History of horror
- 2. What are horror moviesHorror films are unsettling movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, disgust and horror from viewers. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres. Horrors also frequently overlap with the thriller genre.
- 3. First of the horror filmsSilent film offered the early pioneers a wonderful medium in which to examine terror. Early horror films are surreal, dark pieces, owing their visual appearance to the expressionist painters and their narrative style to the stories played out by the Grand Guignol Theatre Company. Darkness and shadows, such important features of modern horror, were impossible to show on the film stock available at the time, so the sequences, for example in Nosferatu, where we see a vampire leaping amongst gravestones in what appears to be broad daylight, seem doubly surreal to us now. Nonetheless, these early entries to the genre established many of the codes and conventions still identifiable today. They draw upon the folklore and legends of Europe, and render monsters into physical form. Sadly, the fragility of early film stock means that many of these early attempts at horror have been lost to us, but these three classics are currently available on DVD.
- 4. 1930’sHorror movies were reborn in the 1930s. The advent of sound, as well as changing the whole nature of cinema forever, had a huge impact on the horror genre. The dreamlike imagery of the 1920s, the films peopled by ghostly wraiths floating silently through the terror of mortals, their grotesque death masks a visual representation of 'horror', were replaced by monsters that grunted and groaned and howled. Sound adds an extra dimension to terror, whether it be music used to build suspense or signal the presence of a threat, or magnified footsteps echoing down a corridor. Horror, with its strong elements of the fantastic and the supernatural, provided an effective escape to audiences tiring of their Great Depression reality, and, despite the money spent on painstaking special effects, often provided a good return for their studio. This was also despite the struggle that many of the major players - such as director Todd Browning - had to adapt to the new medium. Making talking pictures was a very different process to producing silent movies and, watching today, some of the early efforts seem very awkward indeed. Some famous films include King, Kong and Dracula.
- 5. 1950’sIt is hard to grasp the changes that took place in popular consciousness between 1940 and 1950. In ten short years the concept of a horrific monster had altered irrevocably. Whereas Lon Chaney, Jr in a fine covering of yak's hair had once served as a powerful envoy from the dark side, now there were more recognisably human faces attached to evil. Faces who had fought on both sides in WW2, the developers of the atom bomb and the death camp, mad scientists indeed whose activities would have unnerved even Victor Frankenstein or Dr Moreau.
- 6. 1970’sHorror movies of the 1970s reflect the grim mood of the decade. After the optimism of the 1960s, with its sexual and cultural revolutions, and the moon landings, the seventies were something of a disappointment. It all started to go horribly wrong in 1970; the Beatles split, Janis and Jimi died, and in many senses it was downhill all the way from there: Nixon, Nam, oil strikes, glam rock, feather haircuts, medallions... However, when society goes bad, horror films get good, and the 1970s marked a return to the big budget, respectable horror film, dealing with contemporary societal issues, addressing genuine psychological fears.
- 7. 1990’sBy the end of the 1980s horror had become so reliant on gross-out gore and buckets of liquid latex that it seemed to have lost its power to do anything more than shock and then amuse. Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (1992) epitomises this; a riot of campy spatter, it climaxes with a zombie orgy through which the bespectacled hero must cut his way with a lawnmower. It's hilarious, and not scary in the slightest. The original creations of the late 1970s/early 80s were simply pastiches of their former selves, their power to chill long having disappeared in a slew of sequels and over-familiarity. It seemed that horror had become safe, a branded commodity (Jason, Freddy, Michael) bringing easy recognition and a rigid set of expectations. The uncanny had somehow become the norm, tame and laughable.
- 8. 2000’sHorror movies in the late 1990s predicted dire things for the turn of the century. Whilst January 1st, 2000 came and went without much mishap, many commentators have identified the true beginning of the 21st century as September 11th, 2001. The events of that day changed global perceptions of what is frightening, and set the cultural agenda for the following years. The film industry, already facing a recession, felt very hard hit as film-makers struggled to come to terms with what was now acceptable to the viewing public. Anyone trying to sell a horror film in the autumn of 2001 (as George Romero tried with Land of the Dead) got rebuffed. "Everybody wanted to make the warm fuzzy movies."(LA Times 30/10/05) There were even calls to ban horror movies in the name of world peace. But, by 2005, the horror genre was as popular as ever. Horror films routinely topped the box office, yielding an above-average gross on below-average costs. It seems that audiences wanted a good, group scare as a form of escapism, just as their great-grandparents chose Universal horror offerings to escape the miseries of the Depression and encroaching world war in the 1930s.