Themes/Motifs/Ideology Research

In most slasher horror movies the main theme is of mass killing. For example in 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' there is a main killer who goes around murdering many characters. In 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' along with many other slasher horrors, the killer is masked. This links to our idea for a horror movie as we have a main antagonist that is a murderer as we find that it is important to have this character in a horror movie because it is an effective convention and also our murderer is masked as we think that this is an effective convention that we wanted to stick to as it creates a mysterious feeling.

Another theme of horror films is torture. This is apparent in the 'Saw' series as well as 'Hostel', as it is a very shocking feature which highlights how the main antagonist is a horrible person. In our movie we chose not to use torture in it as we feel that we have a sufficient amount of other themes, also it may not specifically apply to our idea.

From my research I have also found that fear is a typical theme of the horror genre as this is the main point that horror movies are made, to instill fear into the audience. An example of fear felt by the characters in a horror film is when Rachel feels fear in 'The Ring' as she doesn't know how the video works to kill people.

I have also found that throughout some horror films many of them relate to a specific time in the calendar for example Halloween, Friday the 13th, Black Christmas or Valentine's Massacre and these events cause the killer to start the mass murdering. We found that we didn't want to stick to this convention as we think it has been overdone and we don't feel that it adds a particularly scary element.

Throughout horror films a visual motif is darkness as it is very effective in instilling fear into the audience.