I thought that, for the most part, this piece was almost too straightforward. It offered a lot of common knowledge but did provoke me to think a little more about a handful of concepts I hadn't previously considered in depth.
I consider myself a fan of the horror genre. Particularly after watching Halloween last night, I was prompted to think of how Carpenter's classic fit into the notion of a genre film. Halloween is undeniably a staple of the horror genre, featuring its fundamental components (plays on the innate fears of the audience, features an evil terrorizing agent and helpless victim, startles the audience with unexpected physical action). But it also fulfills Schatz's ideas of how "individual genre films seem to have the capacity to affect the genre" (693). Halloween was one of the original "slasher" films and its critical and commercial popularity helped establish a niche in the horror genre for the knife-wielding serial killer. Halloween also helped give rise to the trope of an innocent heroine--for decades following Halloween's release, it was common practice for the teenagers who were depicted as engaging in drugs and sex to be killed off while the more chaste character (usually female) survives.
Schatz mainly focuses on the Western and musical genres, and I would love to hear the rest of the class's perspective on genres we've approached more in class. I realize we determined that film noir was more of a movement than a genre, but I feel like there could be interesting parallels made between the reading and the noir films we watched.
No comments:
Post a Comment