Horror film

File:UniversalHorrorCharacters.jpg

DVD cover showing horror characters as depicted by Universal Studios. Elsa Lanchester from Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Claude Rains from The Invisible Man (1933), Bela Lugosi from Dracula (1931), Claude Rains from Phantom of the Opera (1943), "The Creature" from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Boris Karloff from Frankenstein (1931), Lon Chaney Jr. from The Wolf Man (1941) and Boris Karloff from The Mummy (1932)

The horror cinematic genre is characterized by the attempt to make the viewer experience dread, fear, terror, or horror. Often their plots involve the intrusion of an evil force, event or personage on the mundane world and the consequences thereof, sometimes of supernatural origin. Some of the most common elements include vampires, zombies and other forms of resurrected (with adverse consequences) corpses, werewolves, ancient curses, ghosts, demons and/or demonic possession, satanism, evil children, slashers, animals attacking humans, inanimate objects brought to life by bane enchantment or twisted science, and haunted houses. The horror film genre has often associated with low budgets and exploitation, but major studios and well-respected directors have made intermittent forays into the genre. Some horror films exhibit a substantial amount of coexistence with other genres, particularly science fiction and fantasy.

Specific stories and characters have also proven popular, and inspired many sequels, remakes, and copycats. These include Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, White Zombie and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

History

Early milestones

The horror genre in film is nearly as old as film itself. The first exploration of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by film pioneer Georges Melies in the late 1890s. The earliest horror-themed feature films were created by German filmmakers in the early 1900s; the most enduring of these is probably F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu 1922, the first vampire-themed feature. 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).

1930s & 1940s: The gothic subgenre

It was in the early 1930s that American film producers, particularly Universal Pictures Co. Inc., popularised the horror film genre, bringing to the screen a series of successful gothic-steeped features including Dracula (1931), and The Mummy (1932), as well as science fiction films with horror overtones, such as "Frankenstein" and "The Invisible Man". These films, while designed to thrill, also incorporated more serious elements, and were influenced by the the German expressionist films of the '20s. Actors, notably Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, began to build careers around the genre. In the 1940s Val Lewton would produce a series of influential and atmospheric B-pictures for RKO, including Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Body Snatcher (1945)..

1950s: Cold War terror and the pull of science fiction

In the nuclear-charged atmosphere of the 1950s the tone of horror films shifted away from the gothic and towards the modern. A seemingly endless parade of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from Outside: alien invasions, and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. During this time the horror and sci-fi genres were often interchangeable. 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 better 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.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of studios centered specifically around horror. Notable were British production company Hammer Films, which specialized in bloody remakes of classic horror stories often starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, including Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein. American International Pictures (AIP) also made a series of Edgar Allan Poe 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: Gore and Shock

Later in the 1960s the genre moved towards non-supernatural 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 was a notable example of this genre. Psychological horror films would continue to appear sporadically with 1991's The Silence of the Lambs a later highlight of the subgenre. Low-budget gore-shock films from the likes of David Friedman also appeared. Examples included Blood Feast (a devil-cult story) and Two Thousand Maniacs (a ghost town run by the shades of Southern redneck bigots), which featured splattering blood and bodily dismemberment.

The Haunting and The Innocents were two psychological horror films from the early 1960s, with high production values and gothic atmosphere, along with Hitchcock's more modern-backdropped The Birds. One of the more popular horror films of the late 60's was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. This film remains the sole horror film to be entered into the movie hall of fame. Blending psychological thriller with social commentary, Blending psychological thriller with social commentary, it moved away from the Gothic Horror trends of earlier eras and brings the horror into the lives of everyday man.

1970s: Sexual Hangups and Schlock

With the demise of the Production Code of America in 1964, and the financial successes of the low-budget Friedman-like 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-films. Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) was a critical and popular success, as was 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 of Judaeo-Christianity became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. Being by doctrine invincible to direct human intervention, Satan-villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film genre, postmodern style and a dystopian worldview.

It was also during the seventies that horror author Stephen King first came on the film scene. Adaptations of virtually all of his books came to be filmed for the screen, beginning with Brian DePalma's adaptation of King's first published novel, Carrie. Reincarnation was also a subject of horror films, 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. In 1978, John Carpenter's successful Halloween introduced the teens-threatened-by-superhuman-evil theme. This theme would be copied in dozens of lesser, increasingly violent movies throughout the 1980s including the long-running Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, as well as several, often far-flung, sequels to Halloween itself.

