Genre as a marketing tool - Horror

Halloween film poster

We are automatically drawn in to the bright orange pumpkin in the centre of the poster which almost seems to be glowing in the dark starry sky. The title 'Haloween' fits in with the pumpkin as you always associate the two together. We all know that halloween is the one day of the year that we all get to dress up in the most scariest of outfits and go around knocking at random people's doors asking for sweets this makes us wonder what this film could be about. However we know whatever is going to happen it's all going to end in blood shed as we can see the pumpkin holding a sharp knife. The pumpkin almost seems personified as it has a pair of evil looking eyes, sharp teeth and also as I have already mentioned it has a hand. The colour scheme is simple and effective, it makes use of black, white and orange.
'Trick or Treat'

Ideology

Ideology is a mixture of ideas that sum up a person’s actions, goals and ideas of life. For a celebrity the media can be a great way to create an ideology.

Britney Spears has had both positive and negative ideologies. Some positives focus on her talent – her passion for singing and dancing – of which she has huge fans from all over the world. She is a very pretty woman who takes care and pride in her appearance. Many see her as a sexual object. She is often seen with a smile on her face and often sets out to achieve her own goals. However a few years back she received very negative press. She went off the rails when her and her husband split up. She was often seen out with her friends clubbing, smoking and god knows doing what else. She was deemed a bad parent and had her children taken away from her. The press had a field trip with similar stories, some of them true and others not. Over this time she began to gain weight, she had stopped singing and dancing and seemed as if she had totally given up on her appearance. We knew things had taken a turn for the worse when she shaved her head completely bald. Was this was a desperate cry for help made public by the media? Or was this just a big publicity stunt to gain even more attention? I guess we will never truly know what was going through her head at that moment but one thing is for sure and that’s that she is well on the road to recovery. Since then she hasn’t been in the press as much, yet has released a new album, done a few concerts and is starting to look like her old self again. She has had a bumpy ride with the media yet I still think that she is a good role model.

Todorov

Todorov’s Narrative stages

Todorov is a Bulgarian philosopher, he believes there are five key stages to any narrative film. These include:

1. Equilibrium - here the setting is established and key characters are introduced, this is when the story line is set up.

2. Disruption - the oppositional characters appear and the story is taken in a particular direction.

3. Recognition of disruption - this is the longest section of all the stages, consisting of both the events and the characters.

4. Fixing the disruption - here we feel a lot of tension and the problem we saw at section two has been fixed.

5. Reinstatement of equilibrium - all the problems are resolved and a new balance is created.

Barthes

Barthes semiotics

Barthes argued that verbal language is just one way of communicating whereas hairstyle, clothing, body language, make up, etc can also have the same effect.

Models for understanding language are constructed by people to produce meanings within a culture. We have the…

Signifier - the physical form of the sign.

Signified - the concept or idea that the signifier produces e.g. red rose means love.

Referent - the real thing. Not the signal or the idea, but the real individual thing.

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey is a professor of film and media studies. She is a feminist would came up with the Male Gaze theory. She believed all women are seen as eye candy in films. She came up with identification and an objectification of how women are portrayed.

Identification is all about how with the male lead, his actions become surrogate for our own part in the narrative and we psychologically align ourselves with his point of view he is the ideal ego.

Objectification is to do with the male’s romantic interest. The male lead desires the female form and because we are aligned with his point of view, the audience too desire the female lead also.

As well as this women are also split into two categories; the Madonna and the Whore. The Madonna character is seen as the woman with class, who is well respected and is knowledgeable. She would usually wear clothes which would cover her up and not seen so much as sexually attainable in the male’s eye. However the Whore character is the opposite, she is usually pretty and we see her use her looks to get what she wants. She is often shown wearing revealing clothes and is the one who is sexually attainable for the men.

But does her theory still work in more modern times? Think about Lara Croft for example. Using Mulvey’s theory can you tell whether she is the Madonna or Whore of the film? Is Mulvey’s theory being challenged?

Freud and Lacan

Freud and Lacan

These two came up with the idea of Scophilla and Voyeurism. Scophilla is about how we construct our identities by looking at our own bodies and each others bodies. From children we derive pleasure from looking at other people’s bodies. Voyeurism is about how we secretly receive pleasure from looking at people without them knowing, this can be described with cinema and pictures. We are looking at them yet they don’t realise we are. The first time we see ourselves, for example in a mirror, is the first time we understand who and what we are.

Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp

Propp was a Russian structuralist scholar who analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest narrative elements. He was able to identify many narrative structures by analysing different types of characters and their actions in a story. Propp came to the conclusion that all tales display eight main characters. These are:

1. The villain (struggles against the hero)

2. The donor (prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object)

3. The helper (helps the hero in the quest sometimes magical)

4. The princess (person the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative)

5. Her father

6. The dispatcher (character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off)

7. The hero or victim (reacts to the donor, weds the princess)

8. False hero (takes credit for the hero’s actions/ tries to marry the princess)