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Horror Genre : The Feeling Of Fear Essay

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When I was young, and knew little about how the world worked, I was frightened by the ideas of monsters in my closet or dolls that come to life while you are asleep. Now that I am older, I have more experience living on Earth, and I know what to expect from it. Likewise, horror genre has grown to create an alternate reality in which one can not assume that what we come to expect of the real world applies in a fictional one: “[The horror genre] must posit an unnatural threat that is outside the realm of normalcy, reality, or history…[with] sympathetic and vulnerable potential victims”(Sipos).As society has grown to expect certain things from a horror film over the years, the horror genre has evolved to counteract that growth in order to provide the audience with the one thing that remains constant in the horror genre, the feeling of fear. The feeling of fear is the one aspect of the genre that defines a horror film: “horror is one of the rare genres that are defined not primarily by period or formal idiosyncrasies, but by the effect they produce in the audience...They all aim at the bodily response of their audience” (Hantke). Throughout the history of the horror genre, parts of the mythology, conventions, and iconography, of the genre that were used to produce the desired response of an audience have changed drastically along with the various cultural changes that occurred during the genre’s history as evidenced by the contrasting and comparable aspects of the horror films,

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