Action Horror Narrator

Basic Trope: A story in which the character(s) decide(s) to fight back against the horror. Straight: A group of people trained and properly equipped for combat attacks and kills an otherwise horrific monster with relative ease. Exaggerated: The group of people are able to defeat any supernatural monster with surprisingly little losses and little resources. Even a basic pistol can put these monsters down without an issue. Downplayed: Even a single monster takes the most powerful weapons, a bunch of ammunition, and the right skill to take down from a group of trained soldiers. Justified: The group of monster hunters was trained by the United States Government in case a situation like a horrific, supernatural monster outbreak would ever occur. Inverted: The monsters assemble a group to fight against the horrific and generally more powerful humans invading their world. Subverted: When the group of monster hunters shoot at the monster, their attacks are easily shrugged off. Double Subverted: ...that is until they whip out the BFG, and the monster turns into complete and utter paste. Parodied: The group of monster hunters is made up of martial artists that easily dispatch of even the toughest Eldritch Abominations with nothing but punches and kicks. Zig-Zagged: Continuing from the Inverted example, the United States Government sees the monsters assembling a group to defend against them, and so they decide to train monster hunters as soldiers and wage an all-out war against them. With some martial artists for good measure. Averted: The Big Bad obtains an artifact that makes non-human, animal predators extremely likely to attack and kill people. Every character in the story just chooses to run and hide from them. Enforced: The executives figure that people will find pure Survival Horror too boring, or too scary. Therefore, they go for a more action-oriented approach. Lampshaded: "I'm not sure why bullets are this effective on these tentacle monsters, but I ain't complaining!" Invoked: The Big Bad intentionally brings monsters into this world and equips people with the weapons needed to fight them so he can make money off their continued survival, whilst enjoying the bloodbath. Exploited: Our Anti-Hero protagonist was a believer in the supernatural before the monsters started attacking. They figure fighting back against them will give them the chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of the public. Defied: The Big Bad is aware that once they summon the monsters, people will try to fight back against them. So, they try to find a way to make their monsters immortal/invincible so that they cannot be harmed. Discussed: "Dude, if supernatural monsters invaded Earth, would there really be any way we could survive that doesn't involve running or hiding?" Conversed: Two characters have a casual conversation about the possibility of fighting back against supernatural monsters, but their discussion is unrelated to the current story. They contemplate the idea of specialized monster hunters and acknowledge the slim chances of survival, ultimately dismissing the notion as unrealistic and more like something from movies. Implied: Our story starts at the ending of an Action Horror story, showing the dead bodies of the monsters lying the streets, as well as the dead people and ruined buildings. The rest of the story is focused on the reconstruction of an apocalyptic event. Deconstructed: While the group can handle one monster just fine, they have great trouble fighting against multiple monsters. If they end up winning, it's not without a great loss in resources and possibly lives of the group, as well as mental and physical trauma to deal with. Reconstructed: Their friends, family, the thankful survivors, and what remains of the government help the group as they're helping them to the best of their ability, and afterwards they try their best to give them the support and help they need. Played for Laughs: Our lone hero easily defeats every single monster he comes across with nothing but a single slap. Played for Drama: Continued from the Deconstruction example, while they do win, it's not without its toll on our former heroes. Only a couple of them remain, and those that do end up in psych wards, or end up committing suicide. Played for Horror: After our heroes win against the supernatural monsters, they themselves are not the same. Through the violence and horrors they experienced, they regress into their base instincts from sheer insanity. They become violent, and kill innocents with little provocation. They end up no better than the monsters they fought.

