One of the goals of the filmmaker is to engage his or her audience and to elicit some emotional reaction. The horror film is a genre which has as its goal the specific emotional reaction of fear. If a horror film is successful, it achieves this response immediately. To accomplish this, the horror film seeks to evoke primal terrors in the viewer, terrors such as come in nightmares, central fears in our lives, and to do so in a setting touching on the uncanny, the excessive, the supernatural, the truly amazing. Filmmakers use a variety of types of image, fearsome ideas, and primal elements to create the horror film, and this commonly means characteristics such as violence, monsters, evil, unresolved tension, gore, the unknown, disgust, and bloody spectacle. An example of one way of accomplishing this task can be found in Night of the Living Dead, directed by George Romero in 1968.
Night of the Living Dead would generally be characterized as a horror film rather than a science fiction film even though there is an element of science fiction in the plot. The latter element derives from the fact that the change that comes over segments of the population begins with a virus from outer space. The central focus of the film is not on technology or scientific concepts, however, but simply on the horror of what those affected become and how they kill and eat victims. Some critics see a moral issue in the film, which they say uses gore and graphic violence in order to show that evil stands outside the sphere to which moral judgments can be applied: "Through the film's main characters, Romero gives us a society where the family is diseased, authority is laughable . . . and equality is non-existent . . ." (James 1). Part of the horror derives from the inevitability of the evil, which seems unstoppable and which is challenged indeed by good people who are ineffective and impotent in the face of their fear.
The film systematically tea...