Jude White
A2 Media
9315
History of Horror Genre (By Jack Spencely)
Horror films have been around for a rather long time, dating back to the late 1890s and the genre still lives on today due to modern advancement in techology. They seek to ellicit a negative emotional response from the viewers by using fear techniques. These kind of films often feature monster that play on peoples fear, such as clowns or insects, or feature much more dark themes such as occult and supernatural imagery.
The first horror movies were created in Europe by people such as Louis Lumiere who created what is considered by some to be the first piece of horror media, 'Le Squelette Joyeux'. It is incredibly short, being only 1 minute in length. It contains only one skeleton, manipulated by puppetry, that appears to dance in an erratic manner. While in todays world this only serves to amuse, at the time of release it was considered to be quite spooky.
The first official horror movie was credited to George Melies who created 'Le Manoir du Diable' or 'The Haunted House' in 1896. He was a popular director for creating several of these short, silent horror movies. It's intention is more to ellicit amusement and wonder from the audience rather than fear, but because of its themes and characters, such as Spectres and the devil, Mephistopholes. Combining these with scenes of the supernatural, it creates an interesting three minute film.
The next wave of horror movies appeared in the early 1900s and began to feature popular monsters of fiction such as Frakenstien's Monster and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'. There were numerous other films similar to these released at this time such as 'Nosferatu', the first vampire themed movies. Released in 1922, it was an unauthorised copy of the book Dracula but with altered names as the studio could not obtain the rights to the novel. After a court hearing it was ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed. However a few survived and the film eventually became on of the most popular horror films of all time.
Horror eventually progressed to feature more monsters like these such as 'Dracula', a second adaptation of 'Frakenstein', 'The Wolf Man' and 'The Mummy'. Once the 1950s arrived horror movies were split into seperate subgenres, Doomsday Film and Demonic Film. Many of the Doomsday subgenre were desgined to highlight the fear shared by a world of living in an atomic age, especially given the bombing of Hiroshima. 'Godzilla', 'Them!' and 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' were some of the most popular of this wave of atomic inspired films.
The slasher subgenre was introduced with films such as 'Peeping Tom' and Alfred Hitchcock's famous
film: 'Psycho'. Eventually American horror was steered during the 1960s to the zombie genre and
George Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead'. This combined the psychological fear with gore,
distinguishing it from the era of horror before.
The genre itself began to diverisfy during the period of the 1970s and1980s. It began with the creation of numerous reincarnation films and the portrayal of children as the villains. This gave the films of the time an uncomfortable feeling because of these antagonists. A few popular slasher movies were made during this period with films such as 'Nightmare on Elm Street', 'Friday the 13th' and 'Halloween'. At the same time the genre of horrific animals began to reemerge after Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' several years prior, with 'Jaws' and 'Orca'. It even diversified into the Sci-Fi genre as well with the film 'The Thing', about an evil shapeshifiting alien, and Ridley Scott's 'Alien'.
During the 1990s the various slasher movies saw sequels but were given extremely bad reviews. New films began to bridge the gap between fictional and real world horror, the most popular of these being 'Scream'. The audience for horror films shifted interested and this is highlighted in the period of the 1990s when the horror movies began to diversify into Sci-Fi much more with films such as 'Mimic', 'Species' and 'Blade'. Films that appeared later began to reignite the slasher genre, as well as the release of 'The Exorcist', a film praised for the sheer amount of terror instilled into it's audience, with members of the audience reportedly vomiting and fainting. Another popular movie was 'The Blair Witch Project', a film about a group of people using a video camera to find and document the Blair witch. This spawned a wave of found footage, low budget horror movies in the 2000s.
The creation of numerous franchise films in the beginning of the 2000s such as 'Jason X' but these were generally not well recieved due to the reliance on previous source material.
Video game adaptations were also released in the mid 2000s such as 'Silent Hill', 'Resident Evil'
and 'Doom' as well as films such as 'Van Helsing' and 'Underworld'. The former in particular was
an interesting throwback to the monsters of the very early horror movies, with them being hunted
by Van Helsing. The 'Resident Evil' franchise was the precursor to the reemergence of the
zombie genre of horror movies such as 'I am Legend' and '28 days later'. Horror movies began to
be reimagined and remade in the 2000s, particularly slashers such as, 'Friday the 13th', 'The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and 'Nightmare on Elm Street' as well as a reimagining of 'Day of the
Dead'.
In the later 2000s and early 2010s horror begins to spread. Up till this point it was primarily movie
based genre. But with the immense popularity of YouTube and Creepy Pasta's films based on
the found film genre made popular by 'The Blair Witch Project' began to appear on YouTube.
The most popular topic usually being 'The Slender Man'. As well as this horror begins to spread
onto the television, spawning series such as 'Hannibal', based on the popular horror film 'Silence
of the Lambs', and 'The Walking Dead'. The horror film genre on the other hand begins to create
a second wave of vampire films such as 'Only lovers left alive' however these films are not meant
to scare as much as they are drama, brought on perhaps by the 'Twilight' franchise. The true horror movies begin to feature much more psychological horror with films like 'Sinister' gaining popularity because of their unreliance on jumpscares.
Overall there is a clear pattern in the horror genre as it grows and evolves. Each age has its own group of horror movies with the 1910s being primarily based on fictional monsters. Which continued up to the 1950s which spawned numerous doomsday films particularly in the spirit of the fear of the atomic age. The 1960s began the zombie genre. The 1970s began the slasher genre and animal horror films. The 1980s was Sci-Fi horror films. and the continuation of slashers as they evolved into franchises. The 2000s saw adaptations, rebirths and reimaginings and finally the 2010s have the diversification of the horror genre onto multipleplatforms as mainstream media as well as psychological horror films.