Horror film

The horror cinematic genre is characterized by the attempt to make the viewer experience dread, fear, terror, or horror. Its plots often involve the intrusion of an evil force, event or personage, sometimes of supernatural origin, on the mundane world and the consequences thereof.

History

Early milestones

The horror genre in film is nearly as old as film itself. The first exploration of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by film pioneer Georges Melies in the late 1890s. The earliest horror-themed feature films were created by German film makers in the early 20th century, many of which were a significant influence on later Hollywood films. Paul Wegener's The Golem (1915) was seminal; in 1920 Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was both controversial with American audiences, due to postwar sentiments, and seminal in its Expressionistic style; the most enduring horror film of that era was probably F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), the first vampire-themed feature, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

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Early Hollywood dramas dabbled in horror themes including versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Monster (1925) (both starring Lon Chaney, Sr., the first American horror movie star). His most famous role, however, was in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), perhaps the true predecessor of Universal's famous horror series.

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1930s & 1940s: The gothic subgenre

It was in the early 1930s that American film producers, particularly Universal Pictures Co. Inc., popularized the horror film genre, bringing to the screen a series of successful gothic-steeped features including Dracula (1931), and The Mummy (1932), as well as science fiction films with horror overtones, such as James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933). These films, while designed to thrill, also incorporated more serious elements, and were influenced by the German expressionist films of the 1920s. Some actors began to build entire careers around the genre, most notably Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

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Other studios of the day had less spectacular success with horror, but Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount, 1931) and Michael Curtiz's The Mystery of the Wax Museum (Warner Brothers, 1933) were both important films in the genre.

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Universal's horror films would continue into the 1940s with The Wolf Man 1941, not the first werewolf film, but certainly the most influential. Throughout the decade Universal also continued to produce more sequels in the Frankenstein series, as well as a number of films teaming up several of their monsters. Also in that decade Val Lewton would produce a series of influential and atmospheric B-pictures for RKO, including Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Body Snatcher (1945).

Related Topics:
1940s - The Wolf Man - 1941 - Werewolf - Val Lewton - B-pictures - RKO - Cat People - 1942 - I Walked with a Zombie - 1943 - The Body Snatcher - 1945

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1950s: Cold War terror and the pull of science fiction

In the nuclear-charged atmosphere of the 1950s the tone of horror films shifted away from the gothic and towards the modern. A seemingly endless parade of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside": alien invasions, and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. During this time the horror and science fiction genres were often interchangeable. These films provided ample opportunity for audience exploitation, with gimmicks such as 3-D and "Percepto" (producer William Castle's electric-shock technique used for 1959's The Tingler) drawing audiences in week after week for bigger and better scares. The classier horror films of this period, including The Thing From Another World (1951; attributed on screen to Christian Nyby but widely considered to be the work of Howard Hawks) and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) managed to channel the paranoia of the Cold War into atmospheric creepiness without resorting to direct exploitation of the events of the day. Film makers would continue to merge elements of science fiction and horror well into the future.

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The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of studios centered specifically around horror. Notable were British production company Hammer Films, which specialized in bloody remakes of classic horror stories often starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, including The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). Hammer, and director Terence Fisher, are widely acknowledged as being pioneers of the modern horror movie.

Related Topics:
1960s - British - Hammer Films - Peter Cushing - Christopher Lee - The Curse of Frankenstein - 1957 - Dracula - 1958 - Terence Fisher

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American International Pictures (AIP) also made a series of Edgar Allan Poe themed films produced by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. These sometimes controversial productions paved the way for more explicit violence in both horror and mainstream films.

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1960s: Gore and Shock

In the 1960s the genre moved towards "psychological horror", with thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) using all-too-human monsters rather than supernatural ones to scare the audience. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) was a notable example of this subgenre. Psychological horror films would continue to appear sporadically, with 1991's The Silence of the Lambs a later highlight of the subgenre (although these films can also be considered crime films or thrillers). Ghosts and monsters still remained popular: The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting (1963) were two supernaturally-tinged psychological horror films from the early 1960s, with high production values and gothic atmosphere. Hitchcock's more modern-backdropped The Birds (1963) was a prime example of "nature-goes-mad" menace combined with psychological horror.

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Low-budget gore-shock films from the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis also appeared. Examples included 1963's Blood Feast (a devil-cult story) and 1964's Two Thousand Maniacs (a ghost town run by the shades of Southerners), which featured splattering blood and bodily dismemberment.

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One of the most influential horror films of the late 1960s was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). This zombie film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" enough to be preserved by the National Film Registry. Blending psychological thriller with gore, it moved away from the gothic horror trends of earlier eras and brought the horror into the lives of everyday man.

