first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by the film pioneer Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the best known being Le Manoir du diable, which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film Another of his horror projects was 1898's La Caverne maudite (aka, The Cave of the Unholy One, literally "the accursed cave") Japan made early forays into the horror genre with Bake Jizo and Shinin no Sosei, both made in 1898 In 1910, Edison Studios produced the first film version of Frankenstein, which was thought lost for many years
The second monster appeared in a horror film: Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame, who had appeared in Victor Hugo's novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Films featuring Quasimodo included Alice Guy's Esmeralda (1905), The Hunchback (1909), The Love of a Hunchback (1910) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1911)
German Expressionist film makers, during the Weimar Republic era and slightly earlier, would significantly influence later films, not only those in the horror genre. Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920) and Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (also 1920) had a particular impact. The first vampire-themed movie was made during this time: F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula
Hollywood dramas used horror themes, including versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Monster (1925) both starring Lon Chaney, the first American horror movie star. Other films of the 1920s include Dr. Jekyll And Mr Hyde (1920), The Phantom Carriage (Sweden, 1920), The Lost World (1925), The Phantom Of The Opera (1925), Waxworks (Germany 1924), and Tod Browning's (lost) London After Midnight (1927) with Chaney.
1930s–1940s
See also: List of horror films of the 1930s, List of horror films of the 1940s, and Universal Monsters
Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster
in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in makeup designed by Jack Pierce.
During the early period of talking pictures, the American Movie studio Universal Pictures began a successful Gothic horror film series. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi, was quickly followed by James Whale's Frankenstein (also 1931) and The Old Dark House (1932), both featuring Boris Karloff as monstrous mute antagonists. Some of these films blended science fiction with Gothic horror, such as Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) and, mirroring the earlier German films, featured a mad scientist. These films, while designed to thrill, also incorporated more serious elements. Frankenstein was the first in a series which lasted for many years, although Karloff only returned as the monster in Bride of Frankenstein (1935)-- the last of Whale's four horror films-- and Son of Frankenstein (1939). The Mummy (1932) introduced Egyptology as a theme for the genre. Make-up artist Jack Pierce was responsible for the iconic image of the monster, and others in the series. Universal's horror cycle continued into the 1940s as B-pictures including The Wolf Man (1941), not the first werewolf film, but certainly the most influential, as well as a number of films uniting several of their monsters.
Other studios followed Universal's lead. Tod Browning made the once controversial Freaks (1932) for MGM, based on "Spurs", a short story by Cintia Gomez, about a band of circus freaks. The studio disowned the completed film after cutting about 30 minutes; it remained unreleased in the United Kingdom for thirty years Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount, 1931), remembered for its use of color filters to create Jekyll's transformation before the camera,[9] Michael Curtiz's Mystery of the Wax Museum (Warner Brothers, 1933), and Island of Lost Souls (Paramount, 1932) were all important horror films.
horror films shifted from the Gothic towards contemporary concerns. Two sub-genres began to emerge: the horror-of-armageddon film and the horror-of-the-demonic film.
A stream of (usually low-budget) productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside": alien invasions and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. In the case of some horror films from Japan, such as Godzilla (1954) and its sequels, mutation from the effects of nuclear radiation were featured.
The Hollywood directors and producers sometimes found ample opportunity for audience exploitation, with gimmicks such as 3-D and "Percepto" (producer William Castle's pseudo-electric-shock technique used for The Tingler, 1959). Some horror films during this period, such as The Thing from Another World (1951) and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), managed to channel the paranoia of the Cold War into atmospheric creepiness.
Filmmakers continued to merge elements of science fiction and horror over the following decades. Considered a "pulp masterpiece"[11] of the era was The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), from Richard Matheson's existentialist novel. While more of a science-fiction story, the film conveyed the fears of living in the Atomic Age and the terror of social alienation.
During the later 1950s, Great Britain emerged as a producer of horror films. The Hammer company focused on the genre for the first time, enjoying huge international success from films involving classic horror characters which were shown in color for the first time. Often starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and drawing on Universal's precedent, these films include The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), and Dracula (1958), both followed by many sequels, with director Terence Fisher being responsible for many of the best films. Other British companies contributed to a boom in horror film production in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s, including Tigon-British and Amicus, the latter best known for their anthology films such as Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965).
