A Study On James Wan Horror Films Narratives

James Wen,the most productive director in filming Hollywood horror movies,made his debut of a master of horror movies by Saw,and proved himself the pioneer in the development of modern horror movies by later Insidious and The Conjuring.Regardless of the conversion of styles of movie from bloody violence,like Saw,to psychological fear,like The Conjuring,as well as the severe condemnation or respect he received,Wen actually impacted the business public tremendously and revoked the modern audiences’ affection and enthusiasm of horror movies.In this dissertation,I use Wen’s horror movie texts as the research content,penetrate the topic from the angel of narratology,and demonstrate the narrative method and style from characteristics,space-time and audio-visual elements.This dissertation consists of the following four chapters.Chapter 1 mainly focuses on the meaning and developing history of horror movie,and generally introduces Wen and the current research status.Chapter 2 researches the characteristics of Wen’s horror movies from topics,multi-perspective narrative methods and role shaping.Chapter 3 discusses the narrative space and time of Wen’s horror movies.In this chapter,I analyze the narrative time from the aspects of temporal distortion and narrative methods and discuss the narrative space from virtually and reality of space and space design.Audio-visual elements are analyzed in Chapter 4 with an emphases on the unique audio-visual language of Wen’s horror movies.More professional research about Wen’s narrative characteristics is described with respects of scenes,compositions of pictures,colors and sounds,to demonstrate the unique charisma of narrative present and aesthetic effect of Wen’s horror movies.