Have you ever thought about what makes a horror movie, a horror movie, Is it because of the fear it

instils in us or could it be the proverbial “monster” that is shown to create a sort of reputation for us
to fear. Whether it is someone who is trying to create a name for themselves in a not so pure of hard
way, or a person that is caught in a mental prison of their own lying consciousness in repentance for
past sins committed, when you watch horror a “monster” will always have a reputation to abide by.
When addressing such abnormalities media often leans on mental health/illness as an answer or
reason for particular peculiar behaviours without purpose, asking us whether they see it as anything
but a medium of storytelling in film. Therefore the films I will be speaking about will all have deep
connection to “the reputation of a monster” and “mental health representation”. 
 
The first film example I will be showing will be Scream a film released in 1996 and Directed by Wes
Craven. This movie is about a teenage girl (Sidney Prescot) who has lost her mother in a murder the
previous year, the murderers ends up being two of her friends (Billy Loomis and Stu Macher) and
now they are going on a killing spree against Sidney and everyone around them. Then just finally
revealed after he said “you see it’s a lot scarier when there’s no motive Sid” that the motive That
Billy has for killing is because of Sydney’s mother who had been having an affair with his father
therefore having his mother abandoned him, When Sidney asks Stu what his motive was in donning
the mask and killing so many people, he responds, “Peer pressure. I'm far too sensitive.”, This
coming from a man who had put much enthusiasm into the killings shows us quite well how much
effort and the enjoyment they got out of becoming the monster and creating a state of emergency.
The quote from Billy “eternal abandonment causes serious devious behaviour, certainly fucked you
up and made you have sex with a psychopath” followed by the quote from Stu “that’s right you gave
it up, now you're no longer a virgin. Now you gotta die, those are the rules.” Shows the great lengths
they went through to seduce Sydney just so they could keep accurate to “the rules of horror” the
rules of horror being Never have sex, never drink or do drugs, never say “I'll be right back”, the rules
have been a recurring theme in most horror movies made, it tells us about the sin factor of the
victims which can show us why some of the victims are being killed giving reason to the monsters
seamlessly random killings. Stu quite often breaks the final rule of never say “I'll be right back”
showing us his attitude of what he's doing putting effort in to follow the rules so he could kill Sydney
but also someone breaking them as a form of humour giving him his iconic attitude, while you could
say that he is doing it for no reason at all you could also say that he feels the need to bring attention
to himself to create a sense of pride in what he's doing so people know who is and not as someone
who followed another through pressure, blend into the background and become unnoticed, giving
us his driving urge to create a worthy reputation and show ego 
 
The next film we are going to look at Is Halloween released in 1978 and directed by John Carpenter
and is about Michael Myers who as a child killed his sister. After officials sent him to a mental
institution for the next 15 years. However, the boy grows into a madman who escape. He returns to
his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night, and terrorizes the residents there
including the main character a babysitter named Laurie Strode. The first major time Michael does
something that would show his dedication to the role as the monster is when he reveals the many
dead bodies in the bedroom and his dead sisters Tombstone on the bed at the Wallace’s house to
Laurie, this shows us his true nature as a villain and monster. The main purpose of this is to create
fear in the victim right before he kills them, even after that when he finally does go in for a stabbed
with a knife and misses, whether this was on purpose or not to create a sort of more painful drawn
out death is up to interpretation. But no matter the case it is shown that he prefers his victims to
have fear inside them for he goes and kills them this being for self-indulgent because when he kills
his victims he wants his victims to hold fear in their minds so that the entire rest of their life all they
could think about is the fact that there is no escape from the icy grip of death that is Michael Myers.
The next example I would like to talk about is after he got shot and knocked down behind the bed
after chasing Laurie, when he inevitably does gets back up, he sits back up while maintaining a
straight posture even while he knows that he isn’t being watched. When this happens, it gives us as
the audience a split second of confusion where we don't know if Michael is doing this action for the
audience and whether he's aware of the fourth wall giving the director of the ability for us to
question whether we are being watched even for a short moment before we realise that for him to
do that would be impossible. This also shows us the fact that he is so entangled with his delusions
and self-reputation he believes that he must keep up appearances even without being witnessed by
others. This does confirm to us that weather big or small he does have some semblance of priorities,
in which one of them is to be feared, likely his 1 st. 
 