British director Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) was the first "slasher" movie.[N 1] It concerns a serial killer who combines his profession as a photographer with the moments before murdering his victims. Next came Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and the same director's The Birds (1963), an example of natural horror in which the menace stems from nature having gone mad. In France, Eyes Without a Face (1960) continued the mad scientist theme, while in Italy director Mario Bava began his own series of horror films.
American International Pictures (AIP) made a series of Edgar Allan Poe–themed films directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, which ended with The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia (both 1964). Some contend that these productions paved the way for more explicit violence in both horror and mainstream films.[citation needed] In collaboration with AIP, Tigon produced Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm, 1968). The tale of a witch hunter in the English Civil War, based on the historical Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price), was more sadistic than supernatural.
Ghosts and monsters still remained a frequent feature of horror, but many films used the supernatural premise to express the horror of the demonic. The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) based on the Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) are two such horror-of-the-demonic films from the early 1960s, both made in the UK by American studios. In Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), set in New York, the devil is made flesh. Meanwhile, ghosts were a dominant theme in Japanese horror, or 'J-horror', in such films as Kwaidan, Onibaba (both 1964) and Kuroneko (1968).
Zombies in Romero's influential Night of the Living Dead.
An influential American horror film of this period was George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Produced and directed by Romero, on a budget of $114,000, it grossed $12 million at the box office in the United States and $30 million internationally. This horror-of-Armageddon film about zombies blends psychological insights with gore, it moved the genre even further away from the gothic horror trends of earlier eras and brought horror into everyday life.[12]
Low-budget gore-shock films from the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis also appeared. Examples include Blood Feast (1963), a devil-cult story, and Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), a ghost town inhabited by psychotic cannibals, which featured splattering blood and body dismemberment.
1970s–1980s
See also: List of horror films of the 1970s and List of horror films of the 1980s
The end of the Production Code of America in 1964, the financial successes of the low-budget gore films of the ensuing years, and the critical and popular success of Rosemary's Baby, led to the release of more films with occult themes during the 1970s. The Exorcist (1973), the first of these movies, was a significant commercial success, and was followed by scores of horror films in which the Devil represented the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. The genre also included gory horror movies with sexual overtones, made as "A-movies" (as opposed to "B movies").
"Evil children" and reincarnation became popular subjects. Robert Wise's film Audrey Rose (1977) for example, deals with a man who claims that his daughter is the reincarnation of another dead person. Alice, Sweet Alice (1977), is another Catholic-themed horror slasher about a little girl's murder and her sister being the prime suspect. Another popular Satanic horror movie was The Omen (1976), where a man realizes that his five-year-old adopted son is the Antichrist. Invincible to human intervention, Satan became the villain in many horror films with a postmodern style and a dystopian worldview.
Another example is The Sentinel (1977 film), in which a fashion model discovers that her new brownstone residence may actually be a portal to Hell. The movie includes seasoned actors such as Ava Gardner, Burgess Meredith and Eli Wallach and such future stars as Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum.
The ideas of the 1960s began to influence horror films, as the youth involved in the counterculture began exploring the medium. Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) recalled the Vietnam war; George A. Romero satirized the consumer society in his zombie sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978); Canadian director David Cronenberg featured the "mad scientist" movie sub-genre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society, and reinventing "body horror", starting with Shivers (1975) Meanwhile, the sub-genre of comedy horror re-emerged in the cinema with Young Frankenstein (1974), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and An American Werewolf in London (1981) among other films.
Also in the 1970s, the works of the horror author Stephen King began to be adapted for the screen, beginning with Brian De Palma's adaptation of Carrie (1976), King's first published novel, for which the two female leads (Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie) gained Oscar nominations. Next, was his third published novel, The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick, which was a sleeper at the box office, receiving mixed reviews on release, but eventually began to be considered a classic. Carrie became the 9th highest-grossing film of 1976. King himself did not like The Shining, because it was barely faithful to the 1977 best-seller novel.
