ESSAY PLANS

“Genre arouses the expectations of an audience.” How and why does it do this?

Slasher Genre
Audiences know what to expect in slasher movies as the conventions and repertoire of elements are generally similar.

In many of the movies from this genre follow typical ‘rules’:
- Teens who sleep with each other will end up dying. This pretty much happens in every slasher movie, however with an exception of “Scream” as the final girl looses her virginity and still survives.
- The virgin is always the final girl and triumphs over evil in the end. Some examples are “Friday the 13th”, “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.
- Never do drugs or run upstairs when being chased by the killer.
One movie which uses irony when presenting these rules is “Scream”. The teens know what to expect but yet still get caught up and end up dying

Majority of the movies have the same repertoire of elements.
For example: -a knife - this makes the killings more personal and sadistic
-Scary music- this builds up tension, i.e. most slasher movies are famous
for there theme tunes, for example “Halloween”
-Blood- this makes it more gruesome
-Setting- almost always in the suburbs, making it more excluded and
scarier.
-Characters- a psycho, final girl, police officer who can’t do the job and
a group of teenagers.
It can be argued genre arouses the expectations of the audience because of the conventions which are repeated again and again. If it did not do this then the Slasher genre wouldn’t be distinguished as the slasher genre and the audience may not want to watch this genre as they don’t know what to expect. Letting the audience know what to expect makes them more interested in wanting to watch it, however to keep the audience interested you must have something unique with the particular movie.
One example is “Scream”, which uses parody.



Outline recent significant developments in one genre of your choice. Illustrate your answer with examples.

A genre must adapt in order to survive and not become to boring, because of this it changes.

For example in the recent “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” the family full of psycho’s also had female’s showing the change in society, basically there are women who can be just a sadistic as men

Another change is the final girl is not always a virgin, for example in “Scream” Sydney has sex but yet still is the final girl. This reflects the fact society accepts teens having sex as long as it’s safe.

Another significant change is censorship; more recent slasher movies show a lot more explicit sexual scenes. For example compare the shower scene in “Psycho” to the scene in “Switch Blade Romance” where the female actress is seen masturbating.
Another change is the special effects, as technology has developed so has the slasher genre. In “Psycho” the amount of gore was very limited, but comparing it to movies such as “Friday the 13th” where Freddy can pull a body under a bed the make his victims blood squirt out fiercely onto the ceiling. Technology has clearly brought the slasher genre forward in times.



“Parody aims to mock in a critical way” (Frederick Jameson). How has parody been used in contemporary genre?

One example where parody aims to mock in a critical way is in the slasher genre, in the movie “Scary Movie”.

“Scary Movie” is a spoof of slasher movies. It mocks various movies such as, “I know what you did Last Summer”, “Scream”, “The Usual Suspects”, and “Halloween”.
It mocks them critically as emphasise on there typical conventions which are repeated over and over again
For example it mocks the fact the killer is always right under the victim’s noses, just like in ‘Scream’. It mocks how obvious it is how not to get killed yet they still do. The main movie being mocked is ‘Scream’.

Funny enough ‘Scream’ also uses parody as one of the teens realises what they must do in order to survive yet still falls for those signs.