Horror film
In film, the
horror genre is characterized by the attempt to make the viewer experience fright,
fear,
terror,
disgust or
horror. Its plots often involve the intrusion of an
evil force, event, or personage, sometimes of
supernatural origin, into the mundane world.
Some of the most common elements include
vampires,
zombies (and other forms of
resurrected corpses), any kind of
monsters,
werewolves, ancient
curses,
ghosts,
demons and/or
demonic possession,
Satanism,
evil children, '
slasher villains', vicious animals, inanimate objects brought to life by
black magic or
twisted science,
haunted houses,
cannibals, and malicious
extraterrestrials. The
serial killer movie is sometimes regarded as part of the horror genre.
Specific stories and characters, often derived from classic literature, have also proven popular, and have inspired many
sequels,
remakes, and copycats. These include
Dracula,
Frankenstein,
The Mummy,
The Wolf Man,
The Phantom of the Opera and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The horror film is often associated with low budgets and
exploitation, but major studios and well-respected
directors have made intermittent forays into the genre. The genre's marginal status has caused it to receive much critical dismissal or moral condemnation over the course of film history. However, during the past few decades new generations of critics - more inclined to take popular genres seriously - have given horror substantial attention and analysis, especially with regard to its perceived subversive content. Over the same period, it has become more than ever a source of controversy, as its level of graphic violence has increased and accusations of
misogyny have been leveled, especially by
feminist critics.
Some horror films owe a substantial amount to other genres, particularly
science fiction,
fantasy,
dark comedy and
thriller. The lines between horror and these other categories are often a subject of debate among fans and critics.
Early milestones
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 Devil's Castle") which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. Another of his horror projects was the
1898 La Caverne maudite (aka "The Cave of the Demons").
[http://pages.emerson.edu/organizations/fas/latent_image/issues/1990-05/horror.htm]The early 20th century brought more milestones for the horror genre including the first monster to appear in a full-length horror film,
Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame who had appeared in
Victor Hugo's book, "
Notre-Dame de Paris" (published in
1831). Films featuring Quasimodo included
Alice Guy's
Esmeralda (
1906),
The Hunchback (
1909),
The Love of a Hunchback (
1910) and
Notre-Dame de Paris (
1911).
[http://www.moria.co.nz/horror/hunchback39.htm]Many of the earliest feature length 'horror films' were created by
German film makers in
1910s and
1920s, many of which were a significant influence on later Hollywood films.
Paul Wegener's
The Golem (
1915) was seminal; in
1919 Robert Wiene's
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was both controversial with American audiences, due to postwar sentiments, and influential in its
Expressionistic style; the most enduring horror film of that era was probably the first vampire-themed feature,
F. W. Murnau's
Nosferatu (
1922), an unauthorized adaptation of
Bram Stoker's Dracula.
[http://silentmoviemonsters.tripod.com/germanexpressionism.html]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.
[http://www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms.html]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). These films, while designed to thrill, also incorporated more serious elements, and were influenced by the German expressionist films of the
1920s. Some actors began to build entire careers in such films, most notably
Boris Karloff and
Bela Lugosi.
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. Throughout the decade Universal also continued to produce more sequels in the
Frankenstein series, as well as a number of films teaming up several of their monsters. Also in that decade,
Val Lewton would produce a series of influential and atmospheric
B-pictures for
RKO Pictures, including
Cat People (
1942),
I Walked with a Zombie (
1943) and
The Body Snatcher (
1945).
1950s
With the dramatic changes in technology that occurred in the
1950s, the tone of horror films shifted away from the gothic and further toward science fiction.
A seemingly endless parade of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside":
alien invasions and deadly
mutations to people, plants, and insects. These films provided ample opportunity for audience exploitation, with gimmicks such as
3-D and "Percepto" (producer
William Castle's electric-shock technique used for
1959's
The Tingler) drawing audiences in week after week for bigger and better scares. The classier horror films of this period, including
The Thing from Another World (
1951; attributed on screen to
Christian Nyby but widely considered to be the work of
Howard Hawks) and
Don Siegel's
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (
1956) managed to channel the
paranoia of the
Cold War into atmospheric creepiness without resorting to direct exploitation of the events of the day. Filmmakers would continue to merge elements of science fiction and horror well into the future.
[http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0412/is_1_29/ai_73036226] The late 1950s and early
1960s saw the rise of studios centered around horror, including the
British company
Hammer Film Productions. Hammer enjoyed huge international success from bloody technicolor films involving classic horror characters, often starring
Peter Cushing and
Christopher Lee, such as
The Curse of Frankenstein (
1957),
Dracula (
1958), and
The Mummy (
1959) and many sequels. Hammer, and director
Terence Fisher, are widely acknowledged as pioneers of the modern horror movie.
