A Corpus-Based Socio-Onomastic Analysis on Turkish and American Horror Film Naming

Both fear and horror have been extensively explored as universal unpleasant emotions with significant effects on psychological well-being. It is believed that horror is the feeling aroused when watching a horror film, and a sense of suspense and resolution is behind it. The present study explores how cultural, social, interactive, and cognitive contexts influence Turkish and American horror film naming. The present study aims to analyze Turkish and American horror film titles based on a socio-onomastic approach. So, 223 Turkish (1949-2021) and 2840 American (1898-2023) horror movie titles were investigated. The hypothesis was that Turkish horror film naming uses religious elements due to religious background. But according to the present study's findings, religious elements are also available in USA horror film naming. Yet, while making and naming their films, American horror film producers pay more attention to cultural events than Turkish filmmakers. On the other hand, the keywords used in naming Turkish and American horror films, regardless of their languages, were the same.


Introduction
Horror films have been one of the most popular genres (Wood & Lippe, 1979, p.13) even if we do not like watching horror films, we have an experience of what horror films are and what kind of experience they offer.Neither the horror movie genre nor the marketing term "horror movie" existed during the early days of cinema (Rhodes, 2018, p.10).The first American-made film featuring the devil was the Cavalier's Dream this particular devil seems to be the first horrorthemed character to appear in more than one American film, a type of repetition on which the later horror movie genre depended (Rhodes, 2018, p.129).Carroll (2003) considers horror, a genre that encompasses various art forms and media.He calls this type of horror "art-horror" and distinguishes it from natural horror.Novels, films, plays, paintings, and other works can contain the horror genre if they are marked by the presence of monsters.That is why Wood describes horror films as normality threatened by monsters which can change from period to period based on the society (Wood & Lippe,1979,p.14).These monsters can be of either supernatural or sci-fi origin (Carroll, 2003).
Horror films can reawaken old feelings and behaviors in us, such as fight or flight, dread of the dark, and a need for community (Kawin, 2012).Horror films are used to highlight unconscious fears, desires, and urges that are buried deep in our subconscious.They help us to release our anxiety and fears and burn our negative feelings and worries about the ordinary world (Park, 2018).
One of the motivations for watching horror films is to defy fear, explore the unknown, and have a particular pleasure connected to the mechanism of watching, which provokes imagination, guessing, and expectations while following the occurrences (Ammer, 2021).In horror films, the source of horror can include fear of the unknown, fear of the known that has turned out to be harmful, and fear of anything connected to damage (Asaad, 1990, p. 44).Much classic horror fictions were used to deal with a fear of the dark (Perron, 2009, p.1 9), then horror movies brought together the concepts of vampire and devil and set the foundation for future horror films entailing symbolisms of vampires, devil, and sorcerer (Kawin, 2012,).
Repeating these characters, settings, and other themes from one genre to the next adds to the appeal.The ghost from an original take on the ghost story is still there, and it carries ghosts from previous works and fresh opportunities to work with or against genre clichés.The same chances present themselves repeatedly in scenarios (Kawin, 2012).
Various terror situations are also restricting.It's nice to have a compelling explanation of why someone can't immediately leave town or rush to the police in the case of a real-world scenario (Perron, 2009).It seems that the first element in horror films that attract the attention of audiences before seeing it is the title.The title is the primary element by which a film is referred to and marketed, they are a source of inspiration, a tool for revision, and even a subtle hint for unsophisticated audiences (Haidegger, 2015, p. 425).Since these horror factors can change based on current events of society and the necessary changes of the day the present research takes a diachronic socio-onomastic approach toward naming Turkish and American horror movies to answer the following questions: 1. What are the frequencies of horror-related terms in the studied corpora? 2. What are the diachronic changes in the USA and Turkish horror film production? 3. Which creatures have been used in naming USA and Turkish horror films during past years?4. Which animals have been used in naming USA and Turkish horror films during past years?Over the past two decades, studies have provided significant, ground-breaking information on socio-onomastics.These studies have been conducted by scholars in human geography, creating a 'critical turn' in onomastics as a whole (Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009).Still, there is very little published research on the socio-onomastic approach, particularly in the case of movie titles.The following briefly describes studies on films and the socio-onomastic approach.
In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature on movies in the general sense and horror movies specifically.Bernstein (2007) identifies New York place names in movie titles.He considers titles as names; thus, onomastics should comprehend them.According to him, a title should summarize the movie's content so that potential audiences know about it.Most movie titles are short and easier to remember, so they have a significant impact.
Surveys such as that conducted by Gola-Brydniak (2011) indicate that a title is intended to promote a film and urge potential viewers to see it.Therefore, we can describe it as a component of advertising discourse.According to her, the length of a film's title can range from one lexeme to one phrase, which qualifies it as a subgenre of this discourse known as a slogan.So, the film title should remain in a more or less close relationship with the film plot to indicate its theme.
Falck-Kjällquist (2016) regarding cinema films mentions that several theoretical and practical problems are connected with the names in cinema films but does not explain further and merely mentions that at least 90 percent of cinema films are adaptions from literary sources.Gabrić et al. (2017) created a corpus of 935 film titles  and their translations into Croatian and German.Their findings indicated considerable differences over the decades in translation methods for movie titles.
Sa'eed and Jubran (2019) reported that in some horror films, men are portrayed as slaughterers who victimize women in various ways.Women, in general, play a significant role in most horror films and are almost always portrayed as the primary characters for fundamental reasons.Sun, Gao, and Tan (2020) [2010][2011][2012][2013][2014][2015][2016][2017][2018][2019][2020].She stated that the reference had the highest frequency, which indicated the producer's creation of a relationship between the content of Turkish television series and their titles.
The abovementioned studies presented thus far provide evidence that not many studies have been conducted regarding movie titles worldwide in recent years, and what they failed to do is to teach the social and cultural elements in these titles.

