DRAFT Catalog

Catalogue:

 

Focus Films:

• 1: A Nightmare On Elm Street (Craven, 1984)

The reason for me choosing A Nightmare On Elm Street as a focus film is due to its contribution to the 80’s slasher era. The 1980’s is said to be the ‘era’ of original slashers and so I found it extremely important to focus on this film in detail, as well as it starting off a multi-million dollar franchise which includes several sequels and remakes.

 

• 2: Scream (Craven, 1996)

Scream is rumoured to be the horror film that essentially ‘saved the genre’ after the late 1980’s poor output of these types of films and it is ironic as the films that are included in the ‘wrecking’ of the genre were multiple of the Nightmare On Elm Street sequels, the franchise started by Wes Craven, and this ‘saviour’ of horror is additionally by Craven and so there is a sense of irony in the film’s mass success in the 1990s so therefore it was highly important that this film is studied closely.

 

• 3: Saw (Wan, 2004)

When discussing US horror it is hard to ignore the change of audience interest in the early 2000’s where ‘body horror’ came into obsession with films such as Hostel (Roth, 2005). However, choosing Saw over many of the other films released in this time period was important as Saw also factored into the equation with psychological horror, which was becoming vastly popular at the time of the film’s release, and therefore the film fits two types of audiences who were essentially demanding for more films suited to their tastes.

Supporting Films:

 

• 4: The Ring (Verbinski, 2002)

I chose this film as a supporting film as the late 1990’s and early 2000’s saw a popular rise in the interest of East Asian horror, also referred to as ‘J-Horror’. Other films such as The Grudge (Shimizu, 2004) were also fitted in this time period and category however The Grudge has often been criticized for copying multiple elements from The Ring and so being one of the first successfully popular Japan to Hollywood remakes, it was important to my research to choose The Ring as a supporting film for points on J-Horror remakes in Hollywood.

 

 

Books

• Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s – Kim Newman
  This book was really useful as it talks a lot about the horror scene in the 1980’s and more so specifically with the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, which includes one of my focus films as well as touching apon the 1990’s horrors such as Scream (again another focus film) and the early 2000’s films like Hostel.
   
• Recreational Terror: Women and The Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing – Isabel Christina Pinedo
  This book was useful in the fact that it speaks a lot of post-modern horror, which is helpful for speaking about the Saw movies as they are often classified as ‘post-modern’. It also talks about the ‘body-horror’ obsession in the early 2000’s, which could easily link to the Saw films.
   
• Rebels & Chicks: A History of the Hollywood Teen Movie by Stephen Tropiano. Published 2006.
  This book was very interesting with its comments on late 1980’s slasher films and had some interesting facts on teenage audiences in the 1990’s.
• Chapter 3: Case Study: J-Horror and the Ring Cycle, Pages 95-101,The Media Student’s Book (4^th edition) by Gill Branston and Roy Stafford, first published 2006.
  This chapter contains some vital information that needs to be researched when referring to the ‘J-horror cycle’.
   
• Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film, Pages 43, 94-95 and 126-133, by James Blackford, Jasper Sharp, David Pirie. First published 2013.
  This book contains some interesting information that touches upon the gore of the Saw movies as well as how horror has developed since the 1980’s slashers and briefly discuss’ the J-horror element to my research.
   
• Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate:Second edition, Chapter 7: ‘I was a teenage horror fan: or, ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love Linda Blair’ by Mark Kermode, Pages 126-135. First published 2001.
  This chapter held some very interesting information about what it was like to be part of the teenage audience watching all the 1980’s slashers and horror in general.

 

Magazines

• Empire, March 2003, Mark Dinning , Page 38
  This is a good review of The Ring and how it has changed since the original.
   
• Empire, March 2003, Lesley O’Toole, Pages 93-95
  Very positive review of The Ring and how the audience reacted to its release.
   
• Empire, April 2004, Kim Newman, Page 111
  Some helpful information about A Nightmare on Elm Street and VHS releases.
   
• Empire, August 2004, Kim Newman, Page 32
  Helpful review on Ju-On: The Grudge (the Japanese original), good for a comparative review of the remake of the film.
   
• Empire, August 2004, No one Credited,  Page 70
  Somewhat helpful and relevant information to J-Horror and the US remakes (specifically mentions The Grudge).
   
• Empire, October 2004, Shari Roman, Page 56
  Relevant article on the Saw release including some words from Director Wan.
   
• Empire, December 2004, Kim Newman, Page 36
  Helpful review on Saw, multiple comments made on the context of the film.
   
• Empire, December 2004, Olly Richards, Page 42
  Good article on The Grudge to compare with the review of the original film.
   
• Empire, April 2005, RF Page 156
  Some good comments made on The Grudge remake, great to compare to comments on the original film.
   
• Empire, September, Nick De Semlyen, Page 146
  Really useful review of The Ring 2 and good comments on movie remakes.

 

Internet

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nightmare_on_Elm_Street_(franchise)
  Useful and basic information on the Nightmare franchsie.
• http://www.metacritic.com/feature/nightmare-on-elm-street-movies-ranked
  Helpful statistics on the Elm Street movies, good to use for box office stats.
   
