Lon Chaney, Sr. in The Phantom of the Opera.
The 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 (a.k.a. The Cave of the Demons, literally “the accursed cave”). Japan made early forays into the horror genre with Bake Jizo and Shinin no Sosei, both made in 1898. The era featured a slew of literary adaptations, with the works of Poe and Dante, among others. In 1910, Edison Studios produced the first film version of Frankenstein, following the 1908 film adaptation of the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The macabre nature of the source materials used made the films synonymous with the horror film genre.
Around the Weimar Republic era, German Expressionist film makers would significantly influence later films. Paul Wegener’s The Golem (1920), Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name, were influential films at the time. The first vampire-themed movie, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), was made during this time, though it was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’sDracula.
Though the word “horror” to describe the film genre would not be used until the 1930s, after Universal Pictures released Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), Hollywood dramas often used horror themes. Some notable influences on the genre include The Phantom Carriage (Sweden, 1920), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Waxworks (Germany, 1924), The Phantom of the Opera (1925 film), The Lost World (1925), and The Unknown (1927). These early films were considered dark melodramas because of their stock characters and emotion heavy plots that focused on romance, violence, suspense, and sentimentality.
The trend of inserting an element of macabre into these pre-horror melodramas continued into the 1920s. Directors known for relying on macabre in their films during the 1920s were Maurice Tourneur, Rex Ingram, and Tod Browning.The Magician (1926) contains one of the first examples of a “mad doctor” and is said to have had a large influence on James Whale’s version of Frankenstein. The Unholy Three (1925) is an example of Browning’s use of macabre and unique style of morbidity; he remade the film in 1930 as a talkie, though The Terror (1928) was the first horror film with sound.
Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster
in Bride of Frankenstein(1935).
See also: List of horror films of the 1930s, List of horror films of the 1940s, and Universal Monsters
During the early period of talking pictures, Universal Pictures began a successful Gothic horror film series. Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) was quickly followed by James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and The Old Dark House (1932), both featuring monstrous mute antagonists. Some of these films blended science fiction with Gothic horror, such as Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) and featured a mad scientist, mirroring earlier German films. Frankenstein was the first in a series of remakes which lasted for years. The Mummy (1932) introduced Egyptology as a theme; 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 with B-movies including The Wolf Man (1941), as well as a number of films uniting several of the most common monsters.
Other studios followed Universal’s lead. The once controversial Freaks (1932), based on the short story “Spurs”, was made by MGM, though the studio disowned the completed film, and it remained banned in the UK for thirty years.Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount, 1931) is remembered for its innovative use of photographic filters to create Jekyll’s transformation before the camera. With the progression of the genre, actors like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were beginning to build entire careers in horror. Both appeared in three of Val Lewton’s atmospheric B-movies for RKO in the mid-1940s, including The Body Snatcher (1945).
Christopher Lee starred in several British horror films of the era, shown here in 1958’s Dracula.
With advances in technology, the tone of horror films shifted from the Gothic towards contemporary concerns. Two subgenres began to emerge: the Doomsday film and the Demonic film. Low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats such as alien invasions and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. Japan’s experience with Hiroshima and Nagasaki bore the well-known Godzilla (1954) and its sequels, featuring mutation from the effects of nuclear radiation.
Hollywood directors and producers found ample opportunity for audience exploitation through gimmicks. House of Wax (1953) used the advent of 3-D film to draw audiences, while The Tingler used electric seat buzzers in 1959. Filmmakers continued to merge elements of science fiction and horror over the following decades. Considered a “pulp masterpiece” of the era was The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), based on Richard Matheson’sexistentialist novel. The film conveyed the fears of living in the Atomic Age and the terror of social alienation.
Night of the Living Dead (full film)
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. Drawing on Universal’s precedent, many films produced were Frankenstein and Dracula remakes, both followed by many sequels. Other British companies contributed to a boom in horror film production in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s.
Peeping Tom (1960) was the first “slasher”; Alfred Hitchcock cemented the subgenre with Psycho (1960), while his The Birds (1963) introduced natural horror, in which the menace stems from nature gone mad. France continued the mad scientist theme, while Italian horror films became internationally notable. American International Pictures (AIP) made a series of Edgar Allan Poe–themed films.
