Looking at Gothic Horror

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Looking at Gothic Horror The horror genre remains very popular with cinema audiences even nowadays because the special effects today make creatures look even more terrifyingly realistic and it also means that you can film stunts or scenes like somebody turning into a werewolf for example, much more easy to film and much more effective. An example of a modern horror film that consists of very effective special effects is 'Underworld' that makes use of computer generation to make some impressive transformation scenes. The advances in technology give modern horror films an edge over classics and a modern audience expects a lot more from a horror film nowadays. Modern horror films consist of old and new tricks of filming to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. They consist of much more varied and clever plots and storylines. Re-workings of older horror films are filmed with the view to appeal to a modern audience and the audience go to see these horror films with an expectation of what they think will happen and the good thing about horror films is they can have plot twists and unexpected events occurring throughout the film. We watched two extracts from the film adaptations of two Gothic horror novels, Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' and Kenneth Brannagh's 'Frankenstein'. We analysed these two scenes and then compared them to the written extracts. The two scenes we looked at are the creation scene from 'Frankenstein' and Harker's journey to Dracula's castle and his first meeting with Dracula from 'Dracula'. For this assignment I will be analysing the mise-en-scene and iconography of both scenes, the use of camera shots, li... ... middle of paper ... ...e way the films use clever tricks to give suspense, which can be overlooked in some of the newer horror films that rely on the amount of blood that comes out rather than clever filming and jumpy moments. In short, Dracula and Frankenstein were very similar in the way that they portrayed the typical horror tricks and consisted of similar camera angles to each other point out various bits. I thought that Dracula, both the written extract and the film extract fitted the horror genre a bit better than Frankenstein as it was more believable for me. I also thought that the film extract was much more scary, although Frankenstein wasn't bad and had its moments of fright. My final views were that Dracula was on the whole filmed better than Frankenstein as it used the different camera angles more effectively in my opinion.

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