Horror films go back as far as the onset of films themselves, over 100 years ago. From our earliest days, we use our vivid imaginations to see ghosts in shadowy shapes, to be emotionally connected to the unknown and to fear things that are improbable. Watching a horror film gives the audience an escape into another world, and it lets us go on a rollercoaster of emotions with the characters we identify with, from the comfort of our own living room or the cinema. In these particular surroundings, we know that we aren’t in any danger and aren’t going to get hurt, so we can face our fears head on.
Horror films, when done well and with less reliance on horrifying special effects, can be extremely influential film forms, tapping into our dream states and the horror of the irrational and unknown, and the horror within man himself. The best horror films only imply or suggest the horror in subtle ways. Rather than blatantly displaying it, the audience are left to create their own picture of the villain/evil, as in Scream(1996) and Halloween(1978). The anonymity of the killer usually makes for a scarier and plot and essentially a scarier film.
In typical horror films, a three part narrative can usually be observed. This is when there is a state of equilibrium at the start of the film. At this point, the audience will be introduced to the characters that will play big parts in the plot of the film in one way or another. In the next section of the film, there will be some sort of conflict that breaks the equilibrium, thus creating disequilibrium and a sense of unease for the audience. It is mostly likely that at this stage of the film, majority of the story will unfold. At the end of the film, the equilibrium will be restored and the area in which the events took place will return to how it was. However, sometimes in horror films, the audience are only led to believe that equilibrium has been restored, and the source of terror/evil is still around somewhere.
The earliest horror films were gothic in style. They were usually set in old spooky mansions or castles, and would be bathed in moonlight and fog. This is partly because it, at the time, was the only way they could be film because of the lack of the equipment studios have today. However, the main reason that they were filmed in this way is because the films were largely based on classis literature of the gothic/horror genre such as Dracula.
Horror films develop out of a number of sources: folktales with devil characters, witchcraft, fables, myths, ghost stories, and Gothic or Victorian novels. Probably the most well known horror writer is Bram Stoker, who created arguably the most famous horror character of all time – Dracula. This character is the one that is most frequently portrayed in horror film, with about 160 representations of the 500 year old blood sucking vampire.
The earliest horror films were produced in America from 1909 to the early 1920’s, making the genre of horror one of the oldest and most basic. Before the 1930’s, Hollywood was reluctant to experiment with the themes of true horror films. Instead, the studios took popular stage plays and emphasized their features of mystery, whilst still providing rational explanations for all the supernatural elem
ents. 
By the early 1930’s, horror entered into its classic phase in Hollywood. The studios took morbid tales of vampires, undead aristocrats, mad scientists and invisible men, and created some of the most archetypal creatures and monsters to ever grace cinema screens. Universal Studios was best known for its pure horror films in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and its horror characters – Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy, to name a few. It also produced famous horror actors like Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.
Horror films branched out in all different directions in the 1960’s and onwards. Especially as the Production Code disappeared, giving the studios less boundaries, and film censorship was on the decline. Directors began to frankly portray horror in ordinary circumstances and seemingly innocent settings that the audience could identify with. Around this time, directors like Roger Corman were producing low budget and quickly-made films, and the British film studio Hammer Horror was making sequels to Dracula and Frankenstein. Also around this time, directors varied the type of horror that was used in films e.g. psychopathic murderers, and more suspenseful, atmospheric horror. However, this doesn’t mean that gothic horror had been forgotten, it was simply being modernized and brought up to date. This is evident in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962).
Although Alfred Hitchcock was a well known suspense/thriller director, his early films like The Lodger (1926) did explore themes of horror. Although I have previously discussed Psycho (1960) as a thriller film, it still very easily falls into the horror genre. Psycho changed the face of horror films ever since its release. The pure archetypal horror was discovered in the dark shadows of a human soul, in the form of the psychopathic hotel owner, Norman Bates. The film itself has come to influence a number of Hollywood horror films, especially the ‘slasher’ horror subgenre. Hitchcock didn’t only use the evil within a person to scare an audience. In The Birds (1963), a coastal town and its inhabitants are attacked by a flock of birds.
The horror director George Romero is famous for incorporating the theme of zombies into his films. Romero’s most notable horror films is the Dead series (5 films in total).
-Night of the Living Dead (1968) – A documentary style film, shot in grainy black and white, that welcomed an entire subgenre of horror to cinema.
-Dawn of the Dead (1978) – The gory sequel to Night of the Living Dead followed the survivors of a zombie attack seeking refuge in a shopping centre. There is a classic quote in the film made by Ken Foree, which explained the occurrence of the zombies, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth”. A remake of the film was released in 2004.
-Day of the Dead (1985) – A group of scientists performed experiments on the zombies in hopes of finding a cure for the plague. This was until the zombies turned on them.
