Within the typical genre of a horror movie, there are many common generic conventions that are included in order to interest the audience and to create suspense.

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Sophie Ottewell                Generic conventions of a horror movie

Within the typical genre of a horror movie, there are many common generic conventions that are included in order to interest the audience and to create ‘suspense.’ The main used conventions are as follows:

  • Usually, horror movies are set at night or in the dark as this is usually when people feel the most insecure which relates to the audiences real life

  • Horror movies almost always contain a scene that makes the audience jump. The audience are intrigued by this as it makes them feel tense, as the situation builds up but therefore encourages the audience to read on

  • Some typical ‘slasher’ movies may contain some sort of mystery which leads the audience to question who is or are the potential ‘villains’ within the plot. This is used to interest the audience, and to encourage them to watch until the end to find out who caused all of the horror within the story.

  • Every horror movie needs to contain a victim and a villain. Villains can be anything from monsters, aliens, vampires, or just your average everyday people. Although, usually the victims within a story are women as they are known to be some of the most vulnerable people. This adds success to horror movies as young women watching the movie are going to be encouraged to find the movie scarier as they may imagine themselves to be in the same situation.
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  • Modern horror movies contain many special effects in order to make the movie more realistic to the human eye, and therefore making it again scarier for the audience to watch as they picture themselves within the same situation

  • Some horror movies however, leave some of the special effects to the imagination. For example, the movie ‘The human centipede’ displays across the idea to the reader of a messed up surgeon having a sick fantasy of creating a human centipede. The actual creation of this isn’t shown within the movie and is infact left to the audience’s imagination. This ...

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