Theoretical Framework
Labov initiated the basic principles of sociolinguistics by publishing his landmark doctoral dissertation Social Stratification of English in New York City (1966).The social nature of language has provided a suitable platform for the birth of a new field of knowledge called sociolinguistics, which talks about the usage and function of language as a communication tool in society.
Meanwhile, a name is one of the most fundamental and unavoidable entities (Zandi et al., 2018).
Names come into being due to the particular culture and society in which they exist.Not only do they form part of the language, but also of a person's environment.People name objects that seem essential; thereby they exercise a certain level of control over their surroundings, ultimately making it part of their cultural identity (Ainiala, 2016).These names can include personal names, place names, plant names, food names, movie names, and many other names.Names serve a crucial societal function in addition to their function (Ainiala and Östman, 2017).Names are not just arbitrary symbols; they signify status, achievement, privilege, and meaningful social organization.They may communicate ethnicity, social status, and prestige, all understood as significant within social contexts.Since names provide meanings, they also guide activity by providing plans which transmit cultural knowledge and help us to choose among projects of action (Leslie and Skipper, 1990, p. 273).
In the present research, the point of departure is to study movie titles to indicate that they are also devices used to represent various social and cultural events.There are several reasons why a movie's title matters.It is what immediately grabs the attention of the audience, and they decide whether to watch the film or not.It has a significant impact on how audiences will remember the film.Moreover, it's essential for supporting and boosting sales and recommendations.
Terhi Ainiala has proposed that socio-onomastics encompasses personal and place names and examines how they vary according to social, cultural, and situational aspects.Then, to gain insight into socio-onomastics, derived techniques from sociolinguistics are employed (Ainiala, 2016, p. 2).Therefore, socio-onomastics adopt a systematic perspective on the dynamic analysis of names and look at how names are used.Weiss (2019) divides proper names into two categories of nosense and sense ones.In the no-sense, it is believed that names stand for particular objects with no meaning, while the sense ones have disguised descriptions and a referent.In socio-onomastics, we use the sense of name to indicate which elements and messages they are trying to convey.
Like every study, this study had its limitations.The first limitation was the horror film names, as different countries produce different numbers of films within a year.Therefore, while interpreting the data, authors were cautious and analyzed these two corpora separately and then started to find the common points regarding socio-onomastic.Another limitation of this study is that a new era has begun for Turkish horror cinema within the past few years, where more films per year are produced.Most studies primarily focused on the Islamic motifs of these films (Gjinali and Tunca 2020), and none have examined the naming approaches of these films.Last but not least is the severe deficiency regarding the socio-onomastic approach to naming the film naming in the review of the literature.

