Theme's of Horror Films

There are many different ways in which horror films are themed. For example some could be to do with psychological effects or some could be to do with a certain someone being possessed by and evil spirit. There are a lot of different themes that you can base your film around.

One of the main ones is obviously going to be good versus evil. This is the base layer for most film creators and it is normally a running theme for most horror films. A good example for a horror film with the typical good versus evil would be "A Nightmare On Elm Street". This has the typical good versus evil because of the serial killer named Freddy Krueger who finds and kills people in their dreams, resulting in their real death in reality. Although this could be classed as a psychological thriller as well it still maintains that sense of good and evil throughout. 

Another genre of horror film is "religion". This is normally based around the ways of Christianity and the church. A brilliant example of this theme would be a film called "The Exorcist". This film is all based around taking a devil spirit out of an innocent young child's body. The family then try and use an exorcist as a way of trying to get the demon out of her body. The exorcist is a priest who tries disconnecting evil spirits from human bodies. Religious films like this are horrific because of the methods that they use, and because religion goes back thousands of years ago, they use very dated methods and ways in fairly modern times. 

Another theme for a horror/thriller film is insanity. This is where either a normal person that turns insane, or a person that is naturally insane, either way they both have horrific outcomes. An example of a film based around insanity is "The Shining". In this film the father of a family of three goes insane because of evil spirits influencing anger on his personality. This goes from one extreme to another, he starts out as a nice family man and a good husband and father and then suddenly turns in to this psychotic killing machine that just wants to destroy everything. This theme always has a hard hitting effect on the audience because of the scary change that takes place in this persons mind.