Monday 3 November 2008

Key words from the media vocab pack

1) Male gaze - term used by Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema" to describe what she saw as the male point of view adopted by the camera for the benefit of an assumed male audience.

The male gaze theory will be useful to my study because to this theory I can link the changing roles of women in slasher films.

2) Hybrid Genre - a cross between one film genre and another

Texas chainsaw massacre- the beginning can be classified as a hybrid genre film as it has elements of a thriller and also horror.

3) Binary opposition - a term used by Claude Levi-Strauss as part of his argument that narratives are structured around oppositional elements in human culture, for example good and evil, life and death, night and day, raw and cooked. Within many media narratives, common binary oppositions are cowboys and Indians and also gangsters and police.

This theory of Levi- Strauss is widely seen in all genres of movies every film within the horror genre has to be based upon a hero and a villain.

4) Feminism - political movement to advance the status of women by challenging values, social constructions and socioeconomic practices which disadvantage women and favour men.

Are women still being portrayed as they were earlier on in slasher films or have women taken up the male roles by proving the final girl theory?

5) New man -a term used to describe a new type of masculinity identified and developed by advertising media in the 1980's in line with lifestyle marketing strategies.

Are the roles of men also changing within the slasher genre as women are becoming more powerful and final characters to survive the horrific experiences?

6) Bridging Shot- A camera shot that shows a passage of time or change of location as a means of connecting one scene to another.

In TCM- the beginning the opening scene shows the birth of the villain and the next scene shows a total change of location and time span.

7) Uses and gratifications theory - an active audience theory, developed by Jay Blumer and Elihu Katz that focuses on 'what people do with the media' rather than what the media does to people, arguing that audiences are free to pick and choose from a range of media products to satisfy their own needs.

This theory will be useful to find out why people watch slasher films as it covers the different needs of the audience i.e. personal relationship, surveillance, personal identity etc.

8) Remake- A new version of a previously successful film that closely follows the original but adapts it in line with changing audience expectations.

The first TCM was released in 1974 and due to the success of that the next part was released in 2006 which could not live up to the expectations of the audience as the audience did not think as highly of this part then the historic one.

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