-Land of the Dead (2005) – A symbolic story between upper and lower class survival.
-Diary of the Dead (2008) – A film within a film. It was considered as an updated 21st century presentation of the zombie story for the YouTube and MySpace generation.
In the 1970’s, filmmakers created horror films noteworthy for their shocking expositions of body mutilation, bold use of colour and electronic music, everyday and isolated locations and the sexual exploitation of female victims, made all the more vivid by the turn to realism in films of that era in
general. The critical and popular success of Rosemary's Baby (1968), directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow prompted the 1970’s occult explosion, which included the box office smash The Exorcist (1973) directed by William Friedkin. The Exorcist deals with the demonic possession of a young girl, played by Linda Blair, and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her daughter. It became one of the most profitable horror films of all time (winning two Academy Awards), and until The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, it was the only horror film to be nominated for Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. To date, The Exorcist has been named as one of the scariest films of all time. Another popular film about a demonic child is The Omen (1976), where a man realizes that his five year old adopted son is the Antichrist. The occult explosion included numerous horror films in which the Devil became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. Also in the 1970’s, the famous horror author Stephen King arrived on the film scene. Many of his books were adapted for the screen, beginning with the adaptation of his first published novel, Carrie (1976). As well as its ability to scare people, Carrie is probably better known for its psychological exploration. In 1978 John Carpenter created Halloween, this was around the same time that Sean Cunningham starting to produce Friday the 13th (1980). Both of these films kick started the modern ‘slasher film’. They also inspired numerous, mostly inferior sequels. This subgenre was imitated by dozens of increasingly violent films made throughout the subsequen
t decades. Jamie Lee Curtis made her film debut in Halloween, playing the role of Laurie Strode – the only central teenage character in the film who is not killed. Laurie Strode’s survival in Halloween is what initiated the convention of a person’s chance of survival being directly linked to their morals. The film was a major success and was considered the highest grossing independent film of its time, earning the status of a classic horror film. Jamie Lee Curtis (who, coincidently, is the daughter of Janet Leigh, who played Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) was subsequently cast in several horror films, and she soon became known as the ‘Scream Queen’ because of her roles.
In 1975, Steven Spielberg began his Hollywood career with the film Jaws, a blockbuster notable for not only its expertly crafted horror elements but also for its success at the box office. Jaws is often credited as one of the first films to use elements such as horror and gore in a big-budget Hollywood film. Alien (1979) combined the naturalistic acting and graphic violence of the 1970’s with the monster film plots of earlier decades, and reacquainted horror with science fiction. It spawned a long-lasting franchise and countless imitators.
The 1980’s were marked by the growing popularity of horror movie sequels. The seemingly endless sequels to Halloween (1978), 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 1980’s. Most of these sequels or imitations were exploitative and featured shocks and gory violence. Another common convention was the theme of teenagers – usually female – being stalked by a homicidal male psychopath. Another trend that appeared in the 80’s was the infusion of blatant comedic elements into films. As the cinema box office turned to more serious films, the genre of horror began to fade away. However, the genre found a new audience in the growing market of home video. The names of the killers in horror films of the 80’s have become landmarks of the genre e.g. Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th), Jack Torrance (The Shining).
In the first half of the 1990’s, horror continued many of the themes from the 1980’s. Sequels of famous 80’s horror films continued to make money. Films like Candyman (1992) were part of a mini-movement of self-reflective horror films. They touched upon the relationship between fictional horror and real-world horror. In Candyman, the film examined the link between an invented urban legend and the realistic horror of the racism that produced its villain. Two main problems pushed horror backwards during this period. Firstly, the horror genre wore itself out with the overuse of nonstop slasher and gore films in the 80’s. Also, the audience that feasted on the blood and gore of the previous decade grew up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were instead being captured by the explosion of sci-fi and fantasy, courtesy of the big budgets and computer generated special effects, which horrors lacked. To re-connect with its audience, horror became more self-mockingly ironic, especially in the latter half of the 90’s. Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy, beginning in 1996, featured teenagers who were fully aware of, and often made reference to, the history of horror films, and mixed ironic humour with shock. Along with I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Urban Legend (1998), they re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre. Among the popular English-language horror films of the late 90’s, only 1999’s independent hit The Blair Witch Project attempted straight-ahead scares in the context of a mock-documentary.
The start of the 2000’s saw a quiet period for the horror genre. Film making studios realised that profits could be made by cheaply re-making classic horror films, many were watered down, familiar films without any further originality. These include:
-House of Wax (1953/2005)
-Black Christmas (1974/2006)
-The Amityville Horror (1979/2005)
-The Fog (1980/2005)
-Prom Night (1980/2006)
Final Destination (2000) marked a successful revival of clever horror that was centred on teenagers. The clever thing about the film was that there wasn’t actually a person physically chasing them, instead they were stalked by Death itself. Final Destination was successful because although it was a fictional film, there is a serious issue that is dealt with. The teenagers ‘cheat Death’ after someone has a premonition about a plane exploding. Death then comes back to complete its original design of what should have happened on the plane, and the survivors eventually die in freak incidents, in the order they would have done on the plane.