Zombies in Romero’s influential Night of the Living Dead.
Films in the era used the supernatural premise to express the horror of the demonic. The Innocents (1961) based on the Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw. Meanwhile, ghosts were a dominant theme in Japanese horror, in such films as Kwaidan, Onibaba (both 1964) and Kuroneko (1968). An influential American horror film of this period was George A. Romero’sNight of the Living Dead (1968). Produced and directed by Romero on a budget of $114,000, it grossed $30 million internationally. An armageddon film about zombies, it began to combine psychological insights with gore. Distancing the era from earlier gothic trends, late 60’s films brought horror into everyday life. Low-budget splatter films from the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis also gained prominence.
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 a demon entity is represented as the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children.
“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 occult horror movie was The Omen (1976), where a man realizes that his five-year-old adopted son is the Antichrist. Invincible to human intervention, Demons became villains 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 asChristopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum.
During the 1970s, Italian filmmakers Mario Bava, Riccardo Freda, Antonio Margheriti and Dario Argento developed giallo horror films that became classics and influenced the genre in other countries. Representative films include: Black Sunday, Blood and Black Lace,Castle of Blood, Twitch of the Death Nerve, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red and Suspiria.
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) ( actually based on Serial Killer Ed Gein) 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 subgenre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society, and reinventing “body horror”, starting with Shivers (1975). Meanwhile, the subgenre 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 Oscarnominations. Next, was his third published novel, The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick, which was a sleeper at the box office.
This psychological horror film has a variety of themes; “evil children”, alcoholism, telepathy, and insanity. This film is an example of how Hollywood’s idea of horror started to evolve. Murder and violence were no longer the main themes of horror films. During the 70s and 80s, psychological and supernatural horror started to take over cinema. Another classic Hollywood horror film is Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. Poltergeist is ranked the 20th scariest movie ever made by the Chicago Film Critics Association. Both films, The Shiningand Poltergeist, involve horror being based on real-estate values. The evil and horror throughout the films come from where the movies are taking place. In The Shining, Danny Torrance (the child in the film) can sense supernatural forces. This is because the hotel where the film takes place was once a burial ground for a Native American Indian tribe. This is very similar to the film, Poltergeist. Carol Anne, who is the five-year-old child, can sense the supernatural spirits that have taken over her house. These bizarre spirits come from the graveyard, which the house is built on. Both films are an example of the evolution of Hollywood horror films.
At first, many critics and viewers had negative feedback towards The Shining. However the film became more and more popular and is now known as one of Hollywood’s most classic horror films. Carrie became the 9th highest-grossing film of 1976. King himself did not like The Shining, because it wasn’t very faithful to the 1977 best-seller novel.
A cycle of slasher films was made during the 1970s and 1980s. John Carpenter created Halloween (1978), Sean Cunningham made Friday the 13th (1980), Wes Craven directed A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Clive Barker made Hellraiser (1987). This subgenre 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). The boom in slasher films provided enough material for numerous comedic spoofs of the genre including Saturday the 14th (1981), Student Bodies (1981), National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1983), and Hysterical (1983).
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) began a new wave of killer animal stories such as Orca (1977), and Up from the Depths (1979). 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.
John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing was also a mix of horror and sci-fi, but it was neither a box-office nor critical hit, but soon became a cult classic. 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 classics such as Fright Night (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), and Near Dark (also 1987). In 1984, Joe Dante’s seminal horror comedy,Gremlins became a box office hit with critics and audiences and inspired a trend of little monster films such as Critters and Ghoulies.
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 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 Scream 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.
The start of the 2000s saw a quiet period for the genre.The Exorcist in September 2000 was successful despite the film having been available on home video for years. Valentine (2001), notably starring David Boreanaz, had some success at the box office, but was derided by critics for being formulaic and relying on foregone horror film conventions. Franchise films such as Jason X (2001) and Freddy vs. Jason (2003) also made a stand in theaters. Final Destination (2000) marked a successful revival of teen-centered horror and spawned four sequels. Jeepers Creepers series was also successful. Films such as Hollow Man, Orphan, Wrong Turn, Cabin Fever, House of 1000 Corpses, and the previous mentions helped bring the genre back to Restricted ratings in theaters. Comic book adaptations like the Blade series, Constantine (2005), and Hellboy (2004) also became box office successes. Video game adaptations like Doom (2005) and Silent Hill (2006) also had moderate box office success while Van Helsing (2004) and Underworld series had huge box office success.
