Genre
The formula of the High-Concept movie
It could be argued that the high-concept movie has lost its distinction simply because American cinema is now almost totally overrun by films that are made primarily on the basis of profitability. Indeed, has 21st century Hollywood become high-concept and then everything else? The most dominant Hollywood directors of the past twenty years would suggest this – Spielberg, Tony Scott, David Fincher, James Cameron, Stephen Sommers, Simon West, Michael Bay. (Read full article)
The Slasher Movie: An introduction
You could look back at the stalk and slash sub-genre of horror cinema (predominately known as slasher’ film, or teen slasher’) and cite the book written about serial-psychotic Ed Gein as the root of the genre. Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights to the book and made the pivotal film, Psycho in 1960. Along with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Psycho was the major influencing factor that allowed Tobe Hooper and then later John Carpenter to define the sub-genre with their films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978). It was the monster’ as a human rather than an otherworldly, fictional entity, that gave the horror’ a more solid basis in reality, in turn breeding a closer ideological connection with its audience the next rampaging maniac to run around wielding a knife could be a friend, a relative, a co-worker. Psycho also introduced the audience to the knife as a weapon, a symbolic object of danger, death and madness, which would become an icon of the film and later within the genre itself. The knife represented another human aspect to the evil’, a culturally defined object used by everyone that could quite easily become a weapon in the wrong hands. (Read full article)
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