MEDIA EXAMPLES

The Blood franchise (Blood: The Last Vampire, Blood+ and Blood-C) features an Action Girl named Saya who usually wears a Sailor Fuku and wields a katana that can kill vampires. Digimon Ghost Game: The show is an action series like all previous entries. However, Ghost Game also plays the concept of Digimon attacking humans for horror, with all manners of terrifying imagery and situations. Hellsing: The story deals with the Hellsing Organization and their mission to protect humanity from monsters like vampires and werewolves. There is blood, gore, nightmarish imagery, and gun fights, often courtesy of Alucard, who is literally Count Dracula himself as a '90s Anti-Hero. Highschool of the Dead has a group of high school students and a nurse who are all capable of fighting against zombies. While it looked like a Survival Horror at first, the series leans to more action once the main cast armed themselves with guns, courtesy of the nurse's friend who is a police officer. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The first two parts, Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency, are Shōnen action stories with strong horror elements as the antagonists are extremely powerful vampires. Thankfully, the heroes use a Supernatural Martial Art which lets them wield The Power of the Sun against their undead foes, but it's made very clear how helpless and outmatched the Innocent Bystanders and Red Shirts are against them. This is topped with a hefty dose of Body Horror, especially when the Pillar Men are involved. Horror elements are much rarer in the later parts, however. Summer Time Rendering starts off as a supernatural thriller with eldritch shapeshifters and Survival Horror elements, but the action ramps up significantly at the halfway mark of the story when the main antagonists become aware of the time loops and start actively hunting down the main cast. Fortunately, by this point the heroes have obtained the means to rally enough allies together and start fighting back. Hack/Slash: The main premise of the series is about the former Final Girl turned Action Girl Cassie Hack and her partner Vlad going around the country and taking down any and all Slashers that they can find. Justice League Dark: The comic combines typical superhero action with stories of magic, demons, and otherworldly nightmares. The second volume by James Tynion IV especially plays up the horror elements to contrast with the more traditionally superheroic characters like Wonder Woman and Zatanna. Marvel Comics: Blade is a dhampyr who seeks to exterminate vampires. All of the bloody, creepy aspects of vampires are still here, with Blade throwing in swords and gunplay to fight the undead menace. This is what the story becomes whenever Carnage enters the scene. As a nigh-immortal Serial Killer with Lovecraftian Superpowers, Carnage is the horror. And he's more than willing to take on any Action Hero brave enough to try and stop him. Ghost Rider is, in most of his incarnations, a motorcycle stuntman who sold his soul to the devil, resulting in him being fused with a demon (or sometimes a fallen angel, which may or may not be the same thing) with a flaming skeleton appearance tasked with hunting down the Devil's bounties, including other demons and monsters. The character and his exploits deal heavily with the horrors of Hollywood Satanism, all while fighting evil with chains, guns and Hellfire. Vampirella: The titular character is a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire who defends humans from other monsters, similar to Blade. Many if not most stories have a great deal of action in them, with the '90s comics being very big on fight scenes. Hillbilly is about a Witch Hunter wandering through a Dark Fantasy / Fantasy Americana version of rural Appalachia. The witches are wicked, the Fearsome Critters are fearsome, and there's a whole host of nightmarish monsters around every corner, but Rondel the Wandering Hillbilly is always up to the challenge. As noted above, Aliens. The increased combat capabilities of the protagonists are met in kind with a lot more xenomorphs to fight. The Alien vs. Predator films did the same. Army of the Dead is about a group of armed mercenaries infiltrating a zombie-infested and walled-off Las Vegas to break into a casino's vault and recover the money inside for its owner, who lost his casino when Vegas was overrun. Their enemies also include Alpha Zombies who are smarter, faster, stronger, and more brutal than the common variety. The Blade Trilogy follows a Dhampyr played by actor/martial artist Wesley Snipes who fights and kills vampires. John Carpenter, a filmmaker known for working in both action and horror, has mixed the two genres in the past. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) is an example that goes in the opposite direction from most: instead of action heroes battling horror movie monsters, it's the basic plot of Rio Bravo (a group of lawmen besieged by a heavily armed gang) Played for Horror. John Carpenter's Vampires, an adaptation of John Steakley's novel Vampire$. Carpenter said that his goal was to specifically do a horror Western, while also mocking the more humanized depictions of vampires in contemporary fiction. Ghosts of Mars, in which Space Police and the dangerous criminal in their custody battle Martian colonists possessed by the spirits of the aliens who lived there. Cloverfield is what happens when you do a kaiju movie as a straightforward horror movie. The destruction of New York landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, the Woolworth Building, and the Brooklyn Bridge is paired with the giant monster being kept in the shadows and only seen in