Audience Theories.

In class we have discussed our roles as an audience and analysed audience theories.

• You would talk to your friends about horror movies, but it is unlikely you would talk to your parents or grandparents  - it is a genre usually shared between peers. 
• Word of mouth is vital for promotion of horror films - eg. social networking

My experience of watching horror, is that I tend to be more scared of the idea of watching a horror film than the film itself. It is the build up and anticipation that frightens me, more than anything else.

Paul Wells did research into 4 different age groups (16-25, 26-40, 41-55, 56-80) and asked them what the earliest and latest horror movies they had watched were. Conclusions I can draw from the results of this study are that people have become desensitised to Horror over time and directors are constantly pushing boundaries in order to shock and scare audiences. Horror has transformed into a social genre that is watched with others as an activity. It also shows that horrors change to fit with world wide issues that are happening currently.

Psychoanalytic theory - Spectatorship and male 'gaze'

• Women made to look weak, powerless, vulnerable, passive, submissive, seductive/modest.
• Femininity and sexuality is focused on by camerawork - audience is influenced by how the male character responds to her, eg. pity, attraction.

Laura Mulvey - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

• Women are presented as sexual spectacles and objects of pleasure for the characters and audience. 
• Men fetishise women imbuing them with an overvalued and unrealistic status - 'fetishistic scopophilia'.