Nightmare On Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 2010 American slasher film directed by Samuel Bayer, and written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer. The film stars Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker and Kellan Lutz. This film is a remake of Wes Craven's 1984 film of the same name and is the ninth Nightmare film in total. Produced by Michael Bay and Platinum Dunes, it is designed to reboot the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. This film had two distributors, Warner Bros and New Line Cinema.

At the begging of the film Kris Fowles goes to the Springwood Diner to meet with her boyfriend, Dean Russell who falls asleep at the table and in his nightmare meets a man covered in burn scars, wearing a red and green sweater, a fedora and a clawed glove on his hand. The burned man cuts Dean's throat in the dream, but in reality it appears that Dean is cutting his own throat. At deans funeral Kris discovers a photo when the two were younger but cannot remember ever meeting him before. She had then told her friend Nancy (final girl of the movie) of this discovery she then discovers that there was a preschool that all the teenagers that are being affected by these dreams attended and were all in the same year group. Nancy’s mother then reveals to Nancy that this man in their dreams “Freddy Kruger”  use to be the caretaker at their preschool and use to love the children a little too much. He use to take each child one by one down to his basement which the school use to let him live in. He would touch the children in an inappropriate way and would cut them with gardening utensil such as a trowel.  The parents found out about this behaviour and wanted there revenge so they burnt him alive one evening. Many years had passed and all the children are now teenagers when Freddy decided to get his own revenge to kill his ex-students.  He is a serial-killer who wields a glove with four blades embedded in the fingers and kills the students in their dreams, resulting in their real death in reality. Nancy decides to stand up to Freddy and kills him in his dream world. Thinking that it’s a happy ending Nancy no longer has these dreams but in the last scene of the movie Freddy turns his anger to the parents and now starts to kill them in their sleep.

This movie challenges Todorov’s theory as the beginning scene is someone getting murdered in their dream.  The film never really has an equilibrium as it’s a sequence of different murder’s all committed by the serial killer Freddy Kruger. The only time that it slightly follows Todorov’s theory is when the movie has a flash back to their childhood and everything is fine until it reveals that Freddy molesters the children.

When it comes to audience expectation for Slasher movies it is almost entirely made up of adolescents. There has been much speculation on why many teenagers are drawn to the genre. Critics of the genre argue that it is the frequent violence, nudity and sex that attract a teenage audience. Other theorists argue that it’s a deeper logic, into adolescent psychology. Because violent films are frowned upon by cinema critics and authority figures, the teenagers desire to rebel and view these movies is what drives the audience to watch violent films. As nightmare on elm street 2010 version is a remake of the original film Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984. This is a very famous film with a very iconic villain, Freddy Kruger. Because this film was such a success a lot of the general public have seen the movie so will know what to expect from the remake.  There is a cliff hanger at the end of this movie ready for a sequel, which were made after the 1984 film.  

To create a good horror film, there needs to be good setting, light, music and characters to get the full potential of scaring the audience. In this film the setting is a suburban town with perfect houses and people; the perfect American life style. By making this setting into a horror film is a good idea because the audience don’t expect what’s to come and it defeats the conventions of a suburban lifestyle. In this film as the murders are committed in their dreams it is always generally night time. Natural night lit sky is common for horror films as this is when people feel most vulnerable. The music is usually what makes the movie very tense as it’s usually eerie and is a very subtle indicator that something is going to happen.  Because this movie has been out for a while the general public have learnt Freddy Kruger as a house hold name as he is such a big character in the horror genre, making this film very popular.

As this movie is a slasher film, it fits in the 1980s category of horror history. As the original film was brought out in the 1980s it’s no surprise that it followed this trend of slasher as this kind of genre was the best rating at the time as it was most popular.

Freddy Kruger is the main character in this film as he is the villain and the whole story line is based around him and why he became a serial killer. I think that Kruger was so famous because of his iconic glove that he always wore, attached to the glove were 4 long sharp blades. You could tell who had been killed by him as this was the only weapon he would use and would leave the blade marks on the body. Another way to recognise Freddy is because of his red and green stripped jumper that was a part of his iconography.  The main hero in this film was a girl called Nancy who was on Freddy’s to kill list as she attended this preschool. She was the final girl of this movie as she figured out how to kill him and that it was something to with sleep. She also figured out that it was something to do with their past and tried to worn her fellow peers.

