Secure and Paranoid Horror

After reading an extract from Steve Neale's 'Genre and Contemporary Hollywood' it has been made clear how through time, horror has developed into two catergories, secure horror and paranoid horror.

He says that horror prior to the 1960's used secure horror because it was scary enough, and from the 70's onwards horror "presumes a world in which the monstrous threat is increasingly beyong control" in order to please an audience whose thirst for the unknown is growing.

He catergories the characteristics of secure horror and paranoid horror in this table:

Secure Horror	Paranoid Horror
Successful human intervention	Failed human intervention
Effective expertise	Ineffective expertise
Authorities as legitimate	Authorities as unreliable
Sustainable order	Escalating disorder
‘external’ threats	‘internal’ threat
Centre-periphery organisation	Victim groups organisation
Defined boundaries	Diffuse boundaries
Closed narratives	Open narratives

 We think this is going to help us to decide what kind of horror we are going to do, and keeping to the characteristics of the horror that we decide.

By Emili Hone