Related Topics:
George Romero - Night of the Living Dead - 1968 - Zombie - National Film Registry

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1970s: Sexual Hangups and Schlock

With the demise of the Production Code of America in 1964, and the financial successes of the low-budget gore films churned out in the ensuing years, plus an increasing public fascination with the occult, the genre was able to be reshaped by a series of intense, often gory horror movies with sexual overtones, made as "A-movies" (as opposed to "B-movies"). Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) was a critical and popular success, and a precursor to the 1970s occult explosion, which included The Exorcist (1973) (directed by William Friedkin and written by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the novel), and scores of other horror films in which the Devil became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. Evil children and reincarnation became popular subjects (such as Robert Wise's 1977 United Artists film Audrey Rose, which dealt with a man who claims his daughter is the reincarnation of another dead person). Being by doctrine invincible to solely human intervention, Satan-villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film genre, postmodern style and a dystopian worldview.

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The "new age" ideas of the 1960s hippies began to influence horror films, as the youth previously involved in the counterculture began exploring the medium of film. Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) both pushed comfortable liberal boundaries to the edge; George Romero examined the rise of the new consumer society in his 1978 zombie sequel, Dawn of the Dead; Canadian director David Cronenberg updated the "mad scientist" movie subgenre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society, and reinventing the "body horror" genre, starting with Shivers (1975). Also in the 1970s, horror author Stephen King, a child of the 1960s, first came on the film scene. Adaptations of many of his books came to be filmed for the screen, beginning with Brian DePalma's adaptation of King's first published novel, Carrie (1976), which went on to be nominated for Academy Awards, although it has often been noted that its appeal was more for its psychological exploration as for its capacity to scare. And John Carpenter, who had previously directed stoner comedy Dark Star (1973), created the hit Halloween (1978), introducing the teens-threatened-by-superhuman-evil theme, and kick-starting the "slasher film" genre. This genre would be mined in dozens of increasingly violent movies throughout the 1980s.

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1979's Alien combined the naturalistic acting and graphic violence of the 1970s with the monster movie plots of earlier decades, and re-acquainted the horror film with the science fiction genre. It spawned a long-lasting franchise, and countless imitators, overs the next 30 years.

Related Topics:
1979 - Alien - Science fiction

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At the same time, there was an explosion of horror films in Europe, particularly from the hands of Italian filmmakers like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and Spanish filmmakers like Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy) and Jesus Franco, which were dubbed into English and filled drive-in theaters that could not necessarily afford the expensive rental contracts of the major American producers. These films generally featured more traditional horror subjects - e.g. vampires, werewolves, psycho-killers, demons, zombies - but treated with a distinctive European style that included copious gore and sexuality (of which mainstream American producers overall were still a little skittish). Notable national outputs were the "giallo" genre from Italy, the Jean Rollin romantic/erotic films from France, and the anthology films of Amicus from the UK.

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1980s: Horror Series and Splatter Comedies

Almost any successful 1980s horror film received sequels. For example, 1982's Poltergeist (directed by Tobe Hooper), dealing with a family who live in a house that unknown to them is on the site of a former cemetery, thereby causing evil forces to kidnap their youngest daughter, was followed by two sequels and a television series. The endless sequels to Halloween, Friday the 13th (1980), and Wes Craven's supernatural slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were the popular face of horror films in the 1980s, a trend reviled by most critics. Nevertheless, original horror films continued to appear sporadically: Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987) and Tom Holland's Child's Play (1988) were both critically praised, although their success again launched multiple inferior sequels.

Related Topics:
1980s - 1982 - Poltergeist - Cemetery - Friday the 13th - 1980 - A Nightmare on Elm Street - 1984 - Clive Barker - Hellraiser - 1987 - Tom Holland - Child's Play - 1988

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As the cinema box office returns for serious, gory modern horror began to dwindle (as exemplified by John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), it began to find a new audience in the growing home video market, although the new generation of films was much less sombre in tone. Motel Hell (1980) and Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case (1982) were the first 1980s films that utilized the dark conventions of the previous decade while campily mocking them (zombie films like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead had contained black comedy and satire, but were too dark and moody to be funny). Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead, and Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger (all 1985), soon followed. In Evil Dead II (1987), Sam Raimi's explicitly slapstick sequel to the relatively sober film The Evil Dead (1981), the laughs were often generated by the gore, defining the archetypal splatter comedy. New Zealand director Peter Jackson followed in Raimi's footsteps with the ultra-gory micro-budget feature Bad Taste (1987).

