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Horror and Slasher Films

Sara Johnson
Professor Marie Yerks
Composition 106
10 December 2009
Horror Films and Slasher Movies
In this paper, I will explore just how detrimental the short and long term effects of horror films can be. I will prove that the younger a person is exposed to the gruesome images in horror films, the more likely they are to suffer from nightmares, and anxiety, and exhibit violent behavior. The increasing gore in horror films are corrupting our youth by poisoning their minds. Horror films warp and distort their morality, judgment and even their sense of well being and safety.
Our generation is not easily impressed and they want better sound and better graphics. The competition is always on to make movies more realistic. The film industry has really gone to great lengths to please their audience’s growing demand for amazing movies. Horror films are a genre of film that has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. It is amazing how the horror films of our generation have set a new standard for future horror films. The gore has increased dramatically in the past few decades.
Horror movies in the 40’s and 50’s have never portrayed blood and if a victim was attacked the camera usually turned from the actual encounter and only shadows were seen. Horror movies in the 60’s evolved a little more and became more realistic. The horror films in those days had a little more gore and on displayed blood but again, the camera never showed really graphic scenes of someone being tortured or mutilated. Beginning in the 70’s and progressing through the 80’s and 90’s horror films developed more gore and blood. They also started showing guts “blood and guts” or the victim’s insides coming out of a person’s body. The plots also became more focused on violence as more and more of a horror films content was spent in violent imagery, both with violent scenes lasting longer and longer and occurring with more frequency. All this in response to the youth of that generation’s obsession with seeing more “blood and guts” on screen. Unfortunately, the next generation of the present, our generation, wanted more also. The infamous “Saw” movies took horror films in a new direction when they came to theatres in the 2000’s, bringing new meaning to gory horror films. Taking torture to a whole new level by making the victims choose between maiming themselves or dying a gruesome death. All with of course even greater graphic detail.
In the 40s and 50s, Dracula and Wolf man were men that targeted women, captured and killed them. In the 70s, The “Omen”, and “The Exorcist” were horror films where the demonic spirits possess young children and cause them to commit evil crimes like murder. 80’s horror movies introduced serial killers. “Nightmare on Elm Street” with “Freddy Kruger,” and “Friday the 13th”, with “Jason,” targeted males and females, but very interestingly teenagers. Removing adults who would complain about the level of violence from the audience, making young people identify even more with the violence, and at the same time making these movies the “must see” movies of the season for the young. The movie “Halloween” also has a man wearing a mask that targets and kills teens, male and female. 2000’s the birth of the saw movies where a man captures people (male and female) then he hooks them up to various torture devices and forces them to torture themselves by cutting off their own limbs etc…in order to escape the trap he has put them in.
These movies also continued a new trend from “The Omen” and “The Exorcist,” the plot theme that the “bad guy” really doesn’t die. Because they are sequels and the dangerous character is always resurrected somehow in the next movie. These movies begin to introduce ideas very subtly that can effect feelings of safety and well being, especially in younger and less sophisticated minds. Maybe Freddy is in your closet... danger is always lurking about… you’re never really safe… The introduction of subtle plot themes that can effect well being have continued with “Scream.” Your best friend may be planning to kill you… you can’t trust anyone… the enemy may be someone close to you that you trust… The trend has come up to the present in “Final Destination” where even fate itself may have it in for you. Even if you escape one violent death, another will continue to attack you until you finally succumb.
With the increasing gore in horror films now-a-days, our generation and the generation under us are slowly being desensitized to the value of human life. I will prove exactly how much psychological damage violent and gory horror movies have influenced teens and young children to imitate the horrific violence portrayed on screen.
Teens and young children are easily influenced. They are at the age where they are vey gullible and will believe almost anything, especially what they see on T.V. Teens and young children are also like sponges; they will imitate what they see and hear on T.V. I think children and young teens that are exposed to violent horror films are more likely to engage in violent activities. I also believe, seeing that kind of violence at a young age can have long term effects on them as adults.
By being exposed to violent horror films at a young age could possibly make them curious in a more sinister way. In extreme cases some young boys could try to act out what they saw in a gory film to see what it’s like to kill someone. It is apparent that horror movies affect a child’s psychological development. A child’s mind is prone to absorb what is displayed on screen. Studies and surveys have agreed that horror movies do indeed affect a child’s psychological development.
In “Horror Films: Tales to Master Terror or Shapers of Trauma?” American Journal of Psychotherapy (2007), authors, Bruce Ballon and Molyn Leszcz used many in-depth psychological examples to illustrate how a film can be incorporated into a person’s real life experiences. The article is very convincing in establishing the idea that many people are unable to keep the fantasy world of films separate from their real lives. In their article, they mentioned a troubled teenage male who killed a seven year old and drank his blood, after seeing it in a movie. The teen was suffering from post-traumatic stress and other mental, so he wasn’t able to differentiate fantasy from reality. The horror film only sparked the fuse that was already inside his brain in the first place.
It is no longer an opinion; it is a mere scientific fact that horror movies due indeed affect the adolescents’ mind. The images of blood, dismemberment, and torture will sit in a persons mind for years. After seeing a horror movie, odds are the graphic images will stay in your memory. The restraints are off in the movie industry. Scenes years ago, that would routinely haunt people, in comparison to today seem elementary. Things progressively evolve overtime and the movie industry is no exception.






