The Horror Genre

The Horror Genre

Horror films quite often take place in secluded locations (like empty campus, woods, ghost towns or hotels and castles). Mostly set at night or during a nasty storm. Possibly they could have broken down or they taking a short cut. The people in the local area tend to know about a particular danger, death or curse but choose to ignore it or conveniently let it slip their minds. So the unwitting group has no idea what they are getting into. 

The narrative for these films quite often includes a group of people (friends, family or a group of unsuspecting youngsters):

• Mostly there will be a group together who experience a power cut / telephone lines down or no signal or battery life on their mobile phones. 
• A strange noise is heard and one or two of the group go to investigate. They end up being chased and falling over in an effort to escape.
• One of them runs upstairs being chased by someone / the antagonist, who wants them dead rather than in safety. This means they are trapped.
• They then proceed to either hide behind a door or window, or most famously a show curtain as in Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock). 
• At this point they get murdered. This tends to happen early on in the film and sets the tone. 
• The narrative continues with the 'fake scare.' This could be in the form of a practical joke played on them by another member of the group (makes them jump) or a loud banging of a door or something falling. 
• At the end quite often the ghost/zombie gets defeated. The darkness and people dying adds to a sense of dramatic suspense, tension and fear for both the characters and audience. The audience may experience a visceral reaction from the film, which is the aim of horror.

In the late 1930s horror films were classed as an H to warn people of its content. Also, because they were deemed too scary for children. Earlier on in World War 2 they were even banned from being distributed because they might have damaged the public morale. There have been many changes to the age rating of horror. Now it is deemed acceptable that children as young as twelve to see lightly horror style films as long as horror sequences are not too frequent, or sustained and the overall tone is not disturbing. There are even horror films that can be watched by children younger than twelve, which are normally animated films, which must be very mild in horror aspects.  For higher age ratings certain aspects still have to be monitored such as in a fifteen certificate where there must not be sustained focus on sadistic or sexual threat.  The eighteen certificate horror films can contain very strong horror, gore or sexual threat (basically as an adult they are choosing to watch this so anything goes).

How will i take this into account in my project? 
I need to have a clear idea of which age bracket that my audience fall into, and horror tends to be a 15 or an 18, so i will need to pick, and check the tone of my film matches the BBFC guidelines. We are interested in Zombie Horror films, so this will be a disturbing and threatening tone, but not necessarily sadistic or sexual. Therefire, we will probably pick a 15 age bracket.