A cycle of slasher films was made during the 1970s and early 1980s. John Carpenter created Halloween (1978), Sean Cunningham made Friday the 13th (1980) and Wes Craven directed A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984). This sub-genre would be mined by dozens of increasingly violent movies throughout the subsequent decades, and Halloween became a successful independent film. Another notable '70s slasher film is Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974). Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) began a new wave of killer animal stories such as Orca (1977), and Up from the Depths. Jaws is often credited as being one of the first films to use traditionally B movie elements such as horror and mild gore in a big-budget Hollywood film.
Alien (1979) combined the naturalistic acting and graphic violence of the 1970s with the monster movie plots of earlier decades, and used science fiction. The film was extremely successful in terms of both box-office and critical reception, being called "Jaws in space", and a landmark film for the science fiction genre.
On a similar note, John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) was also a mix of horror and sci fi, but unlike Alien it was neither a box-office nor critical hit. However, nearly 20 years after its release it was praised for using ahead-of-its-time special effects and paranoia.
The 1980s saw a wave of gory "B movie" horror films – although most of them were panned by critics, many became cult classics and later saw success with critics. A significant example is Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies, which were low-budget gorefests but had a very original plotline which was later praised by critics. Other horror film examples include cult vampire classic Fright Night (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), Gremlins, the Critters, and the Poltergeist series.[citation needed]
1990s
See also: List of horror films of the 1990s
In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued many of the themes from the 1980s. The slasher films A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween and Child's Play all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which met with varied amounts of success at the box office, but all were panned by fans and critics, with the exception of Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) and the hugely successful Silence of the Lambs (1991).
New Nightmare, with In the Mouth of Madness (1995), The Dark Half (1993), and Candyman (1992), were part of a mini-movement of self-reflexive or metafictional horror films. Each film touched upon the relationship between fictional horror and real-world horror. Candyman, for example, examined the link between an invented urban legend and the realistic horror of the racism that produced its villain. In the Mouth of Madness took a more literal approach, as its protagonist actually hopped from the real world into a novel created by the madman he was hired to track down. This reflective style became more overt and ironic with the arrival of Scream (1996).
In Interview with the Vampire (1994), the "Theatre de Vampires" (and the film itself, to some degree) invoked the Grand Guignol style, perhaps to further remove the undead performers from humanity, morality and class. The horror movie soon continued its search for new and effective frights. In 1985's novel The Vampire Lestat by author Anne Rice (who penned Interview...'s screenplay and the 1976 novel of the same name) suggests that its antihero Lestat inspired and nurtured the Grand Guignol style and theatre.
Two main problems pushed horror backward during this period: firstly, the horror genre wore itself out with the proliferation of nonstop slasher and gore films in the eighties. Secondly, the adolescent audience which feasted on the blood and morbidity of the previous decade grew up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were being captured instead by the explosion of science-fiction and fantasy films, courtesy of the special effects possibilities with advances made in computer-generated imagery Examples of these CGI include movies like Species (1995), Anaconda (1997), Mimic (1997), Blade (1998), Deep Rising (1998), House on Haunted Hill (1999), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and The Haunting (1999).
To re-connect with its audience, horror became more self-mockingly ironic and outright parodic, especially in the latter half of the 1990s. Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) (known as Dead Alive in the U.S.) took the splatter film to ridiculous excesses for comic effect. Wes Craven's Scream (written by Kevin Williamson) 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 (despite Scream 2 and 3 utilising less use of the humour of the original, until Scream 4 in 2011, and rather more references to horror film conventions). Along with I Know What You Did Last Summer (written by Kevin Williamson as well) and Urban Legend, they re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre.
Horror is a film genre seeking to elicit a negative
emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the
audience's primal fears. Horror films often feature scenes
that startle the viewer; the macabre and the supernatural
are frequent themes. Thus they may overlap with the
fantasy, supernatural, and thriller genres
Horror films often deal with the viewer's nightmares,
hidden fears, revulsions and terror of the unknown. Plots
within the horror genre often involve the intrusion of an
evil force, event, or personage, commonly of supernatural
origin, into the everyday world. Prevalent elements
include ghosts, aliens, vampires, werewolves, demons,
vicious animals, monsters, zombies, cannibals, and serial
killers. Conversely, movies about the supernatural are not
necessarily always horrific