In conclusion I would say that this is a very successful movie because of the interesting story line and how it is almost like a murder mystery, apart from all the brutal murders which make it a slasher horror movie. Freddy Kruger is a true iconic character for horror, renowned for interesting way of killing and also the props as part of his iconography. It follows all the techniques of a horror, slow paced at the begging, getting to know the characters and narrative with a huge climax at the end along with a final girl character.

analysis of trailer- House Of Wax

analysis of trailer- sixth sense

analysis of trailer-The Apperation

HISTORY OF A HORROR CHARACTER

PINHEAD

Pinhead is a fictional character from the Hellraiser series. Created by Clive Barker and portrayed by Doug Bradley, Pinhead is a prominent figure in the series, mostly featured as the main antagonist. Pinhead is the leader of the Cenobites, formerly human creatures from an extradimensional realm who travel to Earth through the Lament Configuration, and harvest human souls. Depicted as intelligent and articulate, the character was deliberately presented as a departure from the mute or wise-cracking 1980s horror movie villains who preceded him, being based more on Count Dracula.



german expression

German Expressionism is a term used to represent the number of creative movements that began in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin, during the 1920s. These developments in Germany were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central European culture in fields such as architecture, painting and cinema. The German Expressionist movement was largely confined to Germany due to the isolation the country experienced during WWI.

Various European cultures of the 1920s embraced an ethic of change, and a willingness to look to the future by experimenting with bold, new ideas and artistic styles. The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal. These are all subject topics that people of this time era can relate to as a lot people suffered with these problems during the 1920’s when WWII was commencing.

The extreme realism of Expressionism was short-lived, fading away after only after a few years. However, the themes of Expressionism were integrated into later films of the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in an artistic control over the placement of scenery and light to enhance the mood of a film. This genre of film making was brought to the United States when the Nazis gained power and a number of German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood. These German directors found U.S. movie studios willing to embrace them, and several German directors and cameramen flourished there, producing a repertoire of Hollywood films that had a profound effect on the film industry.

Two genres that were especially influenced by the German Expressionism are horror film and film noir. German silent cinema was far ahead of cinema in Hollywood. As well as the direct influence of film makers who moved from Germany to Hollywood, developments in style and technique which were developed through Expressionism in Germany impressed contemporary film makers from elsewhere and were incorporated into their work and so into the body of international cinema from the 1930s onward.

Fritz Lang

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known emigrants from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. His most famous films are the ground breaking ‘Metropolis’ which was the world's most expensive silent film at the time of it’s release. He also produced M, made before he moved to the United States, his iconic precursor to the film noir genre.

Early in his career, after the move from Austria to the Decla Company in Berlin in 1917, Lang worked out how studio sets and lighting could be used to create an atmosphere that would ensnare the audience in a world of fantasy. His writing was brief, as Lang soon started to work as a director at a German film studio, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building.

 

history of horror

Hammer Horror

Launched in 1934, Hammer's first production was “The Public Life of Henry the Ninth” and, following a period of inactivity during WW2, the first picture from the newly incorporated Hammer Film Productions Ltd. was 1949's “Dr. Morelle: The Case of the Missing Heiress.” The new company's first colour film was “The Men of Sherwood Forest” in 1954, and in 1955 the success of “The Quatermass Xperiment” led to Hammer's move into horror films including “The Curse of Frankenstein” in 1957 and “Dracula” in 1958.

A hugely successful run of Gothic monster movies cemented the company's reputation as 'Hammer House of Horror', and deals with Universal Studios and Columbia kept the production base at Bray Studios busy with an incredible volume of films produced during this period.

 Half-way through the 1960s deals were struck with Seven Arts and Twentieth Century Fox, which led to further horror classics including “The Plague Of The Zombies”, “Quatermass And The Pit”, and “The Devil Rides Out” in addition to successful adventure films including One Million Years B.C. The 1960s also saw Hammer's first move into television production with Journey to the Unknown and in 1968 the company received the Queen's Award for Industry. The 1970s saw a clutch of vampire movies and some lucrative movie spin-offs from British sitcoms. To The Devil a Daughter was the last Hammer horror feature in 1976, but production continued into the 1980s with two influential and well-loved TV anthology series: Hammer House of Horror and Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.