brief glimpses until the end. Cobra was, according to its star and writer Sylvester Stallone, an attempt to combine a police action movie with a Slasher Movie. The protagonist Marion "Cobra" Cobretti is a Cowboy Cop protecting a model named Ingrid from a Serial Killer known as the Night Slasher, whose attacks are often staged like something right out of a slasher flick as he stalks his prey with a signature customized knife, and who is also leading a Manson-inspired cult of serial killers with a social Darwinist worldview. Day Shift follows vampire hunters in the San Fernando Valley tracking down vampires while they sleep in a manner straight out of John Wick (which some of the film's producers previously worked on), complete with wooden bullets and buckshot, silver razor wire, garlic gas grenades, and a minigun along with bounties for each one they kill. Deep Rising has a group of mercenaries board a luxury ocean liner with the intent of robbing the passengers, only to find themselves in a pitched battle against a swarm of giant worm-like creatures (actually the feeding tentacles of a single monster) that have already eaten most of the people on board. Dog Soldiers pits a squad of British soldiers on a training mission against a pack of werewolves. Doomsday (from the same director as Dog Soldiers) is Escape from New York in Scotland, while adding a lot more horror elements like cannibal gangs, a Dark Fantasy motif (albeit more sci-fi/post-apocalyptic) with the ex-scientist turned warlord/king Marcus Kane, and tons of gorn. Some of the films of El Santo edge into this, pitting the famous Masked Luchador against classic movie monsters. Of these, Santo Contra Las Mujeres Vampiros (or, as it's known in the English dub, Samson vs. the Vampire Women), is probably the best-known outside of Mexico. Imagine a Universal Horror movie punched up by occasional wrestling matches. The Evil Dead series starting with the second film, an Actionized Sequel to and loose remake of the first that combined this trope with Denser and Wackier to turn its protagonist Ash into a snarky, wiseass Action Hero. The third film, Army of Darkness, combined this with medieval fantasy action on top of it. The Ghost and the Darkness, based on the true story of John Henry Patterson and the Tsavo maneaters (a pair of lions who killed 28 people), is about a big-game hunter/engineer tasked with building a railway through Uganda. He must contend with two man-eating lions who begin preying on his work force shortly after his arrival and whose ability to elude all attempts to bring them down borders on the supernatural. The Darker and Edgier installments in the Godzilla franchise often veer into this territory from the action side, depicting a kaiju attack as a horrifying event comparable to an atomic bomb or a natural disaster and emphasizing the sheer body count and national trauma that such a thing would cause. The original 1954 film, of course, was the trendsetter here, portraying the titular monster as an apocalyptic force of nature that most human weapons are completely useless against. While most later films would focus on action spectacle and Behemoth Battles, a number of films (especially reboots) would return to the 1954 film's grim, horrifying tone, most notably The Return of Godzilla, the 2014 American adaptation, Shin Godzilla, and Godzilla Minus One. Jurassic Park (1993) is a Sci-Fi Horror movie combined with an Action-Adventure film, in which the dinosaurs are first used to leave viewers awestruck before they break out and start attacking people in scenes staged in a manner straight out of an old-fashioned monster movie on a much bigger budget. The sequels, meanwhile, swung towards straightforward action, with a focus on fights between large dinosaurs as well as dino rampage scenes inspired by kaiju films. Little Dead Rotting Hood: The movie is about the people of a small town dealing with constant wolf attacks. There's also guns, and an epic battle at the end against the Denmother. Malignant goes from a supernatural horror film to this in the second half once the villain Gabriel's true nature is revealed. A scene set in a police station has Gabriel singlehandedly demolish everybody in the station lockup followed by the entire police force, shot in such a manner that makes it clear that director James Wan was putting his experience making blockbuster action flicks to use even as he returned to the horror genre. Maniac Cop 2 is an Actionized Sequel to the first movie that combines a Slasher Movie plot with numerous action scenes, including car chases and a scene where the titular villain storms the police station Terminator-style. Overlord (2018): During World War II, a group of Allied paratroopers infiltrate enemy lines on the night before D-Day. What follows is a standard war movie until it is revealed that the Nazis have developed a serum to produce undead super soldiers. The film balances the gunfire and explosions with both sci-fi Body Horror and the very real horror of Nazi occupation and experimentation. Pitch Black, at first glance, is a simple Alien riff, but with one key difference: the protagonist Richard B. Riddick, a Proud Warrior Race Guy with superhuman night vision played by Vin Diesel at the height of his early '00s Action Hero fame. The sequel The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) was a full-blown Space Opera, though the subsequent film, titled simply Riddick, returned to this one's action-horror roots. In the Predator series, the titular aliens are a Proud Hunter Race who specifically target humanity's elite warriors to fight. The result: mercenaries in Central America in the first film, LAPD cops and gangsters in the second, a