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0329101/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus
  Good statistics on opening weekend takings across the globe.
   
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087800/
  Again, more good statistics on the box office takings of the film.
• http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/21/mark-kermode-red-riding-hood
  Some good information on Craven as a director and the Elm Street film as well as the Scream movies.
   
• http://io9.com/5666808/the-terrifying-failure-rate-of-us-remakes-of-foreign-horror-films
  Helpful context on the Hollywood remakes of all the Japanese horrors as well as some good comments.
   
• http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=saw.htm
  Helpful statistics on the Saw movies including its budget.
   
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387564/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus
  Again, more useful and factual statistics used including box office takings of the Saw film.
   
• http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=elmst.htm
  Factual information on the Elm Street franchise.
   
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087800/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus
  Again, really useful statistics on A Nightmare on Elm Street.
   
• http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=scream.htm
  Helpful information on the Scream movie statistics, like it’s budget etc.
   
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117571/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus
  Some additional data on the Scream box office takings.

Empire Magazine articles 2004-2006 & J-horror

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Review by Kim Newman (2003 remake version)
"first of a wave of pointless genre remakes"
"When writer Scott Kosar and director Marcus Nispel play variations on the original, almost setting this up as a sequel rather than a remake"
"but somehow that buzzing saw doesn't sound as scary as it used to"



The Ring Review by Mark Dinning (Empire, March 2003, Mark Dinning , Page 38 )
"Lets cut right to the chase: if you've seen the Japanese original, you can knock a star straight off the four below"
"$11 million opening... overall gross of $123 million"
"undeniably Scream inspired" - so even though its a Japanese remake of a ghost story, they've 'pinched' ideas from an American slasher.
"Age-old mythology is, after all, more believable coming from the rich historical tapestry of The Land Of The Rising Sun and the land of peanut butter and Jell-o."



The Ring by Lesley O'Toole (Empire, March 2003, Lesley O’Toole, Pages 93-95)
"took the US box office by the throat"
"The ironic slasher movie had run out of nudge-nudge and wink-wink. The modern restyling of the olde worlde ghost story, as represented by The Blair Witch Project... the fresher came in the Far East"
"not only spawned the most successful horror film franchise in the film-mad country's history, but also a TV series and graphic novel."
"Verbinski surmising he has changed '50 per cent' of the original"
"Death is the only resolution in life, so we seem to want to put it in all our movies"



Chapter: J-Horror and The Ring Cycle from The Media Student's Book
"When Dreamworks released The Ring (2002), they managed both to extend the new ghost cycle and to draw on elements from earlier 'teen horror films'.
"cycle of 'demon children' and 'possession', dating from the 1970s"
"Ringu can be seen as responding to the long cycle of American 'teen' horror with its high school 'victims' and young female 'investigator heroes'"
"the long white dress, the long straight black hair masking the face - can be traced back to traditional Japanese stories from the seventeenth century and earlier,"
"The writer Suzuki Koji draws on Japanese ideas about water as a suitable 'medium' for ghosts and spirits to inhabit."
"$40 million to spend can afford spectacular effects" - so the remake loses the grungy, low budget feel that the original has/had.
"This alone may push the American film towards a more 'action-orientated' narrative."
"'gothic' look of European and American horror"
"Built on this return to the less 'gory', more psychological horror"
"Concepts of the 'supernatural' are different in East Asian cultures, partly because the Buddhist/Shintoist religions in Japan do not have such clear concepts of 'good' and 'evil'. In western stories the narrative often climaxes with evil, forces defeated by good (godly) heroes."
"Ghosts in Japanese culture are in one sense much more 'personal'. Dead characters often come back to tell things to their families."
"The American series often have victims who are killed because they have 'sinned' in some way.. but in Ju-On there is no 'justification' for the deaths."
"Dreamworks invited Nakata Hideo to remake his own Ring 2"
"Director Kim Ji-woon's A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) has been widely admired by critics and fans in the UK and is set for yet another American remake"
"The 'feminisation' of the stories to appeal more widely to young women in the cinema audience was first deemed a success in Japan, but was equally taken up in Hollywood. The Ring and The Ring 2 both feature Naomi Watts and Jennifer Connelly leads in Dark Water. These are two rising female stars and The Grudge helped to consolidate Sarah Michelle Gellar's career."
"In America they all received PG-13 ratings and in the UK '15'. This opened up a horror market traditionally limited to 'R' or '18' rated films seen as off-putting to some female audiences."



