Horror Classification Essays

Horror feeds on audience’s deepest terrors by putting life’s most frightening and perplexing things—death, evil, supernatural powers or creatures, the afterlife, witchcraft—at the center of attention.

Below is a clip of a well-known scene from the film, in which the priests perform an exorcism on Regan, a young girl whose body it has been possessed by a demon: The horrifying nature of this scene is obvious—a possessed child with a grotesque appearance, the presence of a supernatural spirit or demon, the use of religious power or magic to solve the situation, and so on.

Though its visual effects may now be outdated, remains one of the most notoriously terrifying and disturbing horror movies to date.

As the teenage boy stepped into the old mansion, his friends cackling behind him, he thought he could hear things that, he forced himself to believe, were in his head—rattling bones, scurrying rats, hushed whispers…and the slow drip, drip, drip, coming from a spot he told himself wasn’t really there; the red, oozing stain in the ceiling boards above.

He only had to spend one hour in the house and he would prove to his friends that he wasn’t afraid. He took one last glance out the door before shutting out the light of the full moon, enclosing himself in complete darkness, with only the sound of his racing, terrified thoughts. Second, there is an emphasis on the fact that the main character will be continuing his task alone, which is never comforting.

Below is a clip from the icon horror novel and movie of the same name, This clip exhibits a scene from the film that has been a symbol of the horror genre for decades, including the infamous and often repreated phrase, “Here’s Johnny!

”Many pieces of horror literature have become cult classic horror films, for example, William Peter Blatty’s supernatural horror novel and the subsequent film, for which he also wrote the screenplay.Lastly, the setting—an old and likely haunted mansion, darkness, the full moon—helps to accomplish the feeling of foreboding in the situation.Gothic horror, also known as gothic fiction or gothic fantasy, is a dark style of fiction that combines horror and Romanticism.A thriller is a genre of whose primary feature is that it induces strong feelings of excitement, anxiety, tension, suspense, fear, and other similar emotions in its readers or viewers—in other words, media that thrills the audience.Essentially all horrors are thrillers because of the nature of their content; however, not all thrillers are horrors.The main source of terror in supernatural horrors is the human reaction to being faced with the unknown, usually in the midst of a serious conflict—i.e.a haunting, a possession, an invasion, a curse or omen, etc.In literature, horror (pronounced hawr-er) is a genre of fiction whose purpose is to create feelings of fear, dread, repulsion, and terror in the audience—in other words, it develops an atmosphere of horror.The term’s definition emphasizes the reaction caused by horror, stemming from the Old French centuries alike.To learn more about the victim—the disfigured but still breathing body—the reader will have to continue, though they fear to find out who or what is responsible for this gory scene.Not all horror has to be directly bloody or violent with its language.