horror history
The horror genre is nearly as old as film itself. The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by film pioneers such as Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the most notable being his 1896 Le Manoir du diable (aka "The House of the ") which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. Another of his horror projects was the 1898 La Caverne maudite (aka "The Cave of the s", literally "the accursed cave").
The early 20th century brought more milestones for the horror genre including the first monster to appear in a full-length horror film, Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame who had appeared in Victor Hugo's book, "Notre-Dame de Paris" (published in 1831). Films featuring Quasimodo included Alice Guy's Esmeralda (1906), The Hunchback (1909), The Love of a Hunchback (1910) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1911).
Many of the earliest feature length 'horror films' were created by Germam film makers in 1910s and 1920s, 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 influential in its Expressionistic style; the most enduring horror film of that era was probably the first vampire-themed feature, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
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.
1930s & 1940s
It was in the early 1930s that American film producers, particularly Universal Pictures Co. Inc., popularized the horror film, bringing to the screen a series of successful Gothic features including Dracula (1931), and The Mummy (1932), some of which blended science fiction films with ic horror, 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 in such films, most notably Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
Other studios of the day had less spectacular success, but Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount, 1931) and Michael Curtiz's Mystery of the Wax Museum (Warner Brothers, 1933) were both important horror films.
Universal's horror films continued 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 atmospheric B-pictures for RKO Pictures, including Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Body er (1945).
The first horror film produced by an Indian film industry was Mahal, a Hindi film. It was a supernatural thriller and the earliest known film dealing with the theme of reincarnation.
1950s-1960s
ith the dramatic changes in technology that occurred in the 1950s, the tone of horror films shifted away from the ic towards science fiction. A seemingly endless parade of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside":
alien invasions and ly
mutations to people, plants, and insects. These films provided ample opportunity for audience exploitation, with gimmicks such as
3-D and "Percepto" (producer
William Castle's pseudo-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 ers (1956) managed to channel the
paranoia of the
Cold War into atmospheric creepiness without resorting to direct exploitation of the events of the day. Filmmakers would continue to merge elements of science fiction and horror over the following decades. One of the most notable films of the era was 1957's
The Incredible Shrinking Man, 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 of
social alienation.
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of production companies focused on producing horror films, including the British company Hammer Film Productions. Hammer enjoyed huge international success from full-blooded technicolor films involving classic horror characters, often starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), and The Mummy (1959) and many sequels. Hammer, and director Terence Fisher, are widely acknowledged as pioneers of the modern horror movie. Other companies contributed to a boom in horror film production in Britain in the 1960s and '70s, including Tigon-British and Amicus, the latter best known for their anthology films like Dr 's House of Horrors (1965).
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 in both horror and mainstream films.
In Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the object of horror does not look like a monstrous or supernatural other, but rather a normal human being. The horror has a human explanation, too, based in Freudian psychology and . Other seminal examples include Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Homicidal (William Castle, 1961), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, 1962), Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), Pretty Poison (Noel Black, 1968), and The Collector (William Wyler, 1965). Films of the horror-of-personality sub-genre continue to appear through the turn of the century, with 1991's The Silence of the Lambs a noteworthy example. Some of these films further blur the distinction between horror film and crime or thriller genre.
Ghosts and monsters still remained popular, but many films that still relied on supernatural monsters expressed a horror of the ic. The s (Jack Clayton, 1961) and The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) were two such horror-of-the-demonic films from the early 1960s, with high production values and gothic atmosphere. Perhaps the most recognizable milestone of the sub-genre remains Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), in which the is made of flesh.
Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) had a more modern backdrop; it was a prime example of a menace stemming from nature gone mad and one of the first American examples of the horror-of-Armageddon sub-genre. One of the most influential horror films of the late 1960s was George Romero's Night of the Living (1968). This horror-of-Armageddon film about zombies was later deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" enough to be preserved by the United States National Film Registry. Blending psychological insights with gore, it moved the genre even further away from the ic horror trends of earlier eras and brought horror into everyday life.
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 and bodily dismemberment.
1970s
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 , the genre was able to be reshaped by a series of intense, often gory horror movies with ual overtones, made as "A-movies" (as opposed to "B-movies"). Some of these films were made by respected auteurs.
Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) was a critical and popular success, and a precursor to the 1970s explosion, which included the box office smash 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 (as in Robert Wise's 1977 film Audrey Rose, which dealt with a man who claims his daughter is the reincarnation of another person). Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), is another Catholic themed horror slasher about a little 's and her sister being the prime suspect. Another popular ic horror movie was The Omen (1976), where a man realizes his five year old adopted son is the Antichrist. Being by doctrine invincible to solely human intervention, -villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film, postmodern style and a dystopian worldview. Another notable example is The Sentinel, which is not to be confused with the Michael Douglas/Kiefer Sutherland film of the same name, as a fashion discovers her new brownstone residence may actually be a portal to Hell. The movie is most notable for having a mix of seasoned actors like Ava Gardner, Burgess Meredith and Eli Wallach alongside future stars 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 Last House on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) both recalled the horrors of the Vietnam war and pushed boundaries to the edge; George Romero satirised the consumer society in his 1978 zombie sequel, Dawn of the ; Canadian director David Cronenberg updated the "mad scientist" movie subgenre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society, and reinventing "body horror", starting with Shivers (1975).
Also in the 1970s, horror author Stephen King, a child of the 1960s, first arrived 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. John Carpenter, who had previously directed the stoner comedy Dark Star (1974) and the Howard Hawks-inspired action film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), created the hit Halloween (1978), kick-starting the modern "slasher film". This subgenre would be mined by dozens of increasingly violent movies throughout the subsequent decades, Halloween has also become one of the most successful independent films ever made. Other notable '70s slasher films include Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974).
In 1975, Steven Spielberg began his ascension to fame with Jaws, a film notable for not only its expertly crafted horror elements but also for its success at the box office. The film kicked off a wave of killer animal stories such as Orca, and Up From The Depths. The 1978 horror-comedy Piranha, directed by Joe Dante, is a spoof of such films. 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.
1979's Alien combined the naturalistic acting and graphic of the 1970s with the monster movie plots of earlier decades, and re-acquainted horror with science fiction. It spawned a long-lasting franchise, and countless imitators.
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 Jess Franco, which were dubbed into English and filled drive-in theaters that could not necessarily afford the expensive rental contracts of the major producers. These films were influenced by the success of Hammer in the 1960s and early '70s, and generally featured traditional horror subjects - e.g. vampires, werewolves, psycho-killers, demons, zombies - but treated them with a distinctive European style that included copious gore and uality (of which mainstream American producers overall were still a little skittish). Notable national outputs were the "giallo" films from Italy and the Jean Rollin romantic/erotic films from France.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, filmmakers were starting to be inspired by Hammer and Euro-horror to produce exploitation horror with a uniquely Asian twist. Shaw Studios produced Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1973) in collaboration with Hammer, and went on to create their own original films. The genre boomed at the start of the 1980s, with Sammo Hung's Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1981) launching the sub-genre of "kung-fu comedy horror", a sub-genre prominently featuring hopping corpses and tempting ghostly females known as fox spirits (or kitsune), of which the best known examples were Mr. Vampire (1985) and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987). But Hammer Film Productions would stop making movies in the 1970s as the demand for slasher films increased, following the success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween, among others.
1980s
Most of the successful 1980s horror films received sequels. 1982's Poltergeist (directed by Tobe Hooper) was followed by two sequels and a television series. The seemingly-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. Another popular horror film of the '80s, Stephen King and George A. Romero's Creepshow, spawned two generally-considered 'lesser' sequels in 1987 & 2006, Creepshow 2 and Creepshow 3 (or 'Creepshow III').
Nevertheless, original horror films continued to appear sporadically: Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987) and Tom Holland's Child's Play (1988) were both praised by some, although their success again launched multiple sequels, which were considered inferior by fans and critics alike. Also released in 1980 was Stanley Kubrick's austere adaptation of the Stephen King supernatural thriller The Shining which became one of the most popular and influential horror films of the decade.
As the cinema box office returns for serious, gory modern horror began to dwindle (as exemplified by John Carpenter's The Thing in 1982), it began to find a new audience in the growing home video market, although the new generation of films was less sombre in tone. Motel Hell (1980) and Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case (1982) were the first 1980s films to campily mock the dark conventions of the previous decade (zombie films like Night of the Living and Dawn of the had contained black comedy and satire, but were in general more dark than funny). David Cronenberg's graphic and gory remake of The Fly, was released in 1986, about a few weeks from the James Cameron film Aliens, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living , and Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger (all 1985), soon followed. In Evil II (1987), Sam Raimi's explicitly slapstick sequel to the relatively sober The Evil (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). The same year, from Germany's Jörg Buttgereit, came Nekromantik, a disturbing film about the life and of a iliac.