"Video nasty"

"Video nasty" was a colloquial term coined in the United Kingdom by 1982[1] which originally applied to a number of films distributed on video cassette that were criticized for their violent content by the press, commentators such as Mary Whitehouse, and various religious organizations. While violence in films released to cinemas had received attention from an official body, the British Board of Film Censorship, for many years, the lack of a regulatory system for video sales combined with the claim that any film could fall into children's hands led to public debate. Many of these "video nasties" were low-budget horror films produced in Italy and the United States. The furore created by the response to video nasties led to the introduction of the Video Recordings Act 1984 which imposed a stricter code of censorship on videos than was required for cinema release. Several major studio productions ended up being banned on video, falling within the scope of legislation designed to control the distribution of video nasties.

2000s

 The combination of graphic violence and sexually suggestive imagery in some films has been labelled "torture porn" or "gorenography." In films such as Braindead, the over-the-top gore is intentionally exploited to create a comedic tone. This genre of this type of horror film is a combination of extreme violence, gore, manipulation and pornography. This had become very popular in the naughties as gorenography had appeared in a lot more films. This has become popular because the special effects are a lot more realistic and is a lot easier to create different visual amusements. Also a lot more things are more acceptable to show on television hence the use “pornography.”

At the beginning of the 21st century, September 11th, 2001 occurred. The events of that day changed global perceptions of what is frightening, and set the cultural agenda for the following years. The film industry, already facing a recession, felt very hard hit as film-makers struggled to come to terms with what was now acceptable to the viewing public. Anyone trying to sell a horror film in the autumn of 2001 got rebuffed. "Everybody wanted to make the warm fuzzy movies."(LA Times 30/10/05) There were even calls to ban horror movies in the name of world peace. But, by 2005, the horror genre was as popular as ever. Horror films routinely topped the box office, yielding an above-average gross on below-average costs. It seems that audiences wanted a good, group scare as a form of escapism, just as their great-grandparents chose Universal horror offerings to escape the miseries of the Depression and encroaching world war in the 1930s.

The monsters have had to change, however. Gone were the lone psychopaths of the 1990s, far too reminiscent of media portrayals of bin Laden, the madman in his cave. As the shock and awe of twenty first century warfare spread across TV screens, cinematic horror had to offer an alternative, whilst still tapping into the prevailing cultural mood.

Let the right one in- Let the Right One In is a 2008 Swedish romantic horror film directed by Tomas Alfredson. Based on the 2004 novel of the same title by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who also wrote the screenplay. The film is about a young boy called Oskar, a bullied 12-year old, dreams of revenge. He falls in love with Eli, a peculiar girl. She can't stand the sun or food and to come into a room she needs to be invited. Eli gives Oskar the strength to hit back but when he realizes that Eli needs to drink other people's blood to live he's faced with a choice. How much can love forgive? Set in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg in 1982.

Friday the 13^th- Friday the 13th is a 2009 American slasher film directed by Marcus Nispel and written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift. It is a reboot of the Friday the 13th film series, which began in 1980 and the twelfth Friday the 13th film in total. Young friends Whitney, Mike, Richie, Amanda, and Wade end up missing in the woods near the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake (made famous by the original 1980 film), after allowing their curiosity to get the better of them and visiting the site where a physcopathic killer resides. Meanwhile the characterTrent invites friends Jenna, Bree, Chewie, Chelsea, Lawrence and Nolan to his cabin on the lake for a weekend of sex, booze, and drugs. However their seemingly fun weekend soon escalates into a nightmare after lone traveller Clay shows up looking for his missing sister Whitney and the young adults soon find themselves face to face with evil reborn, reimagined, and rebooted, and his name is Jason Vorhees.

1990s

In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued many of the themes from the 1980s. The slasher films A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween and Child's Play all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which met with varied amounts of success at the box office.

