Archetypal Role In Horror Movies

Each of the teenagers in the group plays an archetypal role that can found in many of the horror films of the last thirty years. Jules plays the role of ‘The Whore’, Curt ‘The Athlete’, Holden ‘The Scholar’, Marty ‘The Fool’, and Dana ‘The Virgin’. The remaining two in the third act of the film, Marty and Dana, discover that the order in which they group dies can be flexible, as long as ‘The Whore’ dies first and ‘The Virgin’ lives or is the last to perish. This revelation for the characters partly acts as a critique of the moralistic view of sex as resulting in death in the traditional slasher movie. For example in films that established the slasher in the horror genre like John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ (1978), all of the characters that engage

The Horror Movie in Late Modern Society’ that labelling films such as these as postmodern may be an overreach. He argues that the hybridity of the genre as seen in horror-comedies such as ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ and ‘Scream’ are nothing ‘new’ and that comedy has always played a prevalent role in the horror genre. He goes on to state that, “much of the comic fun to be had (in contemporary horror-comedies) derives from the excess of gory detail. The other aspect, in this case more a development characteristic of the 1990s than the 1980s, is the tendency to reflexively generate humour by openly appealing to a knowing audience’s familiarity with the genre conventions.” This view suggests that Tudor views the emergence of a more comedic element to horror movies as more of an evolutionary step in horror, than a deliberately postmodern outlook. He cements this as his view as he uses the example of ‘Scream’ and the films made in its wake (such as ‘Scary Movie’ (2000)), Tudor claims “It is films such as these that have so often attracted the designation ‘postmodern’, if only superficially, because of their studied self-consciousness and their use of pastiche.” (Tudor, p.107) Tudor’s view is that films such as these bear only surface-level post-modernism that the term is used too liberally and the films would be better suited towards the term parody than a post-modernism. Tudor argues that their “studied self-consciousness” disqualifies them from being labelled as postmodern, however it can be argued that parody and self-consciousness elements of these films are what make them postmodern at