Work Cited

Purdue OWL. "MLA Formatting and Style Guide." The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 10 May 2008. Web. 15 Nov. 2008.
Bruce Ballon, Molyn Leszcz. “Horror Films: Tales to Master Terror or Shapers of Trauma?”. American Journal of Psychotherapy (2007). Print
Saw VI. 2009. Film
Dracula. 1931. Film
The Omen. 1970. Film
The Exorcist. 1973. Film
Nightmare on Elm Street. 1980s. Film
Scream. 1996. Film
Final Destination. 2000. Film
Halloween. 2008. Film

The results of my survey

X-tra Credit Pics

Pictures

My Interview with Dr. Loeb

I interviewed psychology Professor Roger Loeb in his office at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. During my interview with Dr. Loeb, I noticed many beautiful pieces of art and souvenirs that decorated his office. I could tell Dr. Loeb loves to travel; each piece of art in his office came from a different country. He had a lamp from India, a stuffed animal parrot from Mexico, a beautiful quilt from Peru hung on his wall, and hanging from his ceiling I saw the most beautiful, colorful butterfly kite from China. I also saw many pictures of him and his family members, showing how family oriented he is. I also saw a picture of him smiling with a group of children from a different country; I could tell that he likes children. Professor Loeb is a very nice man; he smiles all the time he has a gentle, yet assertive presence. He is very knowledgeable about the field of psychology, his gray hair symbolizes his wisdom but he has very few wrinkles, he has a young spirit and is very down to earth. He is a very passionate teacher and he knows how to relate to his students and I think that is a very good quality to have as a professor.
Dr. Loeb has been a psychology professor for almost forty years but he was not as enthusiastic about teaching at the start of his career. He just sort of “fell into it”, as he describes. Even though he applied to graduate programs in psychology, his PhD is not in psychology; he actually doesn’t have any degrees in psychology. His PhD is in human development with a major in child and family psychopathology.
Through his first years of college Dr. Loeb had trouble making up his mind and what field he wanted to pursue; he studied political science at Cornell University, then discovered that he was no longer interested in being a pre-law major. He took a vocational interest test and the test suggested he be a lawyer, accountant or a social science teacher. He did not want to be a lawyer or an accountant, and at that time he did not even know what social science meant, but he figured it had something to do with sociology, so he took a sociology classes and loved it. He then decided to be a sociology/anthropology major, however, by the end of his junior year he started to prefer psychology.
When Dr. Loeb applied to the graduate program at Cornell University, he expressed that he was not interested in teaching. He wanted to work with and research emotionally disturbed children and families, but they offered him a teaching assistantship anyway; he accepted the offer because it was good pay. He was so nervous about teaching his first class, because he didn’t really want to teach. He did not prepare for his classes and did not teach by any of the readings, he changed the classes into discussion sections. “…the students started asking me questions and amazingly enough I knew the answers. Others I would turn into discussion questions, others I would say ‘that’s so important; I’ll get back to you next week’.” He said with a smirk. “The cutting edge therapies, many of which are biochemical, I barely understand and find confusing as do I think many students and I don’t think that’s really necessary in a first-time undergraduate class.”
When he noticed how engaged the student were in his class, he became excited. “They wrote everything down that I said, and they laughed at my poor jokes, and they all paid attention, and I thought ‘this is great! I love this!’” The light bulb went on, and Dr. Loeb changed his entire career plan at that point, during his second year of graduate school. He never wavered since then, he’s been teaching full time for thirty-nine years and still loves his job.
When I asked Dr. Loeb what interests him the most about psychology, he answered, “Why people behave the way they do, what it is particularly in their backgrounds that make them do these things like: want to learn or not want to learn, to be shy versus outgoing, submissive or domineering. My particular interest is parent/ child interaction, and I think that comes from my own childhood experiences; issues of control, issues of self-esteem. And I’m interested in those same topics applied to special groups.”