motley crew of soldiers and criminals in the third, the US military in the fourth, and a group of Comanche warriors in the fifth all thrust into a Hunting the Most Dangerous Game scenario against aliens who hunt like Slasher Movie killers, saving the laser blasters for emergencies in favor of blades that make the fight more fair and interesting. The Purge entered this with its sequels. While the first film was contained to a single house and played out like a conventional home invasion movie, later films and the TV series more fully explored the premise of there being one night a year where all crime was legal, and focused on people fighting to survive amidst the urban anarchy and mayhem that characterized the titular holiday. Renfield (2023) is an action / horror / comedy that follows Dracula’s servant as he fights cops and criminals in the modern day while trying to find a way out of his toxic relationship with his master. The Resident Evil Film Series veered heavily in this direction. The protagonists in the first film are commandos hired by the Umbrella Corporation to put down a T-Virus outbreak in their lab, along with an amnesiac woman named Alice who turns out to have been a badass Action Girl. In the sequels, Alice is made explicitly superhuman while the threat is turned up to apocalyptic levels. Robowar is a cheap Italian knockoff of the original Predator, with a team of commandos in an unspecified island location fighting an elusive but very clunky robot. The Seventh Curse, a Hong Kong film based on the Wisely and Dr. Yuen series of pulp novels, have the hero, Dr. Yuen, uncovering an evil cult whose High Priest practices Human Sacrifice and regularly has hundreds of children ground alive in rituals to maintain his power. There's plenty of shootouts and action sequences (including an Indy Escape in a cavern), but also plenty of supernatural elements, jump scares, zombies, and a final battle against a powerful flying demon. There's also a heavy dose of Horror Comedy. Snakes on a Plane, the entire marketing hook for which was Samuel L. Jackson in full BAMF mode fighting a horde of venomous snakes aboard a passenger jet. The Terminator was a Slasher Movie in which the killer was a robot who used guns as his weapons of choice. The sequels, however, were straightforward action films. Tremors is a Genre Throwback to '50s monster movies whose main standout feature is its recurring supporting character Burt Gummer, a Properly Paranoid Crazy Survivalist who, over the course of the series, slaughters scores of Graboids with his massive assortment of weapons to the point that he becomes an expert on them. The Underworld films took the Urban Fantasy genre in this direction, using the supernatural powers attributed to vampires and werewolves in folklore to stage superhuman fight scenes between them. Universal Horror: The 1999 and 2017 remakes of The Mummy. The former was a Two-Fisted Tales Action-Adventure flick that happened to feature Imhotep as the Big Bad wielding the Curse of the Pharaoh, while the latter featured a Creature-Hunter Organization called Prodigium as major supporting characters. Van Helsing features the legendary monster hunter as he battles the classic Universal monsters throughout the world, using various steampunk gadgets and weapons. Dracula Untold, an origin story for Dracula in which he embraces vampirism to fight back against the invading Ottoman Empire. VFW, which can be described as Assault on Precinct 13 IN A VFW POST! A young woman, seeking revenge on the gang leader who killed her sister, steals a massive shipment of drugs from his safe and flees into a VFW post where a group of aging Vietnam veterans (and one Korea vet) are celebrating the birthday of one of their own. The gang leader responds by commanding an army of junkies to besiege the post with the promise of drugs in return, forcing the veterans to once more fight for their lives against The Horde. War of the Worlds (2005) is a Disaster Movie take on the idea, one that takes the basic Alien Invasion premise of H. G. Wells' original novel and plays it for horror. Scenes of aliens destroying a city, battling the Army, and attacking a ferry boat are all depicted from the perspective of an ordinary father and his kids trying to survive, who find themselves helpless and terrified in a manner evocative of the 9/11 attacks. We Have a Ghost is largely a Horror Comedy. However, the second half adds elements of gunplay and chases as government agents and the ghost’s killers become involved. Willy's Wonderland is a film heavily inspired by Five Nights at Freddy's in which a night janitor at a Suck E. Cheese's joint must fight off the restaurant's Hostile Animatronics when they try to kill him. The main difference from Five Nights at Freddy's is that he's played here by Nicolas Cage as a laconic drifter whose response to the animatronics isn't to hide in the security office, but to singlehandedly demolish them with anything he can get his hands on. The film adaptation of World War Z used this to showcase the global scale of the Zombie Apocalypse, with scenes of zombies overrunning Philadelphia, Newark, Manhattan, the DMZ in South Korea, Jerusalem, and an airliner fleeing Jerusalem. The original ending was supposed to revolve around a Big Badass Battle Sequence where the Russian military retook Moscow from the zombie hordes that had overrun the city, but this was removed from the final edit in favor of a smaller-scale, more horror-focused third act at a lab in Cardiff. Yakuza Apocalypse: The film is about a Yakuza group whos leader is a vampire, and passes his Vampirism on to his most loyal enforcer upon his death. There's a lot of martial arts and fighting in the movie.