In 2003, two of 1980’s most recognisable horror characters went head to head in Freddy vs. Jason. Some notable trends have marked horror films in the 2000s. The Others (2001) was a successful horror film of that year and 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 2002. Two sequels have followed. The British film 28 Days Later (2002), directed by Academy Award winner, Danny Boyle, featured an update on the genre with a new style of aggressive zombie. The film later spawned a sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007). A new subgenre of horror that has started to emerge in recent films is ‘torture-porn’ or ‘gore-nography’. Some examples of films in this genre are Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), Captivity (2007) and their respective sequels. Another variation on the horror genre was the blending of ‘chick-flicks’ with a traditional horror/adventure film. The Descent (2005) was one of the first all-female action horror films. For the characters, six unknown actresses were used. This is so that the audience didn’t identify with them as much as they would have if they had been well known actresses. In 2007, Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween. The film focused more on Michael Myers’ childhood than the original 1978 film did. The slasher genre is standing strong in cinema today...
-A remake of the 1981 horror My Bloody Valentine was released in the cinema on 16th January of this year.
-A remake of Friday the 13th was released in the cinema on Friday 13th of February of this year.
-The sixth installment of the Saw series is set to be released later in the year.
-The fourth film in the Final Destination series – Final Destination: Death Trip 3D is set to be released in August.
-and finally, Scream 4 is currently in production for a 2010/2011 theatrical release.
Although Alfred Hitchcock was a well known suspense/thriller director, his early films like The Lodger (1926) did explore themes of horror. Although I have previously discussed Psycho (1960) as a thriller film, it still very easily falls into the horror genre. Psycho changed the face of horror films ever since its release. The pure archetypal horror was discovered in the dark shadows of a human soul, in the form of the psychopathic hotel owner, Norman Bates. The film itself has come to influence a number of Hollywood horror films, especially the ‘slasher’ horror subgenre. Hitchcock didn’t only use the evil within a person to scare an audience. In The Birds (1963), a coastal town and its inhabitants are attacked by a flock of birds.
The horror director George Romero is famous for incorporating the theme of zombies into his films. Romero’s most notable horror films is the Dead series (5 films in total).
-Night of the Living Dead (1968) – A documentary style film, shot in grainy black and white, that welcomed an entire subgenre of horror to cinema.
-Dawn of the Dead (1978) – The gory sequel to Night of the Living Dead followed the survivors of a zombie attack seeking refuge in a shopping centre. There is a classic quote in the film made by Ken Foree, which explained the occurrence of the zombies, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth”. A remake of the film was released in 2004.
-Day of the Dead (1985) – A group of scientists performed experiments on the zombies in hopes of finding a cure for the plague. This was until the zombies turned on them.
-Land of the Dead (2005) – A symbolic story between upper and lower class survival.
-Diary of the Dead (2008) – A film within a film. It was considered as an updated 21st century presentation of the zombie story for the YouTube and MySpace generation.
In the 1970’s, filmmakers created horror films noteworthy for their shocking expositions of body mutilation, bold use of colour and electronic music, everyday and isolated locations and the sexual exploitation of female victims, made all the more vivid by the turn to realism in films of that era in
general. The critical and popular success of Rosemary's Baby (1968), directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow prompted the 1970’s occult explosion, which included the box office smash The Exorcist (1973) directed by William Friedkin. The Exorcist deals with the demonic possession of a young girl, played by Linda Blair, and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her daughter. It became one of the most profitable horror films of all time (winning two Academy Awards), and until The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, it was the only horror film to be nominated for Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. To date, The Exorcist has been named as one of the scariest films of all time. Another popular film about a demonic child is The Omen (1976), where a man realizes that his five year old adopted son is the Antichrist. The occult explosion included numerous horror films in which the Devil became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. Also in the 1970’s, the famous horror author Stephen King arrived on the film scene. Many of his books were adapted for the screen, beginning with the adaptation of his first published novel, Carrie (1976). As well as its ability to scare people, Carrie is probably better known for its psychological exploration. In 1978 John Carpenter created Halloween, this was around the same time that Sean Cunningham starting to produce Friday the 13th (1980). Both of these films kick started the modern ‘slasher film’. They also inspired numerous, mostly inferior sequels. This subgenre was imitated by dozens of increasingly violent films made throughout the subsequen
t decades. Jamie Lee Curtis made her film debut in Halloween, playing the role of Laurie Strode – the only central teenage character in the film who is not killed. Laurie Strode’s survival in Halloween is what initiated the convention of a person’s chance of survival being directly linked to their morals. The film was a major success and was considered the highest grossing independent film of its time, earning the status of a classic horror film. Jamie Lee Curtis (who, coincidently, is the daughter of Janet Leigh, who played Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) was subsequently cast in several horror films, and she soon became known as the ‘Scream Queen’ because of her roles.In 1975, Steven Spielberg began his Hollywood career with the film Jaws, a blockbuster notable for not only its expertly crafted horror elements but also for its success at the box office. Jaws is often credited as one of the first films to use elements such as horror and gore in a big-budget Hollywood film. Alien (1979) combined the naturalistic acting and graphic violence of the 1970’s with the monster film plots of earlier decades, and reacquainted horror with science fiction. It spawned a long-lasting franchise and countless imitators.