Next is shutter Island and movie released in 2010 directed by Martin Scorsese. Shutter Island is a
movie about a man (Teddy Daniels) who is a detective who takes a job for a missing patient in a
mental asylum on a small island, and the reason he takes this job was to find a man that used to be a
patient at the hospital (Andrew laeddis), that man had killed his wife, while being trapped on this
island by a storm he finds out that they are doing unethical experiments on the patients here, as he
tries to shut it down he finds out that they have apparently been a patient at this asylum for 24
months and that he share the same name  as the man he’s trying to fight, and for his wife and kids,
he had killed his wife who had drowned his kid. As always happens in the movie Teddy creates a
story to cope with the sins he had committed, he created a villain in his own mind with features that
could be associated with evil, a scar across his entire face representing the past evils that have left
marks on him, 2 different eye colours representing him as different since birth and burning down
schoolhouses telling us that the innocent isn’t something he’s afraid of killing. Creating an entity in
his mind to personify all of his crimes left him with a self that felt righteous enough to feel the need
to protect those around him, even a villain born from the mind, he even tells his partner that
Andrew is a “firebug” showing us the true separation of both his selves, showing that with every sort
out “Villain” with a clear evil to them there could also be a fully thought out “Hero” with the feel of
evil left from them, and it may sometimes not be easy to tell them apart. 
Watching all these movies and doing the research and detecting the origin of the fear they cast their
reputation seems to create fear, this is showing that no matter what you watch horror wise you
won’t know how to be afraid if you don’t know why do be afraid. With this information you could
drive home a statement talking about how this relates to our society as a whole, given that many
people in this world seem to act without knowledge and get many people hurt or disadvantaged
because of their negligence informing yourself on the information necessary for task is the best way
to prepare for something you’re not ready for. For example, I truly Believe that after the main hit
from COVID-19 entire world has seen the dangers that viruses and contagions because better
preparing ourselves for the future. Power is preparation, Preparation is knowledge and Knowledge
is power 
  
Psycho is a movie that was released in 1960 directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho is a movie about a
woman named Marion Crane after stealing $40,000 from her employer so that she could run away
with her boyfriend Sam Loomis, while driving on the back roads to avoid the police she becomes
very tired, so she stopped at the ramshackle Bates Motel. Well here he meets the owner of the
motel Norman Bates a young man that lives with his mother, he has an interest in taxidermy and
after meeting Marion he offered her a room next to his office so that he could peek on her
undressing through a hole in the wall conveying to us his unwholesome affection towards Marion.
Being shown this side of Norman so early after meeting him really gives us as an audience a feel for
the directors mindset, being that almost immediately after introducing this warm hearted kind
person immediately turns into discussed as we realise that he is after all just another sick and
twisted person like everyone else, while also conveying the feeling that he is unlike everyone else at
the same time, giving us a early hint that nothing is as you expect and the people you see may not be
exactly what you expect. Afterword’s Marion would have a shower and as she was cleaning herself a
silhouette of a person walks in the bathroom with a knife in hand, then proceeds to kill Marion in the
shower. After this they walk into the house and Norman screams at his mother that she has blood all
over her, Norman would walk down to Marion’s room to see her dead on the bathroom floor, after
seeing that she had been killed he would take his body and the $40,000 that Marion had wrapped in
a newspaper and thrown them in her car, afterword’s he would drive the car into a bog to hide the
body. At the end of the movie it is revealed that Norman’s mother had been dead for a long time
and that the Silhouette the had scene in the bates house window could not have been that of
Norman’s mother. After they sneak into Norman’s house it is revealed that Norman had Dissociative
Identity Disorder in which he believed himself to be his own mother and that it was him that had
killed Marion. While Norman having DID gives us a reason for his murders it also tells us about the
representation of mental illness at the time of the movie’s release, that Norman mother’s
personality killing all the women that he had fallen for, can be seen as almost a comment against the
problem of mental health, telling us that for someone to have mental health issues or illness, they
would have to be ready to cause danger as shown by Normans disliking of his mother’s lover.  
 
