The Modern era that we live in is largely marked by consumerism and the struggle for power and wealth. Each day brings new difficulties and people need a safe haven to get away from them for at least an hour or two. Watching films is one of the safe havens that are used as a distraction from problems. But not just any films. People mostly choose horror and disaster movies because they’d rather be frightened by a fictional monster than the problem in real life. That is one of the reasons why the genre of horror and disaster movies got so popular. All of us had watched at least a few of the monster/disaster genre movies in our life. Some people are obsessed with these movies while others would rather skip watching them. But in the end, the curiosity
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The disasters that most frequently occur in this genre are floods, earthquakes, asteroid collisions, accidents like shipwrecks and airplane crashes, catastrophes like worldwide disease pandemics or various types of vicious monsters. This movie genre became prominent in the 1970s, especially in the U.S. due to a large number of events such as the Watergate scandal, the environmental activism, fear of the end of the world and the culture of mistrust caused by political secrets and lies. Much of the information comes from the mass media and film being one of them has “an important role in social construction because people respond emotionally to what they see and they carry these positive and negative emotions with them into other socio‐political environments.” (Murphy, 1996) Every movie of this genre starts with a scene of a disaster emerging, the origin of which may be natural or man-made. The issue of corruption is the one to blame for the disasters because money is more important than human life. The characters are categorized as good or bad and the bad ones usually die as a punishment for their sins, while the good characters develop camaraderie when facing danger and manage to survive and save themselves as the disaster …show more content…
In The Towering Inferno people are saved from the danger, in Jaws the shark is defeated by the hero and in Dawn of the Dead the escape of Fran and Peter represents hope of surviving the apocalypse. The punishment of the “bad” characters in the movies can be defined by the dispositional theory mentioned above. In The Towering Inferno, the contractor who is responsible for the disaster died when he tried to force his way to safety. In Jaws, Quint is eaten by the shark because of his greed and over confidence while in Dawn of the Dead, Roger gets bitten by a zombie because of his recklessness, and in the end becomes one. Monsters, plagues and disasters may be a reflection of our fears as the third theory claims. The shark in Jaws might be a result of a nuclear waste, zombie plague a result of secret experiments and different man-made catastrophes caused by
The disasters that most frequently occur in this genre are floods, earthquakes, asteroid collisions, accidents like shipwrecks and airplane crashes, catastrophes like worldwide disease pandemics or various types of vicious monsters. This movie genre became prominent in the 1970s, especially in the U.S. due to a large number of events such as the Watergate scandal, the environmental activism, fear of the end of the world and the culture of mistrust caused by political secrets and lies. Much of the information comes from the mass media and film being one of them has “an important role in social construction because people respond emotionally to what they see and they carry these positive and negative emotions with them into other socio‐political environments.” (Murphy, 1996) Every movie of this genre starts with a scene of a disaster emerging, the origin of which may be natural or man-made. The issue of corruption is the one to blame for the disasters because money is more important than human life. The characters are categorized as good or bad and the bad ones usually die as a punishment for their sins, while the good characters develop camaraderie when facing danger and manage to survive and save themselves as the disaster …show more content…
In The Towering Inferno people are saved from the danger, in Jaws the shark is defeated by the hero and in Dawn of the Dead the escape of Fran and Peter represents hope of surviving the apocalypse. The punishment of the “bad” characters in the movies can be defined by the dispositional theory mentioned above. In The Towering Inferno, the contractor who is responsible for the disaster died when he tried to force his way to safety. In Jaws, Quint is eaten by the shark because of his greed and over confidence while in Dawn of the Dead, Roger gets bitten by a zombie because of his recklessness, and in the end becomes one. Monsters, plagues and disasters may be a reflection of our fears as the third theory claims. The shark in Jaws might be a result of a nuclear waste, zombie plague a result of secret experiments and different man-made catastrophes caused by