Remade In The USA by ? (Empire, August 2004, No one Credited,  Page 70)


"(The Grudge) latest in a line of Eastern horror flicks that are being turned into lavish, mainstream frightfests by US studios"
"The fad for remaking Asian horror began two years with DreamWorks' retooling of Japanese hit Ringu, The Ring."
"and some executives specifically scour all output from Japan and South Korea for remake potential"
"Dreamworks' version of The Ring out-grossed the original in Japan. Bizarrely, it seems that even in Asia there's a market for US remakes"

Dare You See Saw by Shari Roman (Empire, October 2004, Shari Roman, Page 56)

"I wanted to make something really intense that people would remember" (James Wan, Director)
"genuinely disturbing, deeply freaky piece of work"



Hostel by ?
"Quentin Tarantino called it one of the best he'd ever read" (referring to the script) coming from the guy who filmed a guy 'getting his ear cut off' as part of a torture method.0
"sickest shit I could think of" (Eli Roth on his script)



Saved By VHS (side article) by Kim Newman (Empire, April 2004, Kim Newman, Page 111)


"A Nightmare on Elm Street became a franchise thanks to video"



Empire calls 2004 the 'Year of The Dead' with Shaun of the Dead in cinemas as well as 28 Days Later. Important as zombie films were making a comeback from the 50s/60s, but more gore is added.



Saw Review by Kim Newman (Empire, December 2004, Kim Newman, Page 36)

"Ingeniously scripted"
"boasts an intricate structure - complex flashbacks-within-flashbacks"
"ghastly claustrophobia"
"squirm-inducing moments"
"As good an all-out, non-camp horror movie as we've had lately"



The Grudge Review by RF (Empire, April 2005, RF Page 156)

"continuing the trend of remaking Japanese horror hits"

The Grudge by Olly Richards (Empire, December 2004, Olly Richards, Page 42)

"The initial reaction to hearing that Takashi Shimizu has remade his own Japanese cult hit for a Western audience is: why bother?"
"came off as merely a cheap imitation of Ringu"
"The terror is upped without relying on too many cliches"



Ju-On: The Grudge Review by Kim Newman (Empire, August 2004, Kim Newman, Page 32)          
"the random curse aspect echo The Ring but many other elements: a lank-haired female ghost, obviously, follow that influential cycle. Expect a Freddy vs Jason-type Sadako vs Kayako team-up sequel"
"ingenious bone-freezing scares as genuinely terrifying spooks appear under the sheets"



The Ring Two Review by Nick De Semlyen (Empire, September, Nick De Semlyen, Page 146)

"VHS now has yet another Ring film"
"Jaws 4 approach to sequel-making" - ironic as The Ring was proven to be successful and The Grudge remake was dubbed a 'copycat' of The Ring yet the sequel to it was described like this.
"Problem J-horror genius Nakata faces is the brilliant simplicity of his original concept. Back in 1998, the idea of a cursed videotape was chilling; in 2005, it's become slightly hackneyed"

American remakes of Asian horror

An article on io9, explains the differences in the American remakes of Asian original horrors, and the results aren't all that surprising.
The Ring (Verbinski, 2002)
"Gore Verbinski's remake stays pretty close to Hideo Nakata's original, but is faster paced and has more gruesome imagery, plus the cursed videotape has a lot more stuff on it."

Which accounts for the 'obsession' the Western world had suddenly picked up in the late 90s for more gorey imagery.

The Grudge (Shimizu, 2004)

"Director Takashi Shimizu directed both the Japanese and U.S. versions"

So here they used the exact same director to get the same effect as the original (Ju-On) was one of the scariest films out at the time in Japan and so for the Western audience to get the same effect, they bagged the same director. 

Mark Kermode on Scream and its 4th installment

"It's hard to remember the impact that Wes Craven's Scream had back in 1996; a postmodern horror pastiche which parodied the conventions of the genre while still scaring up enough full-blooded shocks to frighten even the most world-weary slasher fan. Ironically, the original Scream had its media-savvy roots in Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a brilliantly bizarre postscript to the long moribund Nightmare on Elm Street franchise which put an unexpected sting into the tail of a rash of increasingly flatulent sequels. There's no such creative spark to the equally late-in-the-day Scream 4 (2011, Eiv, 15), which comes a decade after the dreary Scream 3 and contains plenty of knowing references to fatuous sequels and "postmodern, self-aware meta-shit" alongside clunking updating acknowledgement of the rise of Facebook, Twitter, torture porn et al.
Despite rewrites by Ehren Kruger, the extent of which remain a subject of debate, Kevin Williamson's script – which sends survivor-turned-writer Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) back to the town of Woodsboro, where the Ghostface killer is reincarnated once again – seems peculiarly retrograde in terms of style, substance and surprises. Considering his role as producer of 2009's utterly unnecessary remake of Last House on the Left, is it not time for the once revolutionary Craven to stop recycling his back catalogue and take a stab at something new?"

Mark Kermode talks about Saw 3

What makes a franchise

According to metacritic, the highest grossing film in the Elm Street franchise is 'Freddy Vs. Jason' which is actually ranked as the worst film within the franchise. Freddy Vs. Jason grossed $104 million whereas the next ranking, the original Elm Street, grossed $91 million. Freddy Vs. Jason had the highest budget of the franchise (up until the 2010 remake of the original) and even still, it was only beaten by $2 million with 7 years difference between when the films were made. There must have been a lot of hype for the film as two franchises came together for a film with such a large budget and opening weekend


A Nightmare on Elm Street opening weekend box office takings :

Opening Weekend:

$1,271,000 (USA) (9 November 1984)

Freddy Vs Jason opening weekend box office takings:

$36,428,066 (USA) (17 August 2003)