Dr. Loeb has done research with regular children, as well as children kids with sensory impairments, visual or hearing impairments and gifted children. He is mostly interested in gender differences; it is a variable he likes to study. “…and reflecting my sociology background, I’m also very impressed with the power of social class differences. Even within what America calls ‘broadly middle class’, the difference between lower middle class and middle to upper middle class, there are substantial differences.” Over the years Dr. Loeb has also become very interested in evaluating the impact of education. “…since I’ve been doing it for so long, I’m curious as to what educators actually accomplish. And I’m not so interested in what they accomplish intellectually or academically, but what changes they bring about in their students’ values, attitudes and approaches to life.”
Not only has Dr. Loeb been a professor for thirty-nine years, he was also a part-time practicing psychologist for a number of years. He was a therapist in graduate school, and he worked in a variety of settings. The first place he worked was in a program for dealing with mentally retarded children, he also ran parent groups for the parents of those children. Dr. Loeb ran parent groups for parents of children suffering from schizophrenia as well. In Michigan, he worked in a private clinic as a therapist for individuals, families and groups. Dr. Loeb found that the more he practiced therapy, the more he realized that he made the right choice in being a teacher. Dr. Loeb has no interest in being a therapist anymore but he does teach therapeutic assessment techniques to his students.
When I asked why he didn’t like being a therapist, Dr. Loeb answered, “A friend of mine, who is an excellent therapist, says ‘To be a good therapist, you have to be nosey.’ I think I wasn’t nosey enough. I am nosey about my friends; but people I didn’t know, I found I just wasn’t that interested. I also found it frustrating working with kids when I didn’t have access to their parents. And with adults, I found it frustrating because what seemed to happen over the months of seeing them…they didn’t seem to make a lot of progress; the same old issues kept coming up. The only thing that seemed to change is they seemed to become more dependent on me as a therapist, which was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish; and that is to make them independent. It’s very tough, I think you need a special kind of personality that I don’t have for being a good therapist.” He told me after seeing his clients, he was much happier to see his students.
Dr. Loeb started teaching at the University of Michigan- Dearborn in 1978. He teaches many courses, three every semester. The course I was mainly fond of was his Abnormal Psychology through Film class, because my paper has to do with the effects of films. Dr. Loeb created this particular class two years ago. He has been teaching normal psychology since his first year at the university and he was getting tired of doing the same course over and over. He also felt that he was a little out of date and since psychology is a rapidly changing field, he decided to teach his psychology class with a twist. Loeb also teaches a class called Psychology and Theatre; he found it to be very challenging and reinvigorating. “…Relating to theatre through film and there’s so much abnormal psychology in movies I thought it would be interesting for the students, interesting for me; I think it brings special things to the classroom…It makes it much more real than reading about it in textbooks, another thing that it brings, is that it shows the impact of the mental illness on family and friends, which you also don’t get from reading in a book. The third thing I think that some of the films do is they show the societal reaction to the person or persons with mental illness; that is how they are treated in the hospital, outside of the hospital. And those are issues of interest to me, given my interdisciplinary background. I’m very interested in societal reactions, family impact issues. And that’s something special that I can bring to the class.” The kind of movies he shows are primarily dramas, mystery and suspense; sometimes “slasher” movies but Prof. Loeb does not show many horror films because he finds them to be inappropriate for the classroom and the students react very strongly.

Answer to pg. 356

The name "Second Life" is referring to a virtual fantasy life that people can use as an escape from their real life. In your "Second Life" you are in charge. You can look however you want, you can have whatever job you want, you can really let your imagination soar in your second life. You don't have to worry about other people judging you, it's your own world where anyting goes.