Horror films continued to cause controversy: in the United Kingdom, 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 (notably foreign films such as The Anthropophagus Beast, A Blade in the Dark, The New York Ripper and Tenebre but US and Canadian films like Madman, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Don't Go in the House & Maniac). In the USA, Silent Night, ly 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.
1990s
In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued with themes from the 1980s. It managed mild commercial success with films such as continuing sequels to the Child's Play and Leprechaun series. The slasher films A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween 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.
Note: New Nightmare, with In the Mouth of Madness, The Dark Half, and Candyman, were part of a mini-movement of self-reflective 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 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.
In 1994's Interview With the Vampire, the "Theatre de Vampires" (and the film itself, to some degree) envoked 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.
The Canadian film Cube (1997) was perhaps one of the few horror films of the 1990s to be based around a relatively novel concept; it 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 unexplored.
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 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, courtesy of the special effects possibilities with computer-generated imagery.
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 USA) took the splatter film to ridiculous excesses for comic effect. Francis Ford Coppola's 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, and a plot focusing just as closely on the romance elements of the Dracula tale as on the horror aspects. 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. Along with I Know What You Did Last Summer, they re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre.
Among the popular English-language horror films of the late 1990s, only 1999's surprise independent hit The Blair Project attempted straight-ahead scares. But even then, the horror was accomplished in the context of a mockumentary, or mock-documentary. Other films such as M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999) also concentrated more on unnerving and unsettling themes than on gore. Japanese horror films, such as Hideo Nakata's Ringu in 1998, and Masuru Tsushima's Otsuyu (aka The Haunted Lantern) (1997) also found success internationally with a similar formula.
2000s
The start of the 2000s saw a quiet period for the genre. The re-release of a restored version of The Exorcist in September of 2000 was successful despite the film having been available on home video for years. Franchises such as Freddy Vs. Jason also made a final stand in theaters. Final Destination (2000) marked a successful revival of clever, teen-centered horror, and spawned two sequels.
Some notable trends have marked horror films in the 2000s. A minimalist approach which was equal parts Val Lewton's theory of "less is more" (usually employing low-budget techniques seen on 1999's The Blair Project) has been evident, particularly in the emergence of Japanese horror movies which have been remade into successful Americanized versions, such as The Ring (2002), and The Grudge (2004).
There has been a minor return to the zombie genre in horror movies made after 2000. The Resident Evil video game franchise was adapted into a film released in April of 2002. Two sequels have followed. The British film 28 Days Later (2002) featured an update on the genre with a new style of aggressive zombie. The film later spawned a sequel: 28 Weeks Later. An updated remake of Dawn of the (2004) soon appeared as well as Land of the (2005) and the comedy-horror Shaun of the (2004). More recently the popular video game franchise Silent Hill (2006) was made into a feature film, based on an original story.
A larger trend is a return to the extreme, graphic that characterized much of the type of low-budget, exploitation horror from the Seventies and the post-Vietnam years. Films like Audition (1999), Wrong Turn (2003), House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The 's Rejects and the Australian film Wolf Creek (2005), took their cues from The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). The latter two have also been remade: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003, and The Hills Have Eyes in 2006. An extension of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with emphasis on depictions of , suffering and violent s, (variously referred to as "horror ", "torture ", Splatter , and even "gore-nography") with films such as Turistas, Captivity, Saw, Hostel and their respective sequels in particular being frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this sub-genre.
One of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the 2000s was the British horror film The Descent (2005). Its all-female cast was a departure from "tough-guy" male-dominated stereotypes or other archetypal dispositions common in horror films. Its director, Neil Marshall, directed Dog Soldiers (2002), a film that became a favorite of fans of the genre and a box office hit in Great Britain.
In 2007, Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of John Carpenter's Halloween. The film focused more on Michael's backstory than the original did, devoting the first half of the film to Michael's childhood. It was critically panned by most but was a success in its theatrical run.
2008 saw a return to mockumentary-style horror, with the box office success of Cloverfield and the release of George Romero's Diary of the .
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