Methodology
In this study, American horror film names (n=2840) were collected from Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the online database of information related to films from (1898-2023) and Turkish horror film names (n=223) from  were collected from previously conducted article by (Bozkurt 2021).This study is devoted only to horror films, so other genres will not be studied.It should be noted that since the data of American horror film names outweighs the body of Turkish horror film names each copora was studied separately and their diachronic trends have been statistically evaluated.After collecting the data, the Key Word In Context (KWIC) lemma was extracted using text analysis tools.A lemma is usually found in dictionaries and represents the basic form of a word.Lemma belongs to the same basic word class; for example, the verb lemma walk consists of the words walk, walked, walking, and walks (Baker, 2006).The data for this research include two corpora of American and Turkish horror film names.Table 1 represents the details of these corpora regarding the highest frequent words.According to Table 17,921 words (tokens) and 2,528 unique word forms in the USA corpus and 441 total words (tokens) and 308 unique word forms in the Turkish corpus were studied.TTR (Type/Token Ratio) reveals more about corpus size than lexical repetition or uniqueness (Baker 2006).While the number of tokens in a corpus refers to the total number of words, the number of types refers to the total number of unique words.In the USA corpus, the term "dead" appeared 109 times but only counted as a one-word type.Types are used in calculating a text or corpus's type/token ratio (TTR, a measure of lexical repetition) (Baker, 2006).
A high TTR indicates a large amount of lexical variation, and a low TTR indicates relatively slight lexical variation.We can say that the word selection is less varied in USA corpus, with 31.91%TTR than in the Turkish corpus, with 69.84%.42).In this corpus, the frequency of some synonym terms was different.i.e., home * (9) and house * (63) are synonyms but according to Britannica, a house is a structure in which an individual resides.Yet, home can refer to any place that a person regards as part of their living space, regardless of form, be it a house, an apartment, a tent, a boat, or even an underground cave.Another example is dead * (109), kill * (42), death * (39), die * (18), all of which somehow indicate death, but their part of speech and semantic features are different.In the second corpus, the Turkish one, the most frequent words were cin * (41), şeytan * (11), kara * (11), büyü * (8), ölü * (6).These words were related to religion, but when we compare them with the previous corpus, we find similar KWIC, such as the ones mentioned in Table 3.Interestingly, the frequency of "üç * " and "harfliler * " is the same according to the corpus, and they were used as collocations to indicate the notion "cin" which is also three words.The authors compared some common KWIC in the English corpus and the equivalent in Turkish (Table 3).Although the size of the two corpora was not the same, common KWIC were identified in both corpora, indicating that horror film producers use the same elements to create horror.
Although at first glance it seems that Turkish horror film naming uses religious elements, when we look at Table 3 we get to know that these elements are also available in USA horror film naming as well for instance the term şeytan in Turkish can be seen in various forms in USA horror film naming such as satan, devil, demon, evil.
Comparison diagrams indicate the yearly production of the horror film.According to Diagram 1, year 2008 was the year in which the highest number of horror films has been produced in the USA, and in 1971 about 31 horror films has been made.The produced films' frequency in the years other than the ones in Diagram 1 was less than 31; consequently, in 1951, 1916, 1914,1910,1908, and 1898, only 2008 2006 2004 2010 1980 1950 1920 1982 1986 1999 2003 2019 1976    with over 30 frequencies during the last decades and used repeatedly.It should be noted that as the frequency of these words is high their number of repetitions during intuition and ending is also high.For example, pumpkinhead * has occurred four times in 1998, 1994, 2006, and 2007.Diagram 3 indicates the year filmmakers started to use these creatures in film naming, and the year in which they ended in USA horror film naming.According to this diagram, some words had a more extended period of use in film naming than others, for example, filmmakers have used zombie * from 1932-2020 so this creature has 88 years old, although vampire * has roughly the same frequency but year 2008 was the year in which this creature expired and filmmakers did not use it after that.
Diagram 3 Creatures in USA horror films and their years one horror film has been produced.Regarding the production of USA horror films, Diagram 1 indicates the frequency of produced films over the past decades in which the year 1990 is a boom decade among other decades.Diagram 1. Years and decades in which USA horror film production had the highest frequency According to Diagram 2, which belongs to Turkish horror film production, 2019 was the year of the highest number of horror film production in Turkey.It can be said that except in 2021 and 2020, from 2010-2019, we can observe an ascending trend in the production of horror films in Turkey.On the other hand, when we observe the decades year 2020 is the boom decade among other decades.
5195/cinej.2023.589| http://cinej.pitt.edu431 Diagram 2. Years and decades in which Turkey horror film production had highest frequencyThe following figures have been extracted using online data mining tools to determine the cultural and religious relationship between keywords and their collocates in Turkish and American horror films.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.relationship between keywords and their collocates in Turkish corpus

