#1 The first article is “Why do People Like Horror Movies?” by Guest Columnist. It mainly talked about the reason why some people enjoy horror movie. In this article, Guest explains simply that people have a demand for horror element based on biology and psychology, especially for teenager or young adult. They watch horror movie not just for fun. They watch it so they can know what it is like to be in a horror environment like murder. People want to have a taste about how these horror works in real life. So they try to get information from movies in order to find something useful to learn. Guest has a real impressive conclusion, he said ” If fear is experienced over and over, onscreen or otherwise, it makes a person stronger in the face of real threats”( Columnist 2009). So his whole point is people enjoy watching horror movies because they want to learn something from it.

#2 The second article is “Why we Love Scary Movies” by Richard Sine. It has similar point as the first article, but more focus on why young teenager like horror movie. One of the reason is young teenager like horror movie simply because their parents don’t like they watch horror type of things. It is just a teenagers behavior to against parents. However, the more standard explanation is  people “seek out violent entertainment as a way of coping with actual fears or violence”(Sine 2007). So Sine Richard agrees that people enjoy horror movie because they want to know how fear feels like.

In “Why Horror” By Noel Carroll, he asked a question about “why are horror audiences attracted by what, typically(in everyday  life), should (and would) repel them?”(Carroll 2002). The answer is pretty simply. These people who enjoy horror movie like to have a close taste of how fear or violent feels like.  It doesn’t necessary means these audience have psycho issue, but it proves that these people want to know how horror feels like no matter they like it or not. Personally, I don’t really watch horror movie a lot because it’s scary and creep me out. I might have a nightmare because this horror movie. So usually I try to avoid watching horror movie, but it doesn’t mean I don’t ever watch one. I do watch some, but only some are acceptable  to my feels.  Horror is just a strange thing. We agree it is not natural, but people still keep enjoying it because the adventure it brings.

 

Carroll, N. (2002). Why Horror?. In Neill, A. & Riley, A. (eds.) Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates (2nd ed., Chap. 17). New York, NY: Routledge.

Columnist,G.(2009). Why Do People Like Horror Movies?. The Jacksonville Observer. http://www.jaxobserver.com/2009/10/24/why-do-people-like-horror-movies/

Sine, R.(2007). Why We Love Scary Movies. Mental Health Center. http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/why-we-love-scary-movies

I don’t usually watch a lot horror movie or horror type of things because it is not good for health.(It scares me!) Nevertheless, I did watch several horror movies like リング, a Japanese horror film(I think it translates as “ring”, but I am not sure). I watched this movie few years ago with my young cousin. It still scares me now if I tried to recall the movie.

I do have a problem on my computer to get access to the Buffy episode, but I will try to do an analyze. In this unit, we learned there are three elements in a horror film: non-diagetic sound, diagetic sound and mise-en-scene. For mise-en-scene, just a terrified shocking screen will give enough scary feeling. Like staring, a reflection of some monster, etc.This kind of horror provides people a visual scare and their body will react immediately when they see some visual horror. However, only combined with sound effect, it can be called as scary. There are two types of sound effect. One is background environment sound or called non-diagetic sound. This is the sound that not provided by human but itself provide a spooky feeling before the actual visual horror appear. For example, we always know some scary moment will happen because the background music is spooky already. So non-diagetic sound is really important for horror. However, I don’t really understand is how diagetic sound works, but what I can guess is when people say something include horror element, it is really easy for audience to get such scary feeling. So what diagetic sound does is to strengthen the scary moment.

This is my view about horror. Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts. 🙂