October's here.
And while most of you nerds are DIYing yourself the perfect Halloween costume,
we cool kids in Movie Lists are making a last minute run to Goodwill so
we can study horror films instead.
And this time,
we decided to pay attention to some of the archetypal trends that define the genre.
These are our picks for the Top 5 Horror Tropes of All Time.
(Sound) We think the best definition for
trope is a recurring cultural pattern in a creative work.
Tropes are what we notice when we look back in review.
The emerge over the course of a medium's development as a common vocabulary is
built between artists and viewers.
But they also emerge because deep down within us,
we all share a few essential features of humanness.
Idiosyncratic side effects of our common evolution that has us
programmed to respond strongly to some things and not to others.
After a while this common patterns arrange themselves into groups and
these groups become partially self-contained and we call them genres.
And the genre made up of storytelling tropes that tend to make us feel all
the different kinds of fear is called horror.
And with horror at first glance,
there's a ton of organizing tropes centered around location.
We can all relate to the experience of being in a place and
feeling some kind of wrong especially if that place is your childhood basement.
In horror films, there's a tendency to tell stories in the creepy backwoods,
the Gothic suburbia, there's the isolated horror of either the cut-off or
imprisoned variety, and there's the always interesting space horror.
However, for our favorite horror location show, we think
there's something especially interesting about The Haunted House with a History.
- I just wish that all those people hadn't died here.
I mean, duh, a guy kills his whole family.
Doesn't that bother you?
- Well, sure, but houses don't have memories.
- Maybe the last family was murdered or maybe they murdered each other.
Or it was built on an ancient burial ground,
preferably Native American in origin.
But whatever it is, something messed up happened there and
it's burned its evil into the walls.
Cinema's hall of haunted house fame is composed of the decrepit likes of 'The
Uninvited's Windward House', 'Amityville Horrors', '112 Ocean Avenue', 'Legend
of Hell Houses', 'Velasco House' and in motel form, 'The Shining's' overlook.
The Haunted House with a History trope finds characters encountering
unexplainable paranormal phenomena and
then discovering that they correspond pretty damningly to a past trauma.
And that's what the haunted house is really all about, isn't it?
An exploration and exploitation of how trauma tends to linger where we leave it.
Of how memory can attach itself very viscerally to a place.
And how sometimes the knowledge of a tragedy in a specific
place can almost project itself onto our experience of it.
(Sound) If you think about it almost all of the commonly encountered horror baddies
exist within the boundaries of a few very specific categories that
say something about what we're fundamentally afraid of.
The vampire is part of a pattern of slightly sexual bat related night
dwellers.
Zombies are a monster trope that spread like an incurable disease,
and demons are a brand of monster that can overwhelm us with evil from the inside.
There's the unkillable terror, the demonic child, the vengeful spirit.
However, there's something especially unnerving about finding out that Man
is the Scariest Monster of All.
- You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse.
You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.
- There's something extra terrifying about learning that the evil isn't some
supernatural entity that goes away when the movie's over.
It's a real human being.
That evil, that's a part of your nature, somewhere deep down inside,
and that gets us really deep in the scary place.
Consider how it's used in the 'Night of the Living Dead',
we're surrounded by zombies.
The protagonist is ultimately shot by an uncaring hunter.
Or in '28 Days Later,' where a safe haven of soldiers proves to be far worse than
the zombie infected alternative.
Or especially '10 Cloverfield Lane,' where the trope hangs over our heads the entire
film like a question, who should we really fear, monster's or myth?
As for the non-monster characters there's the skeptic who get's his the survivalist
who ironically doesn't, the hero who's actually related to the monster.
There's the ever moralizing, sexual punishment trope that has the promiscuous
die while the virginal live and it's racist cousin.
The black guy dies first.
But, we're eternally fascinated by the ubiquity of The Final Girl.
- Okay, look, movies like this end when the final girl kills the main bad guy and
the credits roll.
This smoking hot girl called Paula,
she arrives in the next reel, she's the final girl.