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Horror films continued to cause controversy: in the UK, the growth in home video led to growing public awareness of horror films of the types described above, and concern about the ease of availability of such material to children. Many films were dubbed "video nasties" and banned. In the USA, Silent Night, Deadly Night, a very controversial film from 1984, failed at theatres and was eventually withdrawn from distribution due to its subject matter: a killer Santa Claus.

Related Topics:
Video nasties - Silent Night, Deadly Night - 1984 - Santa Claus

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1990s: Was the genre dead, or just sleeping?

In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued with themes from the 1980s. The genre managed mild commercial success with films such as continuing sequels to the Child's Play and Leprechaun series. The Canadian film Cube (1997) was perhaps one of the few interesting horror films of the 1990s, in that it was based around a relatively novel concept, was able to evoke a wide range of different fears, and touched upon a variety of social themes (such as fear of bureaucracy) that had previously been difficult to capture.

Related Topics:
1990s - Child's Play - Leprechaun - Canadian film - Cube - 1997 - Bureaucracy

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The fact was, the adolescent audience which had feasted on the blood and morbidity of the previous two decades had grown up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were being captured by the explosion of science-fiction and heroic fantasy films laden with computer-generated imagery and nonstop violent action.

Related Topics:
Science-fiction - Computer-generated imagery

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To re-connect with its audience, the genre began to transform into more self-mocking irony and outright parody, especially in the later half of the 1990s, as the horror film became more attuned with its own history. Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) (known as Dead-Alive in the USA) took the splatter film as far as it could go, to ridiculous excesses for comic effect. Francis Ford Coppola's film, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), featured an ensemble cast and the style of a different era, harking back to the sumptuous look of 1960s Hammer Horror. Wes Craven's Scream movies, starting in 1996, featured teenagers who were fully aware of, and often made reference to, the history of horror movies, and mixed ironic humour with the shocks. It re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre.

Related Topics:
Irony - Parody - Braindead - 1992 - Splatter film - Francis Ford Coppola - Bram Stoker's Dracula - 1960s - Hammer Horror - Scream - 1996 - Slasher film

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Of popular English-language horror films in the late 1990s, only 1999's surprise independent hit The Blair Witch Project attempted straight-ahead scares. But even then, the horror was accomplished in the ironic context of a mockumentary, or mock-documentary. Together with the international success of Hideo Nakata's Ringu in 1997, it launched a trend in horror films to go "low-key", concentrating on unnerving and unsettling themes. M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999) was a spectacularly successful example.

Related Topics:
1999 - The Blair Witch Project - Mockumentary - Hideo Nakata - Ringu - 1997 - M. Night Shyamalan - The Sixth Sense

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Millennial horror

Ringu launched a revival of serious horror filmmaking in Japan ("J-Horror") leading to such films as Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on (2000) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001). Other advances in horror were made through Japanese animation (for example the gruesome 'guro' animation), as Japanese culture reached new heights of popularity in the West (the first horror-themed anime began appearing in the west in the late 1980s).

Related Topics:
Japan - J-Horror - Takashi Shimizu's - Ju-on - 2000 - Kiyoshi Kurosawa - Pulse - 2001 - Japanese animation - Guro - Japanese culture - 1980s

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The plundering of horror film history gained steam, including sequels, homages, and remakes of, films long established from previous decades. Some notable box office revivals included the merging of two old franchises in Freddy vs. Jason (2003), the re-imagining of the Universal monsters in Van Helsing (2004), the , as well as further entries in the Halloween and Child's Play series. Remakes of previous successes included Gore Verbinski's American version of Ringu (The Ring (2002)), and remakes of Dawn of the Dead (2004) and The Amityville Horror (2005). The zombie genre enjoyed a revival around the world, fuelled, in part, by the success of the "survival horror" genre of videogames (themselves inspired by films). Some of these games were also turned into films (for example Resident Evil (2002)). Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses and Eli Roth's Cabin Fever were both homages to the horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the latter using body horror as its primary method of scare.

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Original horror entries in the 2000s were a mixed bag of teen exploitation like the Final Destination movies, starting in 2000, and more serious attempts at mainstream horror, notably the further horror-suspense films of M. Night Shyamalan.

Related Topics:
2000s - Exploitation - Final Destination

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There has also been a small revival in British horror film production, with some of the more successful examples including 28 Days Later (2002), Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent (2005).

Related Topics:
British - 28 Days Later - Dog Soldiers - The Descent

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◄ Horror film: Introduction

Horror film: Other notable items ►

~ Table of Content ~

►	Introduction
►	History
►	Other notable items
►	See also

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