Meanwhile, Canadian director David Cronenberg updated the mad scientist movie subgenre by exploring contempoary fears about technology and society, and singlehandedly creating the body horror genre, in Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), and Videodrome (1983). At the same time, there was an explosion of horror films in Europe, particularly Italy and Spain, from the hands of filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy), which were dubbed into English and filled drive-in theaters which could not necessarily afford the expensive rental contracts of the major American producers. These films tended to feature more traditional horror subjects - vampires or werewolves, e.g. - but treated with the requisite gore and sexuality now expected in American horror film but of which American producers overall were still a little skittish.

1980s: Horror Series and Splatter Comedies

A key example of the supernatural in 1980s movies is 1982's Poltergeist (directed by Tobe Hooper, who previously directed the psycho film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre), dealing with a family who live in a house that unknown to them is on the site of a former cemetery, thereby causing evil forces to kidnap their youngest daughter. Many sequels and a television series followed. The sequels to Friday the 13th, Halloween and Wes Craven's fairy tale slasher classic A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were the popular face of horror films in the 1980's.

Zombie films like Night of the Living Dead" and Dawn of the Dead had contained black comedy and satire, but were too dark and serious to be funny. Motel Hell (1980) and Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case were the first 80's films that utilized the dark conventions of the previous decade while campily mocking them. Stuart Gordan's Re-Animator, The Return of the Living Dead, Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger (all 1985), soon followed. In his explicitly slapstick sequel to the sober film The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi produced Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987), which remains the archetypal splatter comedy.

Worth historical observation is that Silent Night, Deadly Night, a very controversial film from (1984) failed at theatres and was eventually withdrawn from distribution because of it being about a killer Santa Claus.

Also worthy of note is the release of the seminal horror / sci-fi film Akira in 1988.

1990s: Was the genre dead, or just sleeping?

In the first half of the '90s, the genre continued with themes from the 1980s. The genre continued to enjoy success with films such as the sequels to the Child's Play and "Leprechaun" series. However, the genre was beginning to rush through a transformation into more self-mocking irony and outright parody, especially in the later half of the 1990s. New Zealand director Peter Jackson's Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead (1992) (AKA Dead-Alive in the USA) combined slapstick humour with a cavalcade of gore. Wes Craven's Scream movies featured teenagers who were fully aware of and often made reference the history of horror movies, and mixed ironic humor with the shocks. Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films both parodied and advanced the zombie genre. The form of comedy that uses gruesome horror elements has been dubbed by some as "splatstick" or "splatterstick".

Francis Ford Coppola's brilliant and evocative piece, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), was one exception to this rule. The film is truly memorable, featuring an inspired ensemble cast and a style that grasps the attention of the viewer and plunges them into a different era. Of popular horror films in the late 90s, 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. The fact was, the adolescent audience which had feasted on the blood and morbidity of the previous two decades had grown up, and its replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were being captured by the explosion of science-fiction and heroic fantasy films laden with computer-generated imagery and nonstop violent action.

Millenial horror

However, the international success of Hideo Nakata's Ringu in 1997 may have launched a revival of serious horror filmmaking in Japan leading to such films as Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse and Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on. Other advances in horror have been made through Japanese animation (for example the gruesome 'guro' animation).

The Canadian film Cube is perhaps one of the most interesting straight-up horror films of the 90s, in that it was based around a relatively novel concept, 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 difficult to capture.

Early horror entries in the 2000s have been a mixed bag of teen exploitation (such as the Final Destination movies) and more serious attempts at mainstream horror, notably the horror-suspense films of M. Night Shyamalan and Gore Verbinski's remake of Ringu, The Ring.

Also, there has been a continuation of series' long established from previous decades. Some notable box office revivals, include the main villains of Freddy vs. Jason, Chucky from the Child's Play series in Seed of Chucky, the monsters in Van Helsing, Michael Myers from the "Halloween" series in "Halloween: Resurrection", and the prequel to "The Exorcist", called Exorcist: The Beginning.

In addition, there were some remakes of previous successes such as Dawn of the Dead and The Amityville Horror (2005 movie).

A unique feature of this period has been a translation of horror video games into films. Some have been enormous successes, such as Resident Evil, while others embarressing and dismal critical and box-office failures, such as Uwe Boll's House of the Dead (2003).

Notable people and films

Notable directors

Dario Argento
Mario Bava
John Carpenter
Roger Corman
Wes Craven
David Cronenberg
Terence Fisher (directed for Hammer Films)
Lucio Fulci
Alfred Hitchcock
Tobe Hooper
F. W. Murnau
Hideo Nakata
George A. Romero
Eric Stanze
James Whale