X GENRE RESEARCH2 Studying Horror Cinema by Bryan Turnock

For the past week, I have been reading the book Studying Horror Cinema by Bryan Turnock.  I found out some things which I found interesting.

COMPLEX DISCOVERY PLOT

Four narrative stages:

• Onset
• Audience made aware of monster
• Discovery
• One or more central characters discovers that the monster's existence
• Confirmation
• The wider community is convinced of the monster's existence
• Confrontation
• Humanity confronts the monster and may or may not be victorious

Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) - relatively straightforward example.

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Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) - contrasted.

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SYMBOLIC STRUCTURES OF IMPURITY

• Fusion
• Simultaneous occupation of two or more normally exclusive categories
• living/dead, human/animal, human/vegetable 
• Fission
• Occupation of two or more categories, at different times
• werewolves, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• or in different spaces
• the doppelgänger
• Magnification/Massification
• Takes an existing source of potential horror and either magnifies it
• giant spiders
• Or masses it
• swarms of cockroaches
• Metonymy 
• Representation of something inwardly monstrous, though appearing normal, through association with a recognisable source of horror
• Norman Bates' association with the stuffed corpse of his mother

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

• Often in Gothic novels to claim the work was based on "found" documents 
• Stoker's Dracula - entirely diary entries, journals and letters by and between book's protagonists
• Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde rely on these devices.
• Continued through horror films 
• Genre depends on audience's ability to suspend disbelief 

TERRIBLE PLACE

• There's a monster or terrible place convention
• Identified by Carol Clover
• Somewhere which seems like a safe haven but in fact acts to trap the victim with the monster
• Often a house or tunnel
• In Gothic literature, often a ruined abbey or castle