"When comparing A Nightmare on Elm Street with the other top-grossing horror franchises—Child's Play, Friday the 13th, Halloween, the Hannibal Lecter series, Psycho, Saw, Scream, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—and adjusting for the 2010 inflation,^[22] A Nightmare on Elm Street is the second highest grossing horror franchise, in the United States, at approximately $583.4 million.^[3] The series is topped by Friday the 13th at $671.5 million.^[23] Closely following A Nightmare on Elm Street is the Hannibal Lecter series with $579.4 million,^[24] then Halloween with $547.8 million,^[25] Saw with $404.5 million,^[26] Scream with $398.3 million,^[27] Psycho with $370.3 million,^[28] The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with $314.6 million,^[29] and the Child's Play film series rounding out the list with approximately $199.7 million.^{[30] " (metacritic)}

Extending life of text

Scream now has TV series on MTV (director Wes Craven was very much involved in the production until his death)


Scream went on to have 3 sequels.


The Grudge went on to have 2 sequels.


A Nightmare on Elm Street grasped its own franchise with 8 follow up films/ remakes.


Saw also went on to have its own franchise with 6 sequels.


These films have also inspired many other films within the same genre; with films like Saw started an entire new subgenre of 'torture porn', however it is also argued that films like Hostel are partly responsible for this.

Focus Films

Main focus film:
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, Craven)


Other focus films:
Scream (1996, Craven)
Saw (2004, Wan)


Comparative film:
The Ring (2002, Verbinski)

Sight & Sound Review

Sight and Sound: January 1995

Review of Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Described as a "rare film"

Development

Develop on the clip of Costas explaining how he believes Saw was a hit because it was 'clever'.

Horror flicks turned from a masked villains slaughtering teenagers to masked villains slaughtering their friends (Scream). Films started having more 'twists' and shock endings rather than just the typical endings like in Halloween; the killer is dead and then at the end it is revealed oh no hang on he's still alive so we can make 5 more movies!!.

More of a threat of the killer being someone the victims knew towards the 1990s, (even shown in New Nightmare, part of the Elm Street franchise which stuck to the 'masked' villain slaughtering teenagers section of the horror genre).

This developed onto a combination of there being a mixture of masked psychos killing teenagers but along side the friend killing murderers. However films like Saw and Hostel warped this by adding a lot more gore to the picture, audiences were getting slightly bored of the same old story line coming out of the horror flicks and so with a society obsessed with violence and disgust, these types of films began a 'new wave' of 'torture porn' as it was dubbed.

Films became less of just some crazy guy hiding behind a mask, killing drunken teenagers and more twisted and warped. They began to mess with the audiences heads a lot more, just like in the ending to Saw, audiences were finding themselves more gripped into the films as film makers became more inventive. It wasn't just about seeing someone killed on screen anymore, that may have terrified the audience during 'The Exorcist' 's era but times are changing and the audiences interests were flaunting to more gruesome and gorey likings yet they don't just want to see loads of blood on screen, they want to be captivated.

But then again soon this changed as towards 2006, with a 3rd installment to the Saw series, it was clear that it wasn't going to be the last. A similar thing had happened to the Elm Street, audiences showed such a high interest in the first film, so to make more money the studio release a sequel, and then, they don't stop making them. A lot of audience members claim this ruins the films, and so films like began to lose the 'creativity' that they were created on and became more about just making money and throwing as much gore as they can at the script and hope that the audience will take to it.

Saw clip

Look closely at this clip, turning point for psychological horror, emphasis on 'twist endings'.

Coursework Title

The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of US Horror (1984-2006)

Gothic: The Dark Heart Of Film

Part One: Monstrous.

Section: Monstrus: Gore and the Gothic by James Blackford

'Gore film' is defined in this chapter as:

"a strain of horror cinema that has usually been seen as occupying the opposite end of the genre's spectrum to the more refined terrors of the gothic" Use this quote for Saw and the gore side to the film. 

"the real turning point for gore cinema came with George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), which updated the Gothic mainstays of zombies and old dark houses for troubled, modern times." Use this possibly when talking about gothic horror in US films.

"Romero had made gore central to the Gothic, but it was two Italians who would go on to make horror cinema's purest expressions of the Gothic-gore aesthetic." Use when talking about origins of gore horror.

Section: Japanese Gothic by Jasper Sharp

"After several decades of relative neglect, Japanese horror cinema resurfaced dramatically at the turn of millennium with what has been termed the 'J-Horror Boom', spearheaded internationally with the success of Nakata Hideo's Ringu (1998), and followed by such films as Nakata's Dark Water (Honogurai mizu no soko kara, 2002) and Shimizu Takashi's Ju-on (2002)." Use when talking about the US remakes of Japanese horrors.

Section: Love is a Devil: Princes of Darkness by David Pirie

"Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) has the appearance of an ogre, but his energy, demonic cruelty and humour, as well as his supernatural aspiration ("I am God")" Use this when talking about Freddy's character and his importance to the franchise. 

The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of US Horror (1984-2006)

Wes Craven Interview Quotes

"Horror films don't create fear. They release it."
This quote is relevant to the fact that society has impacted fear into us and horror films bring this fear to realisation.


