Sunday 14 October 2012

Relating Halloween to the 4 Theories

Tzvetan Todorov: This theory doesnt really work in Halloween, there is an equilibrium, this is the night of halloween and  which is then disrupted causing a disequilibrium, the disruption is when the boy kills the girl at the start or could be when someone breaks into the hardware store to retrieve a mask and a weapon. But then the end of the tale isnt resolved so there is no new equilibrium as the killer doesnt actually die, the characters think the he is, but then realise that he isnt where his body landed, this theory doesnt really work.
Vladamir Propp: In this movie you can say that there is an example for each of the 8 character roles so I feel that this theory does actually work, the ones you can say that it works for, is that there is a villain, hero, the doner, the helper, the princess, the dispatcher and also the false hero (this could be when the little boy kills the girl at the start of the movie).
Claude Levi-Strauss: In this movie there is a good use of binary opposites, the use of the binary opposites help makes the film more understanding, giving it a story and also help people know the genre of the film, it gives them a basic idea of what happens and who is in the film and also what causes the events in the film. this theory relates to Halloween very well, for example some of these are, good/evil, light/dark, normal/strange, sanity/insanity and civilian/killer
Bordwell and Thompson: This theory works well in Halloween, as there is a chain of events, occuring in time and space for example when the killer breaks into the hardware store, at the strat when the kid kills the girl, these are all examples of this. Identifying these events that happen during this film, help us understand the genre of the film, just from viewing these events in the film helps us immediately discover the film genre is Horror.
The theory that would be the best to use to analyse Halloween would be Bordwell and Thompson

1 comment:

  1. Lewis, this is very brief - a little too brief. Hopefully tomorrow's lesson will allow you to flesh it out a bit more.
    EllieB

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