Yeah, yeah.
She is the only one in this movie who doesn't die.
All we got to do is stick with her and
we are going to have the best seats in the house.
- True to its name, 'The Final Girl' is a trope usually found in slasher films,
that finds a group of whittled down to one, who almost always tends to be a girl.
It is a fascinating trope that seems to have emerged organically in the slasher
genre, and has fallen under some very intense scrutiny, study, and debate.
Why are they so often girls?
Are we rooting for or against them?
Is it a positive representation of women, a sign of strength, or an objectification?
And if you haven't been living in a digital dead zone for the past decade,
you can probably guess that there are some strong opinions on both sides.
We don't know whether final girls are good or bad.
We also don't think it matters.
They're happening.
Isn't that we need them to be women because the horror audience wouldn't
accept a male expressing the utter hysterical terror required in the climax?
Maybe.
Are they positive role models for girls?
Ellen Ripley sure is.
Are they a fascinating relic of our horror film culture in this modern era?
Abso-freaking-lutely.
(Sound) The shape of stories also take on patterns themselves,
which you can see in plot tropes.
There's the creepy warning that the characters will certainly ignore.
The crazy prophecy that inevitably comes true.
There's the moment that the telephones are somehow disabled.
The call for help that is disregarded.
The splitting up that should literally never happen.
And then there's the endings.
Twist endings, ambiguous endings.
It was all in your head endings.
Feel bad, bleak endings.
But, because we're still little kids at heart, reminiscing about all our Goosebump
books, we are giving this spot to the "Or Is It..?" Ending.
- Careful, this is the moment when the supposedly dead killer
comes back to life for one last scare.
- Aah! - Aah!
(Sound) - Not in my movie.
- Kind of like a twist ending, but at the very last possible second,
the monsters were gone.
We'd affirmed our own ultimate victory over evil, we can feel the credits coming.
Ready to tuck ourselves nicely into bed,
knowing we're safe, when the rug is pulled out from under us.
And it turns out our sense of security is a lie.
There's nothing like the classic final scare of Friday the 13th to really
turn everything on its head just in time to never sleep again.
And that's what's so cool about this trope, it's like a last piece of
story momentum that allows the emotions in terror to continue on in the film stead.
It sets the trajectory of fear with one final scare that has the movie and
the terror hanging with you.
Because, as it turns out, some of us still want to be scared.
(Sound) Finally finishing off our tour,
let's not forget what everyone's really here for.
The scares.
And most of the time we're seeing a lot of the same sort.
Mirror scares.
(Sound) They're right behind you scares, baby cat scares,
crescendo anticlimaxes, the unseen POV.
However, for our number one pick don't try to deny it, when it all comes down to it
most of us are just hoping for a really good Jump Scare.
(Sound) - We mustn't judge too harshly Will,
it was his first time.
Have you never felt a sudden rush of panic?
(Sound) - Don't get us wrong, we love the slow
full tension build up that twists the screws for so long, we just want to
run out of the theater screaming because it seems like it will never end.
But then, once it does we're just like everybody else.
We want to poop our pants.
(Sound) 'Silent Phantom of the Opera' was the first film to attempt this kind of
scare, and
then a few decades later 'Cat People' was the film to really refine the technique.
(Sound) It really took off in the scene in the 'Psycho',
'The innocents', 'The Haunting' and 'Repulsion'.
And pretty much every horror film since then.
They're in the edit, in the flash of a cut, in the shot, with the turn of
a camera, in the set hiding right behind that thing right there.
(Sound) It is saturated horror cinema.
Exhausted some people, energized others.
It's probably what people's minds go to when they first think of
really being sacred.
(Sound) Because it's so very primal at it's root.
An experience that goes back to the original evolutionary purpose of fear.
To get our asses from zero to 60 in two seconds flat.
Which is why it's our pick for one of the best horror tropes of all time.
(Music)
So, what do you think?
Disagree with any of our picks?
Did we leave out any of your favorite horror tropes?
Let us know in the comments below.
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