"Certainly the deepest horror, as far as I'm concerned, is what happens to your body at your own hands and others"
Relevant to the hype of body-gore in the mid 2000s (Saw, Hostel etc.)


"If I were interested in reality, I'd be making documentaries"
Relevant to the topic that horror films aren't completely based on reality, they merely touch upon it.


"It's almost on a comic book level as far as the danger. And also kind of soap opera-ish." (on Scream)


"I thought they'll never be a sequel. Boy was I stupid." (on the A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels)


http://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000127/quotes

Based on true events: the 'realism' of horror

Many who watch horrors often become even more shocked and terrified by horrors when the small text comes across the screen prior/after the film reading "Based on true events" But why is that?

A Nightmare on Elm Street:

Sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome. The real life syndrome that kills many in their sleep, unexpectedly, with no cause yet discovered, that assisted the feared hype of the film.

Predominately common in Asian males.


CHICAGO — Since April, 1983, at least 130 Southeast Asian refugees have left this world in essentially the same way. They cried out in their sleep. And then they died.
( http://articles.latimes.com/1987-01-11/news/mn-3961_1_asian-refugees)
Craven explains his inspiration for the film after he read an article: "He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street."
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Nightmare-Elm-Street-Was-Inspired-By-Horrific-True-Story-67798.html








Scream:


With the rise of mobile technology, and all technology for that matter, the fear of what issues these may cause are raised within the film. As seen as well in One Missed Call (Valette, 2008), The Ring (Verbinski, 2002), technology is used by those 'villains' to torment and as part of their modus operandi.


Teenage murders have also been influenced by the films: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/18/filmnews.film


Saw:


Fear of kidnap.
There was also fear just after the film's release as it appeared that people were becoming 'inspired' by the films.
"A Salt Lake City mother turned in her son and his friend after she overheard them plotting to kidnap, torture, and murder several people. The two boys, aged 14 and 15, had detailed plans to set up games in the Saw style to teach a lesson to people they claim were harming others, including a police officer (the occupation of many Jigsaw targets) and two middle-school girls. The boys even told police they had procured cameras and camcorders to document the murders, as Jigsaw did. "
"Meanwhile, in Tennessee, two teenage girls found themselves in hot water after what they claimed was a prank gone wrong. A 52-year-old woman received a voicemail in the Saw style, stating that a friend had been hidden in her home, and the caller was about to release the toxic gas they had rigged inside. She had to decide whether to save herself or risk saving her friend. When she received the message, it came at the worst possible time—during a funeral procession. The woman was so terrified that she suffered a stroke. She recovered, but the girls were charged with phone harassment."
http://listverse.com/2013/11/04/10-movies-that-inspired-real-life-crimes/
 As shown from the article, people had taken the films as inspiration for their 'enjoyment' as it is described as 'games'

Recreational Terror: Women and The Pleasures Of Horror Film Viewing -Notes

Chapter One: 

"In the postmodern genre, violence can burst upon us even when we least expect it, even when the sun i shining, even in the safety of our own beds, ravaging the life we take for granted, staging the spectacle of the ruined body"

"Nothing is what it seems to be in postmodern horror. Take, for instance, A Nightmare On Elm Street.... In this postmodern scene, the referent or 'reality' is gone, and she (protagonist) is caught within a closed system from which there is no exit. It is thus that the postemodern horror genre operates on the principle of undecidability."

"The postmodern horror film repeatedly blurs the boundary between subjective and objective representation by violating the conventional cinematic codes that distinguish them. This is one reason that the dream-coded-as-reality occupies a privileged position within the postmodern horror genre. Another is its close association with the unconscious and the irrational"

"Indeed, mental doors are ripped off their hinges in A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film in which teenagers who dream about Freddy Krueger can be killed by him in their dreams. Nancy pops caffeine pills and coffee by the potful because she is 'into survival'. Ultimately, she survives because she rejects the rational belief that dreams are not real and instead puts her faith in an irrational premise that collapses dream and reality"

"Cops and psychiatrists (descendants of the soldiers and scientists of classical horror) are largely absent from or ineffectual in the postmodern genre, despite the latter's insistence on the use of force. When experts are called in, they are not likely to be effective." -Saw

"In the classical horror film, the monster is an irrational other who precipitates violence and transgresses the law. It is evil because it threatens the social order; the suppression of the unleashed menace is a priority for the agents of order"

"Horror is an exercise in recreational terror, a stimulation of danger not unlike a roller coaster ride. Like the latter, people in a confined space are kept off-balance through the use of suspense and precipitous surprises achieved by alternating between seeing what lies ahead and being in the dark"

"The horror film is an exquisite exercise in coping with the terrors of everyday life"

(Dont go in there) "such remarks serve several functions: 1) on the simplest level, they evoke the tension-breaking laughter that steers us away from being terrorized. 2) they constitute attempts to master the situation by taking an authoritative stance; the speaker indicates that s/he would never be so foolish as to do that. 3) as Tudor (1989, 112) points out, the competent audience member knows that the warning is futile but nevertheless issues is to express her or his own ambivalence about the dangers of risk-taking. This entails a splitting of the ambivalence, whereby the narrative character performs the dangerous activity  while the audience member remains secure, yet vicariously enjoys the danger. 4) the collective response serves as a reminder that "you are not alone", "it's only a movie", and thus serves to reanchor the viewer near the shores of reality. 5) these remarks serve as forms of interaction with other members of the audience, who monitor each others responses and react to them in turn, with laughter or remarks of their own."

