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Post by proceduralbob on Nov 16, 2022 16:46:32 GMT -5
Horror is not always a clearly defined genre in my experience. I've seen, and I'm sure I'm not alone here, some works described as horror that I would consider more action/adventure, but at the same time the story goes that Silence of the Lambs (the 1991 film) was marketed specifically as a "psych thriller" because it was an award-winning film and horror was too genre to be sweeping the Academy Awards. I describe a lot of books, films or other media I experience as "horror adjacent" because I'm not sure if "horror" is really the right term, even when I know certainly there are horror themes or sequences within them.
How would you seek to define horror as a subgenre? A few works that I've seen describe as or as not horror that I'd put on the list to question are... Silence of the Lambs? Jaws? We Need To Talk About Kevin? Jurassic Park? The Stand?
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Post by withswords on Nov 16, 2022 20:34:11 GMT -5
I think what makes it horror is less about subject matter and more about how it is handled, the series of setups and payoffs that create a horror atmosphere. Personally I think the only one in that list that is a real question is Kevin, because from what I know about even the ones I haven't read or watched like the Stand, it's structured like an apocalyptic horror, where Kevin (at least in film) is structured like a psychological drama. It's the reason you can have non-horror mystery about murder and killings without that story being horror (where mystery is oriented around introducing more knowns vs horror being oriented around introducing unknowns), there's a sliding scale of how horror a story's structure is. So Jurassic Park is an action adventure, but because it uses these horror building elements throughout it is Also horror, where like Aliens is so minimal on horror structure compared to Alien that it's almost pure action
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Post by proceduralbob on Nov 16, 2022 21:03:03 GMT -5
Not that (in my opinion) this applies to any of the examples I gave in my first post but your reply has also reminded me that yeah I think it's more about structure than it is about whether it Is Scary, because defining horror by whether it is successful at being scary also doesn't allow for bad horror, and I think we all can agree there are a great many examples of that.
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Post by wormsday on Nov 17, 2022 10:12:53 GMT -5
i think some of this Comes from the devaluing of it, in the way all animation in considered the same,,instead of the tool, the medium in which the story is told, like another example of a genre that needs to be a few key elements to be what it is but has tons of variety from within is romance, like a romantic comedy and a romantic drama and a romantic period are all very different types of things but all at its core; romance, i think this is true about horror! there can also be horror romance, so these things genres and subgenres are less rigid and more fluid! horror can def use more like precise ways of categorizing tho!
if we were to categorize we need to talk about kevin as horror, i think there's room to like stretch out the definition to catch like unreliable narrator and social woes and illnesses, like the scale of violence and being trapped within a toxic family and an unhealthy situation, lifetime horror? slice of life but make it horror
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Post by proceduralbob on Nov 18, 2022 19:50:53 GMT -5
I see what you mean by that!
I feel like it's also relevant to point out how different works/creators have conceptualized kinds of fear.
e.g. Stephen King's famous "three kinds" of fear; gross-out, horror and terror. Or in The Magnus Archives, the fourteen* fear entities; corruption, web, spiral, vast, hunt, slaughter, eye, lonely, dark, desolation, buried, stranger, end, flesh (and extinction?). Or in Unknown Armies, the five stress meters; violence, unnatural, helplessness, self and isolation.
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