American International Pictures (AIP) also made a series of
Edgar Allan Poeâ€"themed films produced by
Roger Corman and starring
Vincent Price. These sometimes controversial productions paved the way for more explicit violence in both horror and mainstream films.
1960s
In the 1960s the genre moved towards "
psychological horror", with thrillers such as
Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho (
1960) using all-too-human monsters rather than
supernatural ones to scare the audience;
Michael Powell's
Peeping Tom (1960) was a notable example of this. Psychological horror films would continue to appear sporadically, with
1991's
The Silence of the Lambs a later highlight of the subgenre (although these films can also be considered
crime films or
thrillers).
Ghosts and
monsters still remained popular:
The Innocents (
1961) and
The Haunting (
1963) were two supernaturally-tinged psychological horror films from the early 1960s, with high production values and
gothic atmosphere. Hitchcock's
The Birds (1963) had a more modern backdrop; it was a prime example of "nature-goes-mad" menace combined with psychological horror.
Low-budget
gore-shock films from the likes of
Herschell Gordon Lewis also appeared. Examples included 1963's
Blood Feast (a
devil-cult story) and
1964's
Two Thousand Maniacs (a
ghost town run by the shades of
Southerners), which featured splattering blood and bodily
dismemberment.
One of the most influential horror films of the late 1960s was
George Romero's
Night of the Living Dead (
1968). This
zombie film was later deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" enough to be preserved by the
National Film Registry. Blending
psychological thriller with gore, it moved the genre even further away from the gothic horror trends of earlier eras and brought horror into the lives of ordinary modern people.
[http://www.loc.gov/film/titles.html]1970s
|
Michael Myers, unstoppable psycho-killer from Halloween (1978) |
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"). Many of these films were made by respected
auteurs.
[http://www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms2.html]Roman Polanski's
Rosemary's Baby (1968) was a critical and popular success, and a precursor to the
1970s occult explosion, which included the box office smash
The Exorcist (
1973) (directed by
William Friedkin and written by
William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the
novel), and scores of other horror films in which the
Devil became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children.
Evil children and
reincarnation became popular subjects (such as
Robert Wise's
1977 United Artists film
Audrey Rose, which dealt with a man who claims his daughter is the reincarnation of another dead person). Another well recognized religious horror movie was
The Omen (1976), where a man realizes that his five year old adopted son is the
Antichrist. Being by
doctrine invincible to solely human intervention, Satan-villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film,
postmodern style and a
dystopian worldview.
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 classic
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (
1974) both recalled the horrors of the
Vietnam war and pushed boundaries to the edge;
George Romero examined the rise of the new
consumer society in his
1978 zombie
sequel,
Dawn of the Dead; Canadian director
David Cronenberg updated the "
mad scientist" movie subgenre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society, and reinventing "
body horror", starting with
Shivers (
1975).
[http://www.acmi.net.au/1F6B9E88D95C48FCA5239678F1BBC8C6.htm]Also in the
1970s, horror author
Stephen King, a child of the 1960s, first arrived on the film scene. Adaptations of many of his books came to be filmed for the screen, beginning with
Brian DePalma's adaptation of King's first published novel,
Carrie (
1976), which went on to be nominated for
Academy Awards, although it has often been noted that its appeal was more for its psychological exploration as for its capacity to scare.
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), introducing the teens-threatened-by-invincible-superhuman-evil theme, and kick-starting the "
slasher film". This subgenre would be mined by dozens of increasingly violent movies throughout the subsequent decades, Halloween has also become one of the most successfulindependent films ever made.
1979's
Alien combined the naturalistic acting and graphic violence of the 1970s with the monster movie plots of earlier decades, and re-acquainted horror with
science fiction. It spawned a long-lasting franchise, and countless imitators, over the next 30 years.
At the same time, there was an explosion of horror films in
Europe, particularly from the hands of
Italian filmmakers like
Mario Bava,
Dario Argento and
Lucio Fulci, and
Spanish filmmakers like
Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy) and
Jesus Franco, which were dubbed into English and filled
drive-in theaters that could not necessarily afford the expensive rental contracts of the major American producers. These films generally featured more traditional horror subjects - e.g.
vampires,
werewolves,
psycho-killers,
demons,
zombies - but treated them with a distinctive European style that included copious gore and sexuality (of which mainstream American
producers overall were still a little skittish). Notable national outputs were the "
giallo" films from Italy, the
Jean Rollin romantic/erotic films from
France, and the anthology films of
Amicus from the
UK.
