Horror Film

The horror film genre has proved enduring, evolving over more than a century of film history. In the twenty-first century, hundreds of feature horror films are made annually. Film theorists and movie fans alike have analyzed the appeal of the films and acknowledged the visceral response they evoke. That master of horror, Stephen King, whose books have been adapted for dozens of horror films, in a 1981 essay (originally published in Playboy), argued that people watch horror movies to prove they are not afraid, to assert their normality (as measured against the monstrous), and to have fun. Horror movies, King added, serve a cathartic purpose by allowing viewers to vicariously free the buried, uncivilized creature that dwells within each person. Postmodern horror films may lack the clear demarcation between good and evil found in earlier representatives of cinematic horror, but horror films, as King observes, still serve to "keep the gators fed."

Brief History

In 1896, the year after the Lumière brothers introduced their motion picture camera in Paris, another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, made the first horror film, Le Manoir du Diable (The Devil’s Castle), a two-minute movie featuring a shape-shifting bat, a medieval castle, and a supporting cast of skeletons, ghosts, and witches. In the early years of cinema, horror films drew heavily from literary sources. Alice Guy, another pioneer of French—and American—cinema, in 1905 made an historic contribution to the horror genre with Esmeralda, the first film version of Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). Otis Turner’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908), the first film version of the Jekyll-Hyde transformation and the first American horror film, was an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel.

Two years after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Edison Film Company produced Frankenstein (1910), the first screen version of Mary Shelley’s novel, first published in 1818. It took more than a decade longer for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to reach the screen. The vampire in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) may be Count Orlok rather than Count Dracula, but the story clearly is Bram Stoker’s. In 1925, Rupert Julian adapted Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera (1911) for the screen with Lon Chaney, Sr., as the Phantom. Chaney, known as the Man of a 1,000 Faces for his ability to transform himself into a variety of characters, became the first star of horror films. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), frequently praised as one of the most influential horror films of all time, translated the abstraction and distortion of German expressionism into cinema. The story is a variation on the mad scientist that blurs the line between reality and nightmare, between madness and sanity. The film demonstrated that a horror film could be art as well as entertainment. By the time the silent film era ended in 1929, characters and character types had been introduced that would serve makers of horror films for the first century of movies and beyond.

Universal Studios, having produced some of the most successful silent films of the horror genre, made plans to continue the tradition as talkies began. Bram Stoker’s Dracula inspired the script for the Universal movie of the same name. Stoker’s was not the first vampire story. Both The Vampyre (1819), written by John Polidori in the same writing challenge that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Varney the Vampire, a serialized tale of more than half a million words (1845–1847), predate Stoker’s version. But Stoker’s blend of gothic horror and romance became the most popular version, and it was the original source of the 1931 film. The role of Count Dracula went to a Hungarian actor, Bela Lugosi, whose portrayal became the definitive interpretation of Dracula. Universal followed with a new version of Frankenstein in the same year. When Lugosi turned down the chance to play Frankenstein’s creature, the role went to Boris Karloff, whose flat-headed, gentle monster became one of the most memorable characters in horror film history.

Karloff reprised the role of Frankenstein’s monster in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939), the latter, which also featured Bela Lugosi as the mad Ygor in what many film critics consider his finest performance. Karloff also starred in The Mummy (1932). The mad scientist archetype proved especially popular in the golden age of horror. The Poe-inspired Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Island of Lost Souls (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933), based on H. G. Wells’s novels, and The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) all featured mad scientists. Fay Wray, the female lead in the last, became far more famous for her role in an RKO movie released the same year. The blonde Wray in the hand of a monstrous ape became an iconic image, and King Kong, part horror, part science fiction, started a subgenre of giant monster movies.

By the end of the 1930s, the horror market was saturated. The postwar years brought a brief resurgence, but horror movies of the 1950s were largely B-movies. The next decade produced some classics, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) and George A. Romero’s debut movie, Night of the Living Dead (1968), which led to zombie films as a new subgenre. Such movies served as harbingers of the next decade.

The 1970s brought horror films that had an intensity and directness new to the genre. John Kenneth Muir suggests that anxieties about women’s roles, racism, soaring crime rates, and distrust of government and other institutions were reflected in movies such as The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Jaws (1975), and Halloween(1978). A new generation of filmmakers interested in exploring psychological fears emerged, and big-budget horror films earned box office dollars and critical attention. At the same time, Hammer Films in the United Kingdom, a studio with a reputation for reclaiming the gothic, put a more erotic spin on the vampire tale with a new franchise saturated in lesbianism and nudity.

The 1980s brought technical advances, but the 1990s saw other innovations as films mixed genres and gave the monstrous a more credible face. Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) made Hannibal Lecter part of popular culture. David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) is a cop movie that is also a serial killer movie and a horror film in which the darkness is almost overwhelming. Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), a horror-comedy, parodied teen slasher films and launched a seemingly endless number of sequels and imitators. The decade ended with an award-winning movie that gave new meaning to the term "ghost story," M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999).

Horror Films Today

In the aftermath of the real life horror of September 11, 2001, few people were interested in horror films. The genre was, nevertheless, soon on the rise again. In 2004, the box office served a spike in zombie fandom with a remake of the 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead and the spoof Shaun of the Dead. The first of the Saw franchise was also released in 2004. Saw was a notable addition to the subgenre of psychological thrillers involving the preternaturally mindbending power of serial killers, another being the critically divisive The Cell (2000). The psychological thriller Get Out (2017) won an Oscar for original screenplay. The supernatural remained a popular source of cinematic discomfort, with the super low-budget indie Paranormal Activity following in the footsteps of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Both films were premised on "found footage" of characters recording their encounters with spirits they at first coax and then cannot escape, and both were sleeper hits that discovered huge audiences. Other popular supernatural horror films from the twenty-first century include The Conjuring (2013), and its sequels and other related films, and Hereditary (2018).

The horror genre is well suited to low-budget filmmaking, as camera work, set design, and a creepy script can generate the tension and atmosphere necessary to horrify a complicit audience. However, the traditional motifs of horror—spirits, creatures, and gore—have always been fodder for motion picture special effects. Computer generated imagery (CGI) has enabled filmmakers to depict varieties of shape-shifting and stage spectacular monster attacks, as in Cloverfield (2008) or A Quiet Place (2018), though many fans and critics complain of a tendency in some films to jettison simple psychological scare tactics in favor of more garish CGI effects. Another trend has been the adoption of the traditional horror narrative to juvenile romance. The Twilight novels and film adaptations, in which vampires and werewolves compete for the affections of an ordinary teenage girl, are not considered to belong to the horror genre, but may explain the direction of horror films toward themes of psychological and demonic terror.

Bibliography

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