Reading horror movies

Polysemy - Texts are open to different interpretations. Horrors are often deliberately ambiguous.

Stuart Hall was a cultural theorist, political activist and sociologist who lived and worked in the UK from 1951. He developed  Hall's Theory of encoding and decoding. This approach to textual analysis focuses on "the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience". Meaning that the audience does not simply passively accept a text.

The producer encodes a meaning and the reader decodes the meaning.

A problem for horror movies is the encoded meaning could be received in the way it was intended by contemporary audiences but misinterpreted by modern audiences.

Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author

•  Argues that writing and creator are unrelated
•  Argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity e.g. their political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other personal attributes
• "To assign a single, corresponding interpretation to a text is to impose a limit on that text".

Possible Readings
This is how media can be interpreted

1. Preferred/dominant reading = The audience uncritically accepts the intended meaning of the text
2. Oppositional = The audience rejects the message
3. Negotiated = The message is partly accepted and partly rejected
4. Aberrant = Not understanding or interpreting any message

Horror films arouse strong positive and negative readings. Horror movies can be easily misinterpreted for example, the 1978 movie I spit on your grave was widely criticised for being sexist and misogynistic but the director intended it to be controversial and actually a feminist movie.

Controversial Horror

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) - One of the first found footage movies, in this group of anthropologists search for a group of people who made the first tape while looking in the jungle where a cannibal tribe are rumoured to live. 
The film was pulled from theatres after 10 days of release as the director was hit with obscenity charges and then a murder charge under allegations the deaths were real. Luckily for him he was able to find all the actors to prove they weren't actually murdered

The Exorcist (1973) - A young girl is possessed by a demon and holy men try to rid her of the demon.
Even though people were much more accustomed to the loosening restrictions on sex and violence, the exorcist shocked audiences with its sexual scenes and violence with many moviegoers reportedly having heart attacks and even dying and was banned in the UK for a decade

The Human Centipede (2009) - A German surgeon kidnaps 3 tourists and sews them together mouth to anus creating a conjoined organism
The director went looking for controversy using a 100% medically accurate gimmick and creating a 'Nazi' experiment feel. When the movie premiered people were sick in the aisles and some called for the sequel to be indefinitely banned. 

A Serbian film (2010) - A retired porn star is having money troubles and agrees to do one more film until he is led to an orphanage set
Anything that could be seen as controversial was put into this movie including incest, necrophilia, pedophilia and even a baby rape scene. Censor boards all over the world tried to stop anyone seeing this movie. 



Personally, I like horror films as long as they aren't based on the supernatural or paranormal just because I find jump scares too sudden. The fear is only momentary whereas in psychological horror the fear is constant because of the suspense. and that's what makes a good horror; suspense, a good plot and some morality.