[http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/32/eurohorror.html]Meanwhile, 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, then went on to start creating their own more 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, of which the best known examples were
Mr. Vampire (
1985) and
A Chinese Ghost Story (
1987).
[http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/asianhorror1.jsp]1980s
Almost any successful
1980s horror film received 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 supernatural slasher
A Nightmare on Elm Street (
1984) were the popular face of horror films in the 1980s, a trend reviled by most critics.
Nevertheless, original horror films continued to appear sporadically:
Clive Barker's
Hellraiser (
1987) and
Tom Holland's
Child's Play (
1988) were both critically praised, although their success again launched multiple sequels, which were considered inferior by fans and critics alike. Also released in 1980 was
Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining which ended up being one of the most popular and influential horror films ever made.
As the cinema
box office returns for serious, gory modern horror began to dwindle (as exemplified by John Carpenter's
The Thing (1982)), it began to find a new audience in the growing
home video market, although the new generation of films was less sombre in tone.
Motel Hell (
1980) and
Frank Henenlotter's
Basket Case (1982) were the first 1980s films to campily mock the dark conventions of the previous decade (zombie films like
Night of the Living Dead and
Dawn of the Dead had contained
black comedy and
satire, but were in general more dark than funny).
David Cronenberg's graphic and gory remake of
The Fly, was released in
1986, about a few weeks from the
James Cameron film
Aliens,
Stuart Gordon's
Re-Animator,
Dan O'Bannon's
The Return of the Living Dead, and
Lloyd Kaufman's
The Toxic Avenger (all
1985), soon followed. In
Evil Dead II (1987),
Sam Raimi's explicitly
slapstick sequel to the relatively sober
The Evil Dead (
1981), the laughs were often generated by the gore, defining the archetypal
splatter comedy. New Zealand director
Peter Jackson followed in Raimi's footsteps with the ultra-gory micro-budget feature
Bad Taste (1987).
Horror films continued to cause controversy: in the UK, the growth in home video led to growing public awareness of horror films of the types described above, and concern about the ease of availability of such material to children. Many films were dubbed "
video nasties" and banned. In the USA,
Silent Night, Deadly Night, a very controversial film from
1984, failed at theatres and was eventually withdrawn from distribution due to its subject matter: a killer
Santa Claus.
1990s
In the first half of the
1990s, the genre continued with themes from the 1980s. It managed mild commercial success with films such as continuing sequels to the
Child's Play and
Leprechaun series. The slasher films 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, but all were panned by fans and critics, with the exception of Wes Cravens "A New Nightmare"
Note:
New Nightmare, with
In the Mouth of Madness,
The Dark Half, and
Candyman, was part of a mini-movement of self-reflexive horror films. That is, 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 reflexive style became more overt and ironic with the arrival of
Scream.
The
Canadian film Cube (
1997) was perhaps one of the few horror films of the 1990s to be based around a relatively novel concept; it was able to evoke a wide range of different fears, and touched upon a variety of social themes (such as fear of
bureaucracy) that had previously been unexplored.
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.
[http://www.mediaknowall.com/Horror/eighties.html]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 USA) took the
splatter film to ridiculous excesses for comic effect.
Francis Ford Coppola's
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), featured an ensemble cast and the style of a different era, harking back to the sumptuous look of
1960s Hammer Horror, and a plot focusing just as closely on the romance elements of the Dracula tale as on the horror aspects. Wes Craven's
Scream 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. It re-ignited the dormant
slasher film genre.
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 ironic context of a
mockumentary, or mock-documentary. Together with the international success of
Hideo Nakata's
Ringu in
1998, it launched a trend in horror films to go "low-key", concentrating more on unnerving and unsettling themes than on gore.
M. Night Shyamalan's
The Sixth Sense (1999) was a spectacularly successful example.
Millennial horror
Ringu launched a revival of serious horror filmmaking in
Japan ("
J-Horror") leading to such films as
Takashi Shimizu's
Ju-on (
2000) and
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's
Kairo (
2001). Other advances in horror were in
Japanese animation (for example the gruesome '
guro' animation), as
Japanese culture reached new heights of popularity in the West (although the first horror-themed anime had begun appearing in the West by the late
1980s).