"Insider knowledge is especially high in serial films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The serial audience shares the pleasure of privileged information about Michael, Jason and Freddy, the respective killers."

" as members of a competent audience, we can bask in the knowledge that we would not act as foolishly as the killer's victims; we would know what to do. Insider knowledge provides a measure of security. If we understand it, if we have some idea of what to expect, it becomes less menacing and we can brave it."

Chapter Two:

 " unlike classical horror films, which tell and imply but show very little of the destruction wrought upon the human body, the postmodern horror film is obsessed with the wet death, intent on imaging the mutilation and destruction of the body. The genre's fascination with the spectacle of the ruined body necessitates  its privileging of the act of showing (Brophy 1986, 8). But the act of showing the ruined body is only half the story; the other half is the act of concealing, of producing a partial vision. The dialectic between seeing and not-seeing is so crucial to the production of recreational terror that it operates not only at the level of the film but also at the level of the audience and at the institutional intersection between the two known as the special-effects magazine"
"The realism of special-effects violence, together with audience knowledge that the violence is stimulated, operate in tandem to produce a suspension of disbelief"
"Fan magazines have emerged  to sate this thirst. Pro zines, mainstream commercial publications such as Fangoria (1979- ) or Cinefantastique (1970- ), and fanzines, amateur publications like Gore Gazette are devoted to a discussion of "how they do it". "
"This obsession with the body suggests a connection between horror and pornography, one critics have noted before (Williams, 1989b, Clover, 1992)."
"The link between hard-core pornography and hard-core horror or the gore film is captured in the term "carnography" (Gehr 1990, 58), which uses the carnality of both genres as a bridge. It is this very carnality that relegates hard core and gore to the status of disreputable genres. As Richard Dyer points out about porn,  both are disreputable genres because they engage the viewer's body (1985, 27), elicit physical responses such as fear, disgust, and arousal in indeterminate combinations, and thereby privilege the degraded half of the mind-body split."

Chapter Three:  
"the slasher narrative can be summarized as follows: A masked or hidden (largely offscreen) psychotic male propelled by psycho sexual fury stalks and kills a sizable number of young women and men with a high level of violence" ( drawed from Clover and Dikas ideas on slashers)
"The slasher film violates the taboo against women wielding violence to protect themselves by staging a scene in which she is forced to choose between killing and dying."

Nightmare Movies: Horror on screen since the 1960s - Kim Newman

"Thanks to Tom Savini's developments in special effects make-up for Dawn Of The Dead, the genre made a come-back in the early 1980s"

Romero has been blamed in Newman's book for causing a downhill in horror with the sequel to Creepshow (Creepshow 2, 1987).

Gore movie declined when major productions like The Wild Bunch and Taxi Driver as they gave films like Bloodthirsty and The Wizard Of Gore some competition in the 'explicit violence' field (with rising stars and directors as part of the competition too).

"The early 1980s did see the mobilization of a pro-censorship lobby against the massacre movie. Friday the 13th slipped past the MPAA ratings board with its Tom Savini-engineered decapitations intact. Friday the 13th Part 2 originally contained a similar batch of atrocities created by Carl Fullerton, but had to be drastically pruned before its release, and most of the later entries in the series are almost tame in their butchery."