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. relationship between keywords and their collocates in USA corpus

Diagram 6 .
Cultural events in USA horror films and their years Based on this diagram, filmmakers began to use Day of the dead * in 1985, ended using it in 2018, and subsequently started using the equivalent of this event from 2017-2019.Holloween was used one year after 1981, the most frequent from 1981-2022 for the past 41 years.Regarding cultural events in Turkish horror films, there was no naming based on these events.

Table 1 .
Details of compiled corpus

Table 3 .
Most frequent KWIC in naming horror films in USA and Turkey

Table 4 .
Name of creatures used in USA horror film naming

Table 5
(Jalal et al. 2021)ures used in Turkish horror film naming and the years filmmakers used to use them.According to this table, most of these creatures are based on religious beliefs for instance cin * and üç harfliler * both refer to Jinn, that according to Islamic references, are real creatures from another world that cause physical and mental harm to human beings.On the other hand, şeytan * and iblis * refer to satan as a creature that seduces humans into sin or untruth.Karabasan refers to a supernatural creature in Turkish folklore that is an ugly-looking human being, indicating that the supernatural being has the ability to manifest in human form and is believed to cause paralysis upon falling asleep or awakening, or it can simply refer to the experience of this form of paralysis(Jalal et al. 2021).Deccal in Turkish refers to Dajjal as an evil figure in Islamic theology.Paranormal can be taken as the English translation of the word piskopat a psychopathic person suffering from a severe mental disorder.Hüddam is also related to jinn, satan, and ghosts, and in the Islamic religion, it is a science that aims to control the jinn who are Muslims, it is a sin to practice.Zohak is a demonic figure in Iranian mythology.

Table 5 .
Name of creatures used in Turkish horror film naming from 1974-2021 so this religious creature has 47 years old, still, cin * has a higher frequency but it has only 14 years old.On the other hand, some creatures had only one frequency like pikopat Diagram 4 Creatures in Turkish horror films and their years Table6indicates the animals used in USA horror film naming and the years filmmakers used to use them.According to this table, most of these animals are the ones we know in our daily lives.
* * , zohak * , paranormal, gulyabani * , and ervah * .On the other hand, in Turkish film naming, the only animal's name was dabbe * , which means an animal or a baby camel in a more specific sense.Another interesting finding was that in naming USA films, fly has been used, but this creature was available in almost all the contexts of Turkish horror films

Table 6 .
name of animals used in USA horror film naming Diagram 5 indicates the year filmmakers started using animals in USA film naming, and the year they ended up using them.According to this diagram, beast * had the highest frequency which indicates that at the initial stages, filmmakers used a large or dangerous four-footed to frighten and attract the attention of their audiences, later other types of animals were used.On the other hand, some animals had a longer period of use in film naming than others, for example, USA filmmakers have used wolf * from 1913-2010 over the past 97 years, and sark Diagram 5. Animals in USA horror films and their years Table8indicates the cultural events (Christmas, Halloween, Black Friday, etc.) used in USA horror film naming and the years filmmakers used to use them.According to this table, Halloween * has the highest frequency, primarily associated with ghosts and spirits.Day of dead * or death day * is an important yearly festival in South American countries.Prom night * is the most important dance of high school senior year in American English.A hunting season * is a period when hunting and killing a particular species is legal.Black Friday * is the Friday following Thanksgiving Day to begin the holiday shopping season.There was a horror film named Thankskilling that triggered the * with lower frequency has been used over the past 104 years.Yet, some creatures had only one frequency, like scorpions and ants.It was interesting that both snake * and anaconda * had the same occurrence but anaconda * has been used for 11 years and snake * for 1 year.Volume 11.2 (2023) | ISSN 2158-8724 (online) | DOI 10.5195/cinej.2023.589| http://cinej.pitt.edu439

Table 7 .
Cultural events in USA horror film naming Diagram 6 indicates the year filmmakers started using cultural events in USA film naming.The earliest events were black friday * and, subsequently, Mother's Day * , April fool's day * and Christmas* which started in 1980.