History
1890s-1920s
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 Devil") which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. 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, thought lost for many years, film collector Alois Felix Dettlaff Sr. found a copy and had a 1993 rerelease.
Many of the earliest feature length 'horror films' were created by German film makers in 1910s and 1920s, during the era of German Expressionist films.Many of these films would significantly influence later Hollywood films. Paul Wegener's The Golem (1915) was seminal; in 1920 Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with its Expressionist style, would influence film-makers from Orson Welles to Tim Burton and many more for decades. The era also produced 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 Gothic horror, such as James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933). Tod Browning, director of Dracula, also made the extremely controversial Freaks based on Spurs by Ted Robbins. These films, while designed to thrill, also incorporated more serious elements, and were influenced by the German expressionist films of the 1920s.
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.
The first horror film produced by an Indian film industry was Mahal, a 1949 Hindi film. It was a supernatural thriller and the earliest known film dealing with the theme of reincarnation.
1950s-1960s
With the dramatic advances in technology that occurred in the 1950s, the tone of horror films shifted away from the gothic towards concerns more relevant to the late-Century audience. The horror film was seen to sever into two sub-genres:
- the horror-of-personality film
- the horror-of-the-demonic film. A stream of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside": alien invasions and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. 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.
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, 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 Terror's House of Horrors (1965).
Teaming with Tigon British Film Productions, American International Pictures (AIP) would make what is perhaps the most brutal horror film of the late 1960s: Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (film). Released in 1968, it was oddly retitled for American audiences as The Conqueror Worm.
In Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), for example, the object of horror certainly doesn't appear as monstrous or a supernatural other, but rather as a normal human being. The horror has a human explanation, steeped in Freudian psychology and repressed sexual desires. 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.
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 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"). Some of these films were made by respected auteurs.
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.
Also in the 1970s, horror author Stephen King, a child of the 1960s, first arrived on the film scene. Many of his books were adapted for the screen, beginning with Brian DePalma's adaptation of King's first published novel, Carrie (1976. 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, and Halloween has also become one of the most successful independent films ever made.
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 comedy film 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.
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
The 1980s were marked by the growing popularity of horror movie 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 successful supernatural slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were the popular face of horror films in the 1980s.
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.
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, and Halloween all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which met with varied amounts of success at the box office.
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 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.
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, 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.
Among the popular English-language horror films of 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 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.
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 2000 was successful despite the film having been available on home video for years. Franchise films such as Freddy Vs. Jason also made a stand in theaters. Final Destination (2000) marked a successful revival of clever, teen-centered horror, and spawned two sequels with a third sequel coming out in {2009}.
Some notable trends have marked horror films in the 2000s. A French horror film Brotherhood of the Wolf became the second-highest-grossing French-language film in the United States in the last two decades. The Others (2001) was a successful horror film of that year. That film was the first horror in the decade to rely on psychology to scare audiences, rather than gore.
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 March 2002.
A larger trend is a return to the extreme, graphic violence 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 Devil'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 both followed by a prequel in the same year and a sequel in the following year.
Remakes of late 1970s horror movies became routine in the 2000s. In addition to 2004's remake of Dawn of the Dead and 2003's remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 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. Production of re-makes looks set to continue in 2008 and beyond, with Quarantine (a remake of REC), Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scanners, Hellraiser, The Birds, Child's Play and even Attack of the Killer Tomatoes being remade.