^ This shows how the collapse of the studio system in Hollywood in the 1970s led to poorly executed horror in the 1970s-80s where nearly no rules applied on the explicitness of the gore. Then as the film output of Hollywood began to gain better quality, standards and regulations were put in place leading to many films having to cut back on gore (including Friday the 13th) and then this began to relax toward the 90s, perhaps the horror films in the 90s created the perfect amount of balance, leading to their success??
"An ultimate incarnation of instruction-through-torture is John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, (Tobin Bell) of the Saw franchise, a terminally ill genius who constructs elaborate mechanical traps for victims who have shown disregard for their own or others' lives...Jigsaw's contraptions can be escaped at the cost of pain (and likely disfigurement) if the subject really wants to live. Later entries in the series blur things as less scrupulous disciples take over Jigsaw's work- usually to be punished from beyond the grave by a weirdly fastidious master who is instrumental in dozens of deaths but professes to despise murderers"
"The supernaturally inclined Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street films are oddly down to earth: proletarian murders of upper-middle-class youth are knitted up in ichnographically déclassé items like workman's overalls, hockey masks, stripy jerseys and porkpie hats"
"The buzzword in 1980s horror was 'franchise'... a sequel is the closest the movie can come to a sure thing. As the psycho-slasher of Halloween and Friday the 13th modified into Nightmare On Elm Street, it seemed the element of risk was eliminated from the equation."
^ The fear of risk maybe is due to the collapse of Hollywood in the 1970s and so to reduce the risk of there being another problem in Hollywood just as it was repairing itself, filmmakers built on what was already popular to have a 'guarantee'.
"Robert Englund reprised his schtick (surreal dream manipulations, one-liners, flourishes of finger-knives) through Freddy's Revenge, A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warrior, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, the TV show Freddy's Nightmares, A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Child, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, a punch line cameo in Jason Goes To Hell, past the side-track of Wes Craven's New Nightmare to the dead end of Freddy vs Jason. In the process, Freddy became less frightening."
"If not simply killing teenagers or pursuing shifting goals like trying to possess a new host, these bogeymen deliver harsh, Struwwelpeter-like moral lessons on the theme of be careful what you wish for"
"Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a rare film to come honestly by a possessory credit, proposes the existence of an ur-monster: an ancient, evil entity which preys on the innocent... but escapes to do further harm when the story is weakened by, for instance, a string of decreasingly effective sequels."
"Given the complicated mix of in-jokery, philosophy and by-now familiar Freddyisms, the major achievement is that Craven manages to make things scary again. Reprising Elm Street business (the phone sprouting, the girl gutted in mid-air, he stairs that become a mire), Craven does it more creepily the second time round. From unnerving touches like the earthquake which cracks the wall of Langenkamp's house, mimicking the scratches  of a Freddy glove, to major sequences like a sleep-walking child wandering into a heavy freeway traffic, Craven re-affirms his Nightmare slyly critiques the watering-down of '80s horror and engages debate with anti-horror factions."
"Ditching embarrassing frills like MOR metal music and bad one-liners, New Nightmare isn't even an Elm Street sequel, but an essay in metafiction a step beyond Ed Wood or Gods and Monsters. It ought to have buried its franchise and, indeed, the whole franchise system. As it turned out, mid-level box office relegated New Nightmare to the status of footnote... Craven would return to post-modernism in an easier-to-follow form and the face of horror would change, again"
(Opening scene in Scream) " Again, the trick isn't the self-awareness but the scariness. for all its banter, the scene is conceptually upsetting and efficiently terrifying. As a former editor, Craven times a shock the way great comedians can get laughs from even a poor joke. The first appearance of the costumed killer (even more of a caricature bogeyman than Michael Myers) elicited real screams from Scream's original audiences."
"Scream 2 understands the difference between a hit which inspires a lone sequel and an on-going cash-flow."
"Scream was defining horror film for a generation- not least because it was the first slasher movie to make extensive use of the most significant 1990s gadget, the mobile phone. Previously, prank callers were anchored to landlines"
"The Illinois and Ohio kids of Halloween and A Nightmare On Elm Street are Archie-type archetypes who could, with a few fashion modifications, come from any decade; the California teens of Scream are not just cine-literate, but post-ironically unfeeling as they treat real tragedy (or the nightly news) as if it were a trivial rerun of Terror Train. After several teenagers are murdered, idiots run around school dressed as the killer.. When Himbry is gutted and hung from the goal posts on the football fields, a horde of kids rushes off excitedly to get a look before the corpse is taken down - leaving only diehards involved in the plot around for the bloody finale."
"From the mid-1980s to the turn of the millennium, the classical ghost story was out of fashion. Ghosts frighten or disturb those they haunt. Occasionally, they persecute their murderers (or their murderers' descendants), coerce the living into clearing up unfinished business, or semi-benevolently watch over them to death. they rarely kill people, except by scaring them to death. And '80s/'90s horror was all about killing people, usually by mangling them too."
"In the '90s, audiences were more afraid of serial killers than spooks."
  Asian/US remakes: "Long-haired, pale-faced, black-eyed lady spooks dressed in white have long been a staple of Japanese cinema."
"These tragic, baleful wraiths are usually neglected or murdered wives, lingering where they died, pestering men who did them wrong. The traditional Japanese ghost story is melancholy rather than terrifying, and inherently conservative."
"Hideo Nakata's Ringu/Ring launched a new J-Hora boom. Gore was out; chills were in. The monster was a traditional yurei, but embodied in a technology associated with modern Japan's electronics industry."
"Verbinski winds up with a near-exact copy of Ringu's climax . Perhaps mindful of retaining a teen-friendly rating."
"The Ringu cycle was not the only Japanese ghost franchise. Takashi Shimizu's  modest direct-to-video release Ju-On earned a similarly scaled sequel, Ju-On 2, but a third film, also entitled Ju-On, relaunched the series as a cinema property. This prompted not only another Ju-On 2 but an 'American remake' The Grudge, set in Japan and carrying over the key ghosts from the original series to haunt American names."
"The Blair Witch Project was accused of excessive hype - through putting up a website and giving interviews about the unorthodox production technique is hardly on a par with Mcdonalds tie-in stick figures or Pokémon cards. Some audiences just didn't get it: the improve performances, deliberately awkward camerawork and sometimes hard-to-make-out soundtrack struck naysayers as offputtingly amateurish... When The Blair Witch Project became a hit, a lot of people who saw it hated it because it didn't conform to their idea of a 'proper movie'."
" Eli Roth's Hostel - which was, like it or not, the most significant horror film of 2005"
"Torture wasn't a recent invention in the cinema of physical horror. At the climax of Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat, Bela Lugosi ties the thoroughly evil Boris Karloff to a restraint frame by his wrists, strips him to the waist and announces that he intends to peel the skin from his body, bit by bit."
"Hostel applies this not to the sexual arena usual in the horror film - there are women victims but most of the featured torture, which has a homophobe edge, is man-on-man - but to international relations. In an era of Rendition, in which foreigners should worry about winding up at the mercy of Americans, Hostel is all about American's fear of the rest of the world"
"An undertone of all this is a difference between films of the 1970s and films of the 2000s:the horror movies of the American Nightmare suggested there was something wrong with society, but the message of the twenty-first century is that Other People are Shit."
"While Hostel was performing at the box office, news items ran about a hunger strike among detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which American military authorities broke by strapping recalcitrant prisoners into 'restraint chairs' for force-feeding. The chairs were manufactured in his garage by Iowan Sheriff Tom Hogan, who developed the design fifteen years earlier to deal with troublesome arrestees, and marketed them to jails, psychiatric hospitals and the US government. The original purpose was to prevent violent prisoners doing harm to peace officers or themselves. Technically, someone on hunger strike is attempting suicide, so it can be argued that force-feeding them is an act of mercy. It can also be called torture. These chairs are the key image of the cycle of films that came to be labelled 'torture porn'."
"Young girls are exclusively the targets in a sub-genre of abduction-restraint-and-torture"
"In contrast with other screen torturers, John Kramer (Tobin Bell) of the Saw series is almost a hero. Technically speaking, he's not quite a murderer. he puts his primary victims in situations where they are in dire danger but can escape by taking extreme (always painful) action. His traps do often involve secondary victims, when one person's escape is attainable only at the cost of another's life."
"Though Jigsaw is the most prominent franchise fiend of his generation, the pale, distinctive, soft-spoken Bell has only a tiny role in the first Saw. Jigsaw's traps... are those of an industrial gothic TV game-show host, but he is a man on a mission.. James Wan's Saw is significantly influenced by the strangers-wake-up-in-a-room cycle of Cube and the punishment-fits-the-crime murder devices in Se7en, but has its own tricks. The economic downturn underlies the Saw series, which even has footnotes about the decline of American craftsmanship: in Saw V, a copycat is suspected not only because his inescapable death-trap fails to meet Jigsaw's ethical standards but uses inferior material."

