Most common characters in horror films

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Most common characters in horror films

In most horror based films the main victim is normally an innocent young woman who possibly lives on her own, or with her partner, and the partner usually won’t believe that there are strange things happening to her until near the end of the film and then they will most likely die whilst realizing they were wrong. They will normally end up dying from doing something stupid, they normally end up going to inspect some strange sounds/movements and then get killed.

An example of this is in the film ‘Halloween’. A psychopathic man escapes from an sanitarium and start to kill a groups of students.

When the tension of the film starts to build, Jamie Lee Curtis is on her own in her house at night and the villain is not able to been seen only dark figures of him are shown.

Here is a link to the trailer of the film 'Halloween'.

There is sometimes a male character who plays the hero and will appear to be tough and masculine and will try to save the woman but will possibly die by doing so.

yet in some more modern film women heroes have started appearing to make the films different.

There will also be the villain who will be causing all of the scared and usually either ends up being defeated, appears to be defeated and maybe a sequel film will be made where they come back, or they could stays alive and kills everyone. This is the character/characters that will be the main part of the film and plays a big impact on how frightening the film is. the most common villains in horror films are things like: ghosts, vampires, zombies or possible people being possessed. Also in most cases there appearance won’t be shown and are wearing masks or only their figures are shown and maybe just quick shots of their faces.

An example of this is in the franchise of the Saw films.

The Jigsaw wears this mask when talking through video to his victims.

These films are particularly frightening because the Jigsaw is some sort of psychopathic man who puts a group of victims together and plays with them by making them go through stages of killing them or making them make the decision of dying or killing someone else in extremely gruesome ways, and in the end only 1 of them will survive.

Here is a link to the first of the 'Saw' films.

Also a quite common thing is to have a couple (boyfriend & girlfriend) who are usually really annoying and keep the audience frustrated and on edge to help build up the tension on the film as they make a lot of obvious mistakes, and would make the audience want to shout at them things like ‘no, don’t go in there!’.

There is sometimes also a character that pretends to be helping out but which in actual fact there are on the villains side and throughout the film it’s either really obvious what they’re doing or it will be a big twist at the end.