Unit 6： Horror
I have no idea when I notice that the theme in this week is “horror”. I don’t know what I will learn in this chapter. First of all, I watch these three videos. In the diegetic sound video, the source of the sound is visible. We can notice that there is an old person always appear on the screen. It is interesting for me because I never seen it before. On the contrary, non-diegetic sound cannot see the source of sound. At the beginning of the video in non-diegetic sound, people cannot see the action in the video, and the sound is really dark. After that, I watched the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I notice that there are many non-diegetic sound and diegetic sound in the film. In the beginning, the sound is really quiet, this is an example of diegetic sound. The sound is almost silence, but the glass is broke suddenly. It is a horror element in this film. For non-diegetic sound, the girl walk in the Library should be the example.
After watch these videos, I read the article. According to the article “thus, in order to account for the interest we take in and the pleasure we take from horror, we may hypothesize that, in the main, the locus of our gratification is not the monster as such but the whole narrative structure in which the presentation of the monster is staged” (Carroll, 2002).This means that horror as a necessary in the different form. This saying let me better understand the video above.
I really liked the quote that you brought into your post, you’re right it does help us better understand the bigger picture of horror. Especially the last part of the quote, “gratification is not the monster as such but the whole narrative structure in which the presentation of the monster is staged” (Carroll, 2002). This definitely helps tie everything together and helps us see that there is definitely an art form to creating horror. After learning about the different types of sounds: digetic, non- digetic and Mis en scène I started to notice them more in TV shows that I watch. This made me think about how big of an impact sounds have on TV and movies, would we still have thought the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was kind of creepy without the well thought out sounds?
I really enjoyed how you incorporated the writing by Carrol into your discussion of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Previous to the lesson this week, I had ignored the types of sound that amplified the mood of the various portions of a scene but now I find that I am noticing them in everything I watch. Sound has a huge impact on how we interpret what we see. I thought the use of these types of sounds in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode was especially fascinating because it deprived the audience of the dialog that we usually rely on to know what is happening and instead relied entirely on the sounds and music of the show to tell the story. The lighting also tells us a lot about the scene and I noticed that when the dim light happened, that was an indicator to me that something terrible was about to happen.