The plundering of horror film history gained steam, including sequels,
homages and
remakes of films long established from previous decades. Some notable box office revivals included the merging of two old franchises in
Freddy vs. Jason (
2003), the re-imagining of the
Universal monsters in
Van Helsing (
2004), the
prequel to The Exorcist, as well as further entries in the
Halloween and
Child's Play series. Remakes of previous successes included
Gore Verbinski's American version of
Ringu (
The Ring (
2002)), and remakes of
Dawn of the Dead (2004) and
The Amityville Horror (
2005). The
zombie genre enjoyed a revival around the world, fuelled, in part, by the success of the "
survival horror" genre of videogames (themselves inspired by films). Some of these games were also turned into films (for example
Resident Evil (2002) and
Silent Hill (2006)).
Rob Zombie's
House of 1000 Corpses,
Eli Roth's
Cabin Fever, and Rob Schmidt's surprisingly effective "
Wrong Turn" exhibited homages to the horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the latter using
body horror as its primary method of scare.
Original horror entries in the
2000s were a mixed bag of teen
exploitation like the
Final Destination movies, starting in 2000, and more serious attempts at mainstream horror, notably the further horror-suspense films of M. Night Shyamalan.
James Gunn (writer of
Dawn of the Dead (2004) and the
Scooby-Doo movies) wrote and directed the graphic horror comedy,
Slither, which was released in
2006. It did not do so well at the box office, but it got the best reviews for any American horror movie in years (84% from
Rotten Tomatoes).
One particular phenomenon now commonplace in horror movies (much to fans' chagrin) is that of the
PG-13 horror movie. Films such as
Stay Alive and
Darkness Falls feature many of the typical elements of horror, but are shunned by horror buffs as too "tame", the PG-13 rating being found too restrictive. Some fans argue that horror is about breaking boundaries and getting people out of their "comfort zone", and say PG-13 horror movies do not have the liberty to really push fan's buttons. [
1]
Others argue that this is a narrow argument, as the majority of popular horror films still carry hard-R ratings (
Saw,
Hostel,
The Devil's Rejects) while most PG-13 movies are frequently ghost stories that do not necessitate hard gore (
The Ring,
The Exorcism of Emily Rose,
White Noise).
The new
Saw films were also launched merging
body horror with
thriller to create a commercially successful new series.
There was also something of a revival in
British horror film production, with some of the more successful examples including
28 Days Later (2002),
Dog Soldiers (2002),
Shaun of the Dead (2004) and
The Descent (2005).
Pro wrestling company
World Wrestling Entertainment launched
WWE Films, the new division's 1st film was
See No Evil , a horror movie starring wrestler Kane.
*
A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973) -
Denis GiffordNotable directors
*
Dario Argento*
Clive Barker*
Mario Bava*
Tod Browning*
John Carpenter*
William Castle*
Larry Cohen*
Roger Corman*
Don Coscarelli*
Wes Craven*
David Cronenberg*
Sean S. Cunningham *
Ruggero Deodato*
Terence Fisher *
Freddie Francis*
Jesus Franco*
Lucio Fulci*
John Gilling*
Stuart Gordon*
James Gunn*
Frank Henenlotter*
Alfred Hitchcock*
Tobe Hooper*
Peter Jackson*
Stanley Kubrick*
Herschell Gordon Lewis*
Lucky McKee*
Takashi Miike*
F.W. Murnau*
Hideo Nakata*
Sam Raimi*
George A. Romero*
Eli Roth*
M. Night Shyamalan*
Jacques Tourneur*
James Whale*
Robert Wiene*
Rob ZombieNotable actors and actresses
See also: List of scream queens, List of Final Girls*
Ralph Bates*
Doug Bradley*
Bruce Campbell*
John Carradine*
Lon Chaney, Sr.*
Lon Chaney, Jr.*
Jeffrey Combs*
Angela Bettis*
Barbara Steele*
Jamie Lee Curtis*
Peter Cushing*
Brad Dourif*
Robert Englund*
Michael Gough*
Lance Henriksen*
Boris Karloff*
Udo Kier*
Christopher Lee*
Peter Lorre*
Bela Lugosi*
Jack Nicholson*
Anthony Perkins*
Donald Pleasence*
Vincent Price*
Claude Rains*
Oliver ReedNotable studios
*
American International Pictures*
Amicus*
Dimension Films*
Hammer Film Productions*
New Line Cinema*
New World Pictures*
Tigon*
Troma*
Universal*
Exploitation film*
Final girl*
Haunted Hollywood*
List of comedy horror films*
List of horror films*
List of horror film killers*
List of metal songs featured in horror films*
IMDB Entry on Best/Worst "Horror" Titles*
ESplatter: Web site devoted to modern horror films
