Ian Fielding: The Difference between Comedy, Horror and Drama

After a great comedy, horror or Drama you should feel as though you have temporarily vanquished all the monsters that have oppressed you. Catharsis. So how do these storytelling strategies achieve this end?

For the example I’m going to take one of our times great unresolved terrors, cancer, and see how different story approaches, and in a wider sense, different life approaches, colour the subject in different ways.

First, comedy: it shows you the indifference towards the sufferers. The condition is made light of or ignored completely. Then in horror, we can given little more then the word cancer and the rest is left to our imaginations. Or our anxieties are given the horror image itself, cancer’s actual manifestation in the body, the visual of the tumour. Then finally, for tragedy or Drama, we are shown the crushed desires of the sufferer, the things that could have been done to prevent the illness and the people left behind. The subject remains the same but the attitude generates laughter, fear or tears.

My name’s Ian. I’m a writer and Filmmaker from London currently shooting my second feature film – a detective thriller called Dead Unicorns

To see pics, a trailer and what’s currently happening with Dead Unicorns click here:

http://deadunicornsfilm.wordpress.com

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