The Horror film genre

Early Horror was inspired by art and literature as well as ancient myth & folklore & focused on the supernatural& the occult for its horror. Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1781) is believed to have influenced Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein & features a demon.

Emerging in the late 1700s, Gothic Literature was a key influence. The ‘Gothic’ part of the name refers to pseudo medieval buildings that these stories took place in – old castles on a dark & stormy night – gloomy forests, dungeons & secret passage ways.

The Gothic Novel

The monster’s murder of Victor Frankenstein’s wife in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein (1819) Is believed to be

inspired by The Nightmare. It was later made into a Hollywood film with Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures

releasing it in 1931 ( James Whale) starring Boris Karloff.

Frankenstein was well received by audiences & critics at the box office and led to many sequels. It helped to establish alongside

Dracula, the supernatural/monster genre, as well as being an early example of science fiction.

The sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of The Vampyre by John Polidori & was influential in the early 19th century. But it is Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic novel Dracula which is remembered

The Gothic novel & the occult

The notion of vampirism has existed for millennia; the Ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of blood drinking demons and spirits which were precursors to modern vampires. Many myths emerge during the medieval period but the folklore for the modern vampire originates in the late 17th century in southeastern Europe. These tales formed the basis of the vampire legend that later entered Germany & England.

Nosferatu

Nosferatu (Murnau 1922), is one of the earliest classics of Horror & was influenced by German Expressionism. The film was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, & Stoker's heirs sued over the adaptation. A court ruling ordered all copies of the film be destroyed. However, one print survived, & the film is now regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.

The Expressionist movement was largely confined to Germany due to the isolation the country during World War I. The plots often dealt with madness, insanity, & betrayal, & were a direct reaction against realism. They used extreme distortions in expression to show an inner emotional reality rather than what is on the surface.

German Expressionism

The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. This dark, moody school of film making was brought to the United States when the Nazis gained power and a number of German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood.

Two genres in Hollywood clearly influenced by Expressionism were horror & film noir. Carl Laemmle and Universal Studios had made a name for themselves producing such famous horrors of the silent era as The Phantom of the Opera. Now German filmmakers such as Karl Freund ( cinematographer for Dracula 1931) set the style and mood of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s with their dark and artistically designed sets.

German Expressionism’s influence on Hollywood horror

Stylistic elements taken from German Expressionism are common today in films that do not need reference to real places such as science fiction films (eg, Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner, which was itself influenced by Metropolis).[

Universal Pictures made the first cycle of horror films – triggered in part by the coming of sound in 1927. In the silent era, Universal had made The Phantom of the Opera & Hunchback of Notre Dame both starring Lon Chaney. But in the 30s, Universal sunk their teeth into horror, kicking off the Universal Gothic horror cycle with Dracula, 1931 starring Bela Lugosi.

Universal’s 1930’s Horror

While Universal’s offerings slipped from Horror to formula the smallest of the big 5 studios – RKO started to lay the stylistic foundation for low budget horror films to come. Val Lewton produced these for $150,000 a piece. Using leftover studio sets & creating the scares by using mood and shadows rather than makeup and monsters – Cat People (Tourneur 1942) was a stab at the more psychologically scary films in the decades to come.

After the Supreme Court rulings of 1948 which ripped apart the studio system & cut-throat competition with tv for audiences, in the 1950s, Hollywood became increasingly desperate. Horror films got relegated to B-film status & A-list talent was used for lavish epics. But horror was popular with teens who wanted thrills even if the plot lines were becoming more ludicrous. Cold War

Horror

Break up of Studio System

Horror films began moving away from the dominant staple of Monsters & the Supernatural & began to tap into the 1950’s cold war fear of invasion & nuclear annihilation. This developed into a Pulp Science Fiction cycle with films like The Thing From Another World, The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) & Forbidden Planet & Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The 1960s herald an explosion of styles and cycles & sub-genres in the genre as it gains in popularity, prestige & freedom. (The restrictive censorship of the Production Code was abandoned in 1964). Advances in technology also allow for greater use of special effects & more gore.

Psychology, sex & gore

Hitchcock’s Psycho shocked audiences & led to the view that Horror could be more than B-movie fare.

Unlike the monsters of previous horror cyclesbe they supernatural, demonic, mutated or fromouter space, Norman Bates was rooted in reality.

Human on the outside but with the mindof a monster.

Psychological HorrorHitchcock

In the late 50s Hammer Films Productions in Britain began rebooting Universal’s Gothic Monsters – but adding sex and gore. Shot in full color, Hammer’s first Gothic horror reboot was Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)with Peter Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein & Christopher Lee as the monster. For the first time in a Frankenstein film, blood was shown on screen in full chilling color.

Hammer Horror – sex & Gore

Between 1957 & 1974, Hammer cranked out 7 Frankenstein movies, 6 Draculas, 9 other vampire outings, 2 Jekyll & Hydes, and 3 Mummy films. The Hammer Studio, located on the banks of the River Thames became the setting of it’s own parody – as it’s country style Down Place mansion was used as the set for Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975, a film that is a send up of the Hammer Horror style.

Sex & Gore

Hammer Horror

In the US, inspired by Hammer’s winning formula of sex and gore B-movie producer Roger Corman began making low budget movies beginning with Little Shop of Horrors in 1960; shot in three days with a budget of just $30,000 using sets that had been left over from Bucket of Blood. Corman knew what audiences wanted, blood and babes. His greatest acclaim as a director came with his Edgar Allan Poe Cycle released between 1959 and 1964.

From the 60s Horror was being taken seriously by critics & audiences. This set the stage for important horror films sub-genres that developed in the following decades. The Occult – films about Satan and the Supernatural – was a popular big budget subjects – notably Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968 & The Exorcist (1973) directed by William Friedkin, Richard Donnor’s The Omen (1976) & Stuart Rosenberg’s Amnityville Horror (1979).

The Occult

In the 70s a group of filmmakers The Film School Generation who formally studied horror began to make horror films or inject it into their filmmaking. Brian De Palma’s Carrie in 1976 set the stage for a Teen Horror cycle. 1979’s Alien by Ridley Scott successful remixed horror and science fiction as did John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing in 1982.

TheFilm SchoolGeneration

Horror has been a staple of the low budget film world since the 50s. As film production technology has advanced & costs have steadily declined the rise of independent filmmakers has allowed for more & more new takes on horror. Films like Stanley Kubricks 1980s The Shining which fused the psychological and the supernatural & went on to become a classic.

Produced on a budget of $325,000 & grossing $240 million dollars, John Carpenters 1978 hit Halloween is one of the most successful independent horror film to date. The first of it’s kind - a Hitchcock inspired slasher film- there is in fact very little gore; low budgets forced Carpenter to construct his horror inside everyday suburbia.

There are three modern horror film cycles which arose in late nineties & 2000s Torture Porn is the modern reboot of the Splatter films going back to the Hammer Horror era. This latest cycle emphasizes intense gore, grunge and often tortuous violence. The Saw franchise, the most successful horror film franchise of all time, is considered the