| Fear is one of the most basic and important human emotions. At very beginning of movie history in 1895, when the audience first saw the Lumieres Bothers' The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station on the big screen, almost the entire audience tried to escape from the theater. The image of the approaching train caused fear. To intensify feelings of fear in the audience, film artists use sound, lighting, timing, motion and other stylistic devices. Among the wide range of film genres, especially horror movies aim to trigger a physiological and psychological response of fear in the audience. Within the genre, horror films differ widely from each other based on their time period, sub-genre, and regional differences including religious and cultural motifs. There many different ways of investigating how horror movies accomplish to terrify and horrify an audience, for example, via an analysis of plots, characters, and dialogue. This thesis examines what constitutes the different cinematic styles of horror movies -- color/lighting, time/motion, spatial relationships, and sound -- in different horror movies. The result of my research is presented in an interactive visualization of cinematic aesthetics that enables a cinematic student to explore the patterns of how those elements are applied on the screen and can ultimately trigger and influence an audience's mood. |
