History of Horror

The horror genre is a very forward thinking form of media and has progressed over the past 25 years. Starting from the 1900’s, horror films around the start of the 1900’s included all things related to concepts surrounding monsters and ghouls. The first adaptation of Frankenstein was in 1910, although it was a short quarter-of-an-hour film it was notable due to the fact Thomas Edison produced it. 1910 also saw several adaptations of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Supporting my point on the fictional ‘villains,’ in 1913 The Werewolf was released, which was directed by Henry Macrae.




In 1920 the release of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was the first successful screen adaption of the novel. This was followed by the controversial adaption of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, (which caused Stoker’s family to sue the film-makers over copyright issues) which was titled Nosferatu and was released in 1922.




Between the 1900 to 1930’s films were known as the ‘silent fear’ due to the lack of sound/ dialogue in most films. During the silent era, Universal Studios were responsible for the few achievements in American horror most notably the Lon Cheney Sr. films: The Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame.


Onwards from the 1930’s where talking pictures were now the norm, films still continued to be filled with vampires, monsters and mummies. These were called the ‘classic creations’. Universal Studios really got involved with the horror genre and pioneered Dracula (1931). James Whale then produced the Invisable Man in 1933, Stuart Walker’s Werewolf in London (1935) and Hambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter in 1936.



This Universal Gothic Horror Cycle started to lose its steam and fell into a pit of self parody with film titles like The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy’s Hand and Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man in 1943. The period between the post World War II years and the 1950’s were likely to be the most difficult time in Hollywood. From Supreme Court rulings splitting apart the studio system to a death match against television for patrons, this time period saw an increasingly protective Hollywood trying desperately to stay relevant. The horror genre still stayed popular with teens, looking for a thrill out of the narratives. Horror films began to illustrate this Cold War fear of invasion blending into a Pulp Science Fiction cycle with films like The Thing From Another World and The Day The Earth Stood Still, both from 1951.





By the mid 50’s the sci-fi cycle wore down and this sprung the ‘Psychology, Sex and Gore’ explosion in the 1960’s. Different styles and cycles in the horror genre gained popularity, prestige and freedom, due to the censorship of the Production Code being abandoned in 1964. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) helped mark the change between monsters to reality fears. Norman Bates was an everyday human on the outside but a psychological monster in the mind. Hitchcock then delivered another ground-breaking horror called The Birds in 1963. Back in the United Kingdom, Hammer Films Productions rebooted Universals Gothic Monsters but added sex and gore in films such as Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein.



Horror was starting to be taken seriously both at the highest craft of film production and at the lowest: setting the stage for important horror sub-genres that come in the following decades. Films about Satan and Supernatural forces (the occult) became popular, big budget subjects. The Exorcist (1973) claimed to be the greatest entry in the Occult cycle.





Moving to the 1980’s The Shining, which in true Kubrick fashion defies any category or imitation. Friday the 13^th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were both studio stacked slasher films that were a great success with numerous sequels.



The slasher films came to a halt and psychological and thriller horrors carried on running through the 1990’s and into the early 2000’s, including films like The Ring, Sixth Sense and The Silence of The Lambs.


In the early 2000’s a new era exaggeratedly called “Torture Porn,” this emphasised extreme gore, grunge and often tortuous violence. The Saw franchise, was the most successful series of films to cover the torture porn genre, starting from 2004. The monster villains also returned in 2004 with Shaun of The Dead, (the parody of 2004’s Dawn of the Dead). This was also followed by The Walking Dead television series, whose popularity has continued to grow so much that it regularly gets more than 12 million viewers per week in the USA.



Horror films have continued to push boundaries using body horror and other deep narrative methods, using Evil Dead (2013) as an extremist blood bath film, but also still shocking audiences with psychological thrillers like Oculus (2013) and The Possession (2012).