By the end of the 1980s horror had become so reliant on gross-out gore and buckets of liquid latex that it seemed to have lost its power to do anything more than shock and then amuse. As a reaction to the gory scenes of the 1980s, and an attempt to create "horror for grown-ups", the 1990s presented monsters that were far more mundane. Ever since Anthony Perkins revealed Norman Bates's taxidermy collection in Psycho (1960) audiences have proven susceptible to the charms of mild-mannered horror, the slightly stammering serial killer. Such as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of The Lambs.

New Nightmare, In the Mouth of Madness (1995), The Dark Half (1993), and Candyman (1992), were part of a mini-movement of self-reflexive or metafictional horror films. Each film touched upon the relationship between fictional horror and real-world horror. Candyman, for example, examined the link between an invented urban legend and the realistic horror of the racism that produced its villain. In the Mouth of Madness took a more literal approach, as its protagonist actually hopped from the real world into a novel created by the madman he was hired to track down. This reflective style became more over and ironic with the arrival of Scream (1996). 

Silence of the lambs 1991-The Silence of the Lambs is a 1991 American thriller film that blends elements of the crime and horror genres.[2] It was directed by Jonathan Demme and stars Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Ted Levine, and Scott Glenn. It is based on the 1988 novel of the same name by Thomas Harris, his second to feature Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer. A Young FBI agent Clarice Starling is an assigned to help find a missing woman to save her from a psychopathic serial killer who skins his victims. Clarice attempts to gain a better insight into the twisted mind of the killer by talking to another psychopath Hannibal Lecter, who used to be a respected psychiatrist. FBI agent Jack Crawford believes that Lecter, who is also a very powerful and clever mind manipulator, has the answers to their questions and can help locate the killer. However, Clarice must first gain Lecter's confidence before the inmate will give away any information.

Candyman 1992- Candyman is a 1992 American horror film starring Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd and Xander Berkeley. It was directed by Bernard Rose and is based on the short story "The Forbidden" by Clive Barker. Helen Lyle is a student who decides to write an assumption about local legends and myths. She visits a part of the town, where she learns about the legend of the Candyman, a one-armed man who appears when you say his name five times, in front of a mirror. Of course, Helen doesn't believe all the myths, but the people of the area are really afraid. When she ignores their warnings and begins her investigation in the places that he is rumoured to appear, a series of horrible murders begins. Which leads her to question could the legend be true?

1980s

In the 1980s slasher films were created and were the latest craze in the horror genre. A slasher film is a sub genre of horror film, and at times thriller, typically involving a mysterious psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims usually in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a knife or axe. Although the term "slasher" may be used as a generic term for any horror movie involving graphic acts of murder, the slasher as a genre has its own set of characteristics which set it apart from related genres like the splatter film.

The shining- 1980 The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with novelist Diane Johnson, and starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, and Danny Lloyd. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. A man, his son and wife become the winter caretakers of an isolated hotel where Danny, the son, sees disturbing visions of the hotels past using a telepathic gift known as "The Shining". The father, Jack Torrance, is underway in a writing project when he slowly slips into insanity as a result of cabin fever and former guests of the hotel's ghosts. After being convinced by a waiter's ghost to "correct" the family, Jack goes completely insane. The only thing that can save Danny and his mother is "The Shining."

A popular means for presenting gore in the '80s was through body-horror. Based on the primal fear of destruction of the human body, and a fascination with it. Body Horror is principally derived from the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body. Such works may deal with disease, decay, parasitism, mutilation, or mutation. Other types of body horror include unnatural movements, or the anatomically incorrect placement of limbs to create 'monsters' out of human body parts.

·         Postmodern parodies were created in the 1980s as the horror genre had now become well established. One of the most famous parodies of this decade is “Scream.”

·         Scream 1981- A group of friends go on a rafting trip down a river and stop in at an old ghost town to spend the night. Soon their rafts disappear, and then they begin to be eliminated one by one by a mysterious killer.

Final girl theory

The final girl is a trope in thriller and horror films, particularly slasher films. This specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The final girl has been observed in dozens of films, including Halloween and its Friday the 13th and its reboot and A Nightmare on Elm Street. There are also examples of final girls in other genres as well. The term was discovered by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book “Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.” Clover suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film.