The release of an extended version of
Some pronounced trends have marked horror films. A French horror film Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) became the second-highest-grossing French language film in the United States in the last two decades. The success of foreign language foreign films continued with the Swedish films Marianne (2011) and Let the Right One In (2008), which was later the subject of a Hollywood remake, Let Me In (2010). Another trend is the emergence of psychology to scare audiences, rather than gore. The Others (2001) proved to be a successful example of a psychological horror film. A minimalist approach which was equal parts Val Lewton’s theory of “less is more” (usually employing the low-budget techniques utilized on The Blair Witch Project, (1999) has been evident, particularly in the emergence of Asian horror movies which have been remade into successful Americanized versions, such as The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004), and Pulse (2006). In March 2008, China banned the movies from its market.
There has been a major 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. As of March, 2015, four sequels followed with a fifth sequel in development. The film I Am Legend (2007), Quarantine (2008), Zombieland (2009), and the British film 28 Days Later (2002) featured an update on the genre with The Return of the Living Dead (1985) style of aggressive zombie. The film later spawned a sequel: 28 Weeks Later(2007). An updated remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) soon appeared as well as the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004). This resurgence led George A. Romero to return to his Living Dead series with Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) andSurvival of the Dead (2009).
A larger trend is a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-budget, exploitation horror from the post-Vietnam years. Films such as Audition (1999), Wrong Turn (2003), 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)–although modern audiences may be surprised to find that these 1970s horror films contain little gore. An extension of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with emphasis on depictions of torture, suffering and violent deaths, (variously referred to as “horror porn”, “torture porn”, “splatterporn”, and “gore-nography”) with films such as Ghost Ship (2002), Eight Legged Freaks(2002), The Collector, The Tortured, Saw, Hostel, and their respective sequels, frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this subgenre. The Saw film series holds the Guinness World Record of the highest-grossing horror franchise in history. Finally with the arrival of Paranormal Activity (2009), which was well received by critics and an excellent reception at the box office, minimalist horror approach started by The Blair Witch Project was reaffirmed and is expected to be continued successfully in other low-budget productions.
Remakes of earlier horror movies became routine in the 2000s. In addition to 2004’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, as well as 2003’s remake of both Herschell Gordon Lewis’ cult classic 2001 Maniacs and the 2003 remake of Tobe Hooper’s classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there was also the 2007 Rob Zombie-written and -directed 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, spurring its own sequel. This film helped to start a “reimagining” riot in horror film makers. Among the many remakes or “reimaginings” of other popular horror films and franchises are films such as Thirteen Ghosts (2001), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Friday the 13th (2009), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Children of the Corn (2009), Prom Night (2008), Day of the Dead (2008) and My Bloody Valentine (2009).
Remakes remain popular and serialized, found footage style web videos featuring Slender Man became popular on YouTube in the beginning of the decade. Such series included TribeTwelve, EverymanHybrid and Marble Hornets, the latter of which has been adapted into an upcoming feature film. The character as well as the multiple series is credited with reinvigorating interest in found footage as well as urban folklore. Child’s Play saw a sequel with Curse of Chucky (2013). While Halloween, Friday the 13th and Hellraiser all havereboots in the works. Horror has become prominent on television with The Walking Dead, American Horror Story and The Strain, also many popular horror films have had successful television series made: Psycho spawned Bates Motel, The Silence of the Lambs spawned Hannibal, while Scream and Friday the 13th both have television series in development. You’re Next (2011) and The Cabin in the Woods (2012) led to a return to the slasher genre; the latter was intended also as a critical satire of torture porn. The Green Inferno (2015) pays homage to the controversial horror film Cannibal Holocaust (1980). The Babadook (2014) was met with critical acclaim. It Follows (2014) subverted traditional horror tropes of sexuality and slasher films and enjoyed commercial and critical success.