Horror films have been around for a long time, and can be traced as far back as the late nineteenth century. The horror genre’s origins started with many Gothic horror films, a majority of which being adaptations of popular horror novels, with a large amount being adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . One of the first major horror films was Nosferatu, an unauthorised German adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, albeit with names changed due to their being unable to obtain the rights to the novel.
The genre remained highly Gothic during the first half of the 20th century, with Universal releasing two of the most iconic horror movies of all time, Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein. The character’s presented in these films, and even the actors who portrayed them, became icons of the Horror genre, and would remain so for many years, appearing in many films.
The start of the 50s saw a shift in the tone of horror films, though the Hammer Horror company saw success with yet again adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein, which saw many sequels. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was released in 1960 and is often considered the first slasher film.
Though monsters still remained a staple of horror films, the 60s saw the introduction of what is know as “the horror of the demonics”, this type of horror was frequent throughout the 60s and early 70s, these films often portrayed a corruption of innocence and possession, meaning often the antagonist is a character the protagonist will not be willing to kill. The most famous horror of this kind, The Exorcist, emerging in 1973.
1979’s “Alien” introduced a science fiction horror hybrid and showed hybrid horror films can be executed with the same level of quality as a normal horror film, the film changed the normal conventions of horror in that you rarely see the “monster”, the film acts very similarly to a psychological horror and takes generic conventions of both science fiction and horror.
The 80s saw rise to an excessive amount of gore filled B movies, many were incredibly low budget with an over abundance of gore and were dismissed by critics for being such, but down the line a number of these films became cult classics and received praise from critics looking back with hindsight. One example of this is Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series which has been cited as one of the best horror movies of the decade, with an extremely original plot despite it’s shortcomings in budget.
The late 70s and 80s saw many icons of horror being born, a number of slasher films were released including a Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Child’s Play and Friday the 13th. These films were dubbed “video nasties”. Many of these films saw sequels throughout the 80s and 90s, most of which were received negatively by fans and critics alike. However, one Nightmare on Elm Street sequel dubbed “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” released in 1994 received widely positive reviews, the film was an example of a number of self-referential horror films which presented a question to viewers about the relations between the horror within a film, and the horror within the real world. This movement of horror films would eventually reach it’s peak in the form of Wes Craven’s “Scream”, which garnered a much higher audience than Wes Craven’s original attempt at the concept with New Nightmare.
The 90s saw horror as a genre encounter a number of barriers, the previous decade of horror had been little more than a mess of slasher movies and gorefests, and as such the horror genre had become associated with such and had worn itself out. Furthermore the audience who enjoyed the 80s horror films had aged and were now uninterested in the genre, and the fresh generation who would have been the obvious choice for a new target demographic were more interested in the science-fiction and fantasy films of the decade which had improved drastically due to advancements in technology allowing for better special effects. To counter this horrors began to take themselves less seriously and moved towards a more parodic nature, this is evident in films such as the Scream series and I Know What You Did Last Summer, this helped to revive the slasher genre which had been unpopular for quite some time.
The first successful horror of the 2000s was Final Destination which served as a successful revival of teen centred horror films. Foreign horror films saw wide popularity, with French, Asian and Swedish films seeing success, despite their being filmed in another language. Some foreign horror films have been remade and Americanised and have still seen success, a prime example being The Grudge.
This decade also saw a shift in the overall tone of horror, which divided into two different paths. The first path took a step away from the commonplace use of gore to scare viewers and instead went about using psychology to scare them instead, this was effective and was a breath of fresh air for the genre. The other path however saw the genre embrace the use of gore even more, providing extreme graphics violence, with many films showing vivid images of torture, these were dubbed “torture porn” or other similar titles. This path, though less original and sophisticated than the use of psychology, was massively successful, with the highest grossing horror movie of all time being the Saw franchise of which the entire story was based around torture and gore.
The second half of the 2000s saw a large number of remakes or “reimaginings” of older horror films, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th and The Wolfman, all of which were received negatively by critics.
Currently the horror genre holds little footing amongst other genres, with nowhere near as much popularity as it had in the 80s and many of the recent large money making horror movies being nothing more than poor remakes attempting to thrive off of the popularity of the past.