Costas Mandylor (Dt.Hoffman) in the Saw Franchise interview

Costas kindly answered a few questions for me at a convention he attended recently:

Costas Mandylor

A question to ask the second 'villain' (after Jigsaw) of the Saw Franchise (Saw III-VII)

Costas Mandylor plays Detective Hoffman, the accomplice to Jigsaw's work who carries on his legacy (or so he believes as it is revealed in VII that the Doctor Gordon in I was really carrying on Jigsaw's work all along)

QUESTION: How do you far do you agree the SAW franchise contributed to 'saving' US horror?

Published results/video to be uploaded soon.

Janghwa, Hongreyeon: A Tale Of Two Sisters (Jee-Woon,2003) and (Later) Re-made version The Uninvited (Guard,2009) Trailers

Janghwa, Hongreyeon: A Tale Of Two Sisters (South Korean):

The Uninvited (US): 

Ju-on: The Grudge (Shimizu,2002) and The Grudge (Shimizu,2004) Trailer

 Ju-On: The Grudge (Japan): 

The Grudge (US):

The Ring (Verbinski,2002) and Ringu (Nakata,1998) Trailers

The Ring (US) : 

Ringu (Japan) : 

Freddy Vs. Jason (Yu,2003) Trailer

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven,1994) Trailer

Freddy's Dead: New Nightmare (Talalay,1991) Trailer

Saw III (Bousman, 2006) Trailer (Might not reference)

Saw II (Bousman,2005) Trailer

Saw (Wan, 2004) Trailer

Scream III (Craven,2000) Trailer

Scream II (Craven,1997) Trailer

Scream (Craven,1996) Trailer

Beginning Thoughts

How US Horror (1990-2005) essentially saved the Horror genre.


Films to possibly use:

• The Scream Trilogy (1996, 1997, 2000)
• Saw I (2004)/ Saw II (2005)
• Freddy's Dead: New Nightmare (1991)
• Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
• Freddy Vs Jason (2003)
• American/Asian Remakes : The Ring etc.

Mention possibly Saw III in 2006 as completing the Saw trilogy (insert Costas Mandylor's opinion on how Saw had a particular impact on the universal horror genre)

DEFINITELY FOCUS ON SCREAM

Use the Saw films (within the period)

Use Freddy films

Decide between US/ASIA remake or another one? LOOK INTO THIS MORE.

Explain how horror is said to be killed by Wes Craven with Nightmare On Elm Street, but he 'revived' it and fixed his mistake with Scream, yet still went on to Direct/Write New Nightmare & Wes craven's New Nightmare, being the only ones he had full involvement with since the original in 1987, did he not learn his mistake???