The 1980’s were marked by the growing popularity of horror movie sequels. The seemingly endless sequels to Halloween (1978), 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 1980’s. Most of these sequels or imitations were exploitative and featured shocks and gory violence. Another common convention was the theme of teenagers – usually female – being stalked by a homicidal male psychopath. Another trend that appeared in the 80’s was the infusion of blatant comedic elements into films. As the cinema box office turned to more serious films, the genre of horror began to fade away. However, the genre found a new audience in the growing market of home video. The names of the killers in horror films of the 80’s have become landmarks of the genre e.g. Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th), Jack Torrance (The Shining).
In the first half of the 1990’s, horror continued many of the themes from the 1980’s. Sequels of famous 80’s horror films continued to make money. Films like Candyman (1992) were part of a mini-movement of self-reflective horror films. They touched upon the relationship between fictional horror and real-world horror. In Candyman, the film examined the link between an invented urban legend and the realistic horror of the racism that produced its villain. Two main problems pushed horror backwards during this period. Firstly, the horror genre wore itself out with the overuse of nonstop slasher and gore films in the 80’s. Also, the audience that feasted on the blood and gore of the previous decade grew up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were instead being captured by the explosion of sci-fi and fantasy, courtesy of the big budgets and computer generated special effects, which horrors lacked. To re-connect with its audience, horror became more self-mockingly ironic, especially in the latter half of the 90’s. Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy, beginning in 1996, featured teenagers who were fully aware of, and often made reference to, the history of horror films, and mixed ironic humour with shock. Along with I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Urban Legend (1998), they re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre. Among the popular English-language horror films of the late 90’s, only 1999’s independent hit The Blair Witch Project attempted straight-ahead scares in the context of a mock-documentary.
The start of the 2000’s saw a quiet period for the horror genre. Film making studios realised that profits could be made by cheaply re-making classic horror films, many were watered down, familiar films without any further originality. These include:
-House of Wax (1953/2005)
-Black Christmas (1974/2006)
-The Amityville Horror (1979/2005)
-The Fog (1980/2005)
-Prom Night (1980/2006)
Final Destination (2000) marked a successful revival of clever horror that was centred on teenagers. The clever thing about the film was that there wasn’t actually a person physically chasing them, instead they were stalked by Death itself. Final Destination was successful because although it was a fictional film, there is a serious issue that is dealt with. The teenagers ‘cheat Death’ after someone has a premonition about a plane exploding. Death then comes back to complete its original design of what should have happened on the plane, and the survivors eventually die in freak incidents, in the order they would have done on the plane.
In 2003, two of 1980’s most recognisable horror characters went head to head in Freddy vs. Jason. Some notable trends have marked horror films in the 2000s. The Others (2001) was a successful horror film of that year and 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 2002. Two sequels have followed. The British film 28 Days Later (2002), directed by Academy Award winner, Danny Boyle, featured an update on the genre with a new style of aggressive zombie. The film later spawned a sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007). A new subgenre of horror that has started to emerge in recent films is ‘torture-porn’ or ‘gore-nography’. Some examples of films in this genre are Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), Captivity (2007) and their respective sequels. Another variation on the horror genre was the blending of ‘chick-flicks’ with a traditional horror/adventure film. The Descent (2005) was one of the first all-female action horror films. For the characters, six unknown actresses were used. This is so that the audience didn’t identify with them as much as they would have if they had been well known actresses. In 2007, Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween. The film focused more on Michael Myers’ childhood than the original 1978 film did. The slasher genre is standing strong in cinema today...
-A remake of the 1981 horror My Bloody Valentine was released in the cinema on 16th January of this year.
-A remake of Friday the 13th was released in the cinema on Friday 13th of February of this year.
-The sixth installment of the Saw series is set to be released later in the year.
-The fourth film in the Final Destination series – Final Destination: Death Trip 3D is set to be released in August.
-and finally, Scream 4 is currently in production for a 2010/2011 theatrical release.
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