What defines a horror movie?

Horror has been around since the birth of cinema. “Le Squelette Joyeux” (Eng. The Merry Skeleton) by the Lumière brothers came out as early as 1890s – it was a skeleton dancing, occasionally falling apart and then building itself back into form. The first ever narrative horror film “Le Manoir du Diable” (Eng. The House of the Devil) was made by Georges Méliès. In this piece, you can find different supernatural creatures showing up such as devils, ghosts, witches, and trolls. However, the label “horror” wasn’t coined until 1930s.

The purpose of horror has always been to scare and disgust audiences with shocking imagery. This can be achieved by not only showing gruesome kills and masked villains but also by setting the mood with lighting, angles, sound design, score, and framing. For example, by using negative space or static shots you may evoke a feeling of uneasiness or removing all sound you can build up tension. Horror is known for its tropes, but it is also with making use of the aforementioned filmmaking techniques that something can be classified as ‘horror’. It is also often derived from real life events such as oil crises and wars, and many times these movies reflect our society at a certain time.

As mentioned earlier, there are several tropes that can be found in a lot of horror movie, so here’s a list of some of the most used ones: jump scares, something or someone jumping at viewer and often accompanied by a loud sound; group splitting up, irrational thinking, most likely to lead everyone to their deaths; found footage, cheap to make and often needs a gripping story to be effective; creepy child, gives a false sense of security, precocious child can quickly get annoying; final girl, iconic character especially in golden era of slashers, sole survivor in a group of teenagers and usually the one to defeat the villain; creepy doll (e.g. Annabelle, Chucky, M3GAN), hard to make unique, often haunted or possessed and this trope can get very tiring.

Bodies Bodies
Bodies (2022)
dir. Halina Reijn

House (1977)
dir. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Saw (2004)
dir. James Wan

Bodies Bodies Bodies is an American dark comedy horror that tells a story of a group of ’friends’ throwing a hurricane party at a mansion. Things quickly go awry when one of them dies and the remaining ones start to suspect one another.

Basic horror tropes used in Bodies Bodies Bodies are isolated location (mansion), characters splitting up, multiple victims, stranded signals (the hurricane cuts off all service). These are also traits of a slasher but even with all the tropes mentioned, this movie isn’t your typical slasher but a cleverly constructed whodunit. For example, the final girl in the movie drinks and does drugs like everyone else; in an old slasher the final girl is usually the one to steer away from things like that.

When you take a closer look, you can see that the horror in this movie also comes from fragile and toxic masculinity, and the trauma men inflict on women. There’s a male character who feels threatened by another male character which ends up kickstarting the chaos. The director makes a conscious decision to pit the men against each other.

It is also our obsession with social media that leads us to our demise. The online world is all too consuming us that we no longer know how to act like normal people in situations like this.

When one of them turns up dead and they need to figure out who the killer is, all their underlying issues surface, and they turn against each other. In the end the monster is human – we are the root cause to all our problems.

House is a Japanese experimental horror comedy. It is a story about seven girls visiting one of the girl’s aunt, but it is also so much more than that. At the aunt’s House, they encounter all sorts of whimsical and bizarre things such as a dancing skeleton and person turning into a pile of bananas. This is a movie you need to see to believe.

Horror elements in House include a central villain with some sort of motivation (bakeneko luring the girls to the House), stranded signal (no service when they try to make a phone call), isolated location (titular House), multiple victims, and a final girl. As for other tropes, there are no jump scares, but there are supernatural elements. The cat, Blanche, turns out to be a bakeneko which means ghost cat. Cats can become these when they live to an old age which gives them supernatural abilities.

On surface-level House may seem silly but when you dig deeper into the history of Japan and Ôbayashi himself, you begin to notice all the layers to the story. House has a lot of scenes influenced by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Ôbayashi was born in a town 1,5 hours away from Hiroshima and was seven at the time of the bombing. In the movie the cat reflects real life in how the bombings ripped away the joy and innocence.

Saw is an American horror film. Its reputation precedes the movie itself – dubbed ’torture porn’ by critics yet the first movie is anything but. Saw is more a mystery with horror elements, but it doesn’t make it any less horror. It is a film about a cancer patient wishing to cleanse people of their sins and testing their will to live by putting them in traps. The main characters in this specific story are a freelance photographer Adam and a Doctor Lawrence Gordon.

Typical horror tropes in Saw: creepy doll (Billy the Puppet who has become the face of the franchise); jump scares (not many but there are some); almost found footage (there is security camera footage); a central villain with motivation (Jigsaw); isolated location (main characters in The Bathroom Trap); multiple victims (several victims are mentioned but the movie doesn’t focus on them); stranded signals (Bathroom Trap Boys find a phone, but it is meant to only receive calls).

Aside from the famous traps Jigsaw uses, horror in Saw derives from the tension of solving who chained up the two main characters to the bathroom pipes and whose severed foot is on the poster of the movie. It also ponders the question of how far a person is willing to go to survive such traps depicted in Saw.

Having also been released in 2004, the state of the world and the U.S. specifically, certainly influenced audiences to interpret the movie in a certain way. It is jarring how closely the events of Saw (unintentionally) parallel material from the world post 9/11.