Early horror films are surreal, dark pieces, owing their visual appearance to the expressionist painters and their narrative style. 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.
1920 classics -
The Golem (1915/1920)
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919)
1930's - Horror begins to talk . . . and scream.
Horror 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. 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. The horror films of the 1930s are exotic fairy tales, invariably set in some far-off land peopled by characters in period costume speaking in strange accents. Horror was still essentially looking backwards, drawing upon the literary classics of the 19th century for their source material.
1930's classics -
Dracula (1931)
Frankenstein (1931)
1940's - Horror eats itself
Wartime horror movies were an American product and they was banned in Britain. With film production curbed throughout the theatre of war in Europe, horror films were cranked out by Hollywood solely to amuse the domestic audience. The studios stuck with tried and tested ideas, wary of taking risks that might suggest they had no measure of the zeitgeist, and trotted out a series of variations on a theme. This was not an age of innovation, but horror movie memes were, nonetheless, evolving. If the horror movies of the 1930s had dealt in well-established fictional monsters, looking back towards the nineteenth century for inspiration, the 1940s reflected the internalisation of the horror market. The Americans looked at themselves as “safe”, whereas everything else, particularly anything hailing from that frightening, chaotic, unreasonable and uncontrolled place known as Europe was dangerous.
1940's classics -
Cat people (1942)
1950's - Creature features
It 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.The military action of WW2 had left over 40 million dead, and millions more exposed to the full spectrum of man's inhumanity to man. Homecoming soldiers and bereaved widows had too many horror stories of their own to appreciate fantasies on the big screen, and much preferred the silliness of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein et al. The world could never be the same again, and the dawning of post-war posterity in America brought with it a new breed of monsters, adapted specifically for survival in the second half of the twentieth century.
1950's Classics -
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
The wasp Woman (1960)
House on Haunted hill (1959)
1960 Thriller to chiller
Horror films and thrillers had intertwined way back in the days of the Old Dark House (1932) and Cat People (1942). However, horror's relegation to the B-movie zone in the 1950s meant that those directors who were interested in thrillers had concentrated on producing glossy, stylish, film-noir stories with no taint of the supernatural, the monstrous, and therefore the drive-in. It is interesting to compare the original Cape Fear(1962) with its 1991 remake. And yet... The undisputed master of the thriller, Alfred Hitchcock, chose the 1960s for his two main ventures into the horror genre.
1960's Classics
Psycho (1960)
The Birds (1963)
1970's - Nightmare decade: in front of the children
Horror 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.
1970's classics -
The Exorcist (1973)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
1980's Horror films
Horror movies of the 1980s (which probably begin in 1979 with Alien) exist at the glorious watershed when special visual effects finally caught up with the gory imaginings of horror fans and movie makers. Technical advances in the field of animatronics, and liquid and foam latex meant that the human frame could be distorted to an entirely new dimension, onscreen, in realistic close up. This coincided with the materialistic ethos of the 1980s, when having it all was important, but to be seen to be having it all was paramount. People demanded tangible tokens of material success - they wanted bigger, shinier, faster, with more knobs on - as verification of their own value in society. In the same way, horror films during this decade delivered the full colour close-up, look-no-strings-attached, special effect in a way that previous practitioners of the art could only dream about. Everything that had lurked in the shadows of horror films in the 1950s could now be brought into the light of day. The monsters were finally out of the closet.
1980's Classics -
The thing (1982)
Child's Play (1988)
1990s Horror in the 1980s
By 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.
1990's Classics -
Se7en (1995)
Wes Craven's new nightmare (1994)
2000's Global Convergence
Horror 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. The monsters have had to change, however. Gone were the lone psychopaths of the 1990s, far too reminiscent of media portrayals of bin Laden, the madman in his cave. As the shock and awe of twenty first century warfare spread across TV screens, cinematic horror had to offer an alternative, whilst still tapping into the prevailing cultural mood.
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