Continuing with Halloween 1978 We are going to talk about the mental instability of Michael this
could be started at the very beginning of the movie where after we can assume he has come back
from trick-or-treating Halloween night 1963 he sees his sister making out with what we assume is
her boyfriend afterwards they began to run up the stairs  presumably because they are going to have
sex, after seeing this Michael walks through the unlocked and open  back door and pulls open a
drawer in the kitchen and then grabs a knife, afterwards he begins to walk upstairs into the bedroom
of a sister while she is naked and brushing her hair puts on a mask and then proceeds to stab her
multiple times then walks down stairs and outside to a police officer that takes off his mask showing
his face. Looking at this scene shows you the beginning of a psychopath, making a serious decision in
a split second, after walking down the stairs to the police officer and having his mask ripped off you
see his face and the expression that holds an expression of unknowingness, an expression that tells
us that he does not understand the importance that this decision would have on his life, yet being
impressed with himself for pulling it off. Throughout this movie it seems the director is telling us that
not only does insanity create murderers, but murderers create insanity. When the police rip off the
mask from Michael it shows us that the mask itself was symbolism and that when he went upstairs
to kill sister he grabbed something to hide himself from his actions not to spare himself from guilt,
but to make himself a separate entity, this is backed up by the fact when later on in the movie his
masks get moved from his face and his first reaction is to put it back on. Through these actions the
director tells us that with something as simple as a mask to hide themselves they can become
something that is almost nonhuman a “monster” something that can no longer be classified with
everything else. 
 
Once again we are going to dissect the inner meaning of Shutter Island and the mental state that the
main character is in and how it represents its self. Whether it had been real or not Teddy was
offered the opportunity to leave shutter Island after he thought he was in danger. For him this would
have been the ideal solution, but because of his current mental state in which he believed himself to
be a loyal sinless man of empathy, he tries to escape the offer so he could find his “partner” and
while this is a good move in his character. Once he gets to the Lighthouse which he had theorised
there to be experiments on the human brain going on, it turned out that they had expected him to
come to that location where it would be revealed to him that he had been a patient at the hospital
institution for 24 months this is something that teddy would not believe, until his “partner” had
walked in the room revealing himself as Teddy’s primary psychiatrist Leicester Sheehan. This gave
Teddy a feeling of extreme betrayal is if he had been working against him, at this point he begins
showing cracks in his façade of a good man. after sitting down they explained to him that if he did
not break through permanently they would have to euthanising him. He quickly reaches for his gun
that is on the table as if this was a defence mechanism almost like a last stand for his eloquently
crafted manifestation of Teddy Daniels. After shooting Dr. Cawley you can see blood splatter on the
whiteboard behind them, but then it disappears as he realise that he’s having hallucinations and that
his gun is made of plastic and is nothing but a toy. as he snaped the gun in half. It seems as if the
integrity he had left seem to snap with it, as his body shakes and becomes extremely agitated he
attacks Dr. Sheehan. To prevent a fight Dr. Cawley shows Teddy pictures of his dead kids he didn’t
know he had, including a little girl that he has hallucinations of. This seems to have been the last
straw for Teddy Daniels. As the director breaks down the walls of his mental prison he trapped
himself in, he shows us glimpses into the mind of teddy or who is now Andrew. After waking up, Dr.
Cawley confirms with him if he had broken through the mental state and that hopefully he wouldn’t
have to relapse once more, the next morning he sets on the front steps of the hospital and speaks to
his partner as Teddy showing that he had relapsed into his old mind, as the man with the
euthanising needles walked towards them he spoke with his partner and said “you know this place
makes me wonder. Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or to die as a good man” this quote
alone speaks 1000 words it speaks about the decision of life and death, whether he believes he
deserves atonement, or whether he should pay for his sins with his life. The finish of this movie the
director has asked us and age-old question whether to die a hero or to live villain. 
Looking at the examples being shown throughout the movies and films provided, we can observe
that not only does the directors in film use mental illness representation as something other than a
medium for storytelling, they use it as a way to speak their own opinions and almost philosophies to
those who will listen. While this is represented in media, we can also speak of the same scenarios
when we are giving a topic like society, when many people are part of one thing, information can
really be seen as a resource that can be control. But with people that are open-minded and willing to
see what others are ignoring, you can really read what they are saying giving you information that
may be overlooked by others. I see this as not only a technique, but as a comment on the way we
live with each other and the world. 
 
While working through all these films so that I could find my connections and what they
represent in the real world such as the “reputation of a monster” and “mental health
representation in media”, I believe that the questions that I have asked like what makes,
horror, horror and, does media only see mental health as a storytelling device have been
answered in a sufficient degree where I could give answer such as, we are given a reputation
of a “monster” that we can fear and that without it we would be nothing but a
unknowledgeable creature not knowing why fear is appropriate, and that when considering
the mental health in media directors and such typically use it not only as a storytelling
device but I say way to truly speak to the audience. Whether there are people trying to
create a name of violent acts or a man of regret creating himself his own prison, there is
always a deeper meaning that can be found if you just take the time and look little closer.