A Horror Genre Analysis

This essay will be examining the genre of Horror, its conventions and origins. A dark genre that aims to unsettle. Wholly unique in the aspect that traditionally film often attempts to lull the audience into a comfortable sense of detachment. A voyeuristic element of disconnect from the screen, yet Horror's appeal is it's aim to immerse. Mise en scéne, the use of lighting and sound all common film techniques. Used to play upon the audience's most basic instinct, fear.
The notion of the 'uncanny' is reoccurant in Horrors, the idea that something familiar has been altered in such an unsettling way that the audience garners discomfort. The use is particularly effective in film as the fear of the uncanny is so dissimilar to tradition notions of

The Other concerns a view of 'Use versus Them'. 'Them' being someone or something deemed unfit in society. Wallace's adaptation of It presents the antagonist (Pennywise the clown) as the Other in this situation, an especially horrifying clown when clowns have already been deemed frightening decades ago. One must consider his relation to the Mise En Scéne, which is a perfect image of middle America, a suburban landscape that would be so familiar to a majority of the audience. Pennywise is the Other invading a comfortable space, effectively defamiliarising it to a point that Western pleasantries such as balloons become a rather threatening weapon. Horror truly offers a completely different experience to the audience, whereas other genres leave the audience in joyfulness, or perhaps an enlightened sense of self; Horror creates paranoia. With the use of jarring scenes and imagery that leave the audience up at night, Horror certainly sticks with it's audience. But these horrific scenes make up most of the appeal, in a world with unclear and or lack of any immediate threat, the audience has the privilege of terror as a fun, leisure activity. Furthermore, the contrast of Horror and the real world can be rather reassuring. Statistically the likelihood of finding yourself in a situation like Hitchcock's Pyscho is so small, yet the thrill of the adrenaline rush, living out this situation in cinema just is unexplainably exciting. In the way the moment of terror before parachute jumping