Genre Research: Reading a Lot of Stuff About Horror

 The idea that I plan on going with can be classified as three different genres: a psychological horror, a horror drama, or a surrealist fiction. Just like last year, I've been tasked with research genres to see what is common within them. Similarly to last year, I'll conduct my research by looking into different movies to see what they all share. Unlike last year, however, I won't be describing each movie I looked into. This time, I'll just point out the common tropes.

The first genre I looked into was psychological thriller. Psychological thrillers normally aims to scare the audience with atmosphere instead of jumpscares or creepy villains. Directors John Madden and Peter Hutchins agree that psychological horrors are at their best when they focus on tension and anxiety instead of fright. To me, this meant dim lighting and subtle movements in the background. However, when I looked into different psychological horror films, I was surprised to see that the colors were mostly normal. While some movies, Joker(2019) to be specific, had a decreased saturation, the coloration in general still looked normal. The anxiety and uneasiness that I expected from this genre came from the actors and the scenes that they were put into.

The second genre I looked into was horror drama. A horror drama, or horror film, is a film that seeks to instill fear into its audience. From what I saw during my research, this genre achieves this by having disturbing scenes and imagery. The antagonists of these films were monsters in more ways than one. In some films, the antagonist is human and torments the protagonist as well as the others around them. In other films, the antagonist is actually a monster and when they are, they are usually grotesque or hard to look at. I've noticed the camera work is different in these films. The camera looks up at the antagonist, possibly to make it seem like they are bigger and a threat.

The third genre I looked into was surrealist fiction. From what I've seen, I don't think surrealist films aim to do anything in general. A surrealist film can aim to tell a story or, if it wants, it could just be weird for the sake of it. This genre seems to be the most freeform of the three I've looked into. The whole time I was watching clips and snippets of films, I never fully understood what was going on.