenage girls due to her unessential need to be rescued by a male counterpart. Her masculine qualities of watchfulness and aggression combined with her male sounding name, provides her with conventionally male abilities of knowledge. Since she doesn't require reliance on a male hero to save her, she is routinely placed within situations where she independently saves herself: she is also active yet sexually inexperienced, prioritising knowledge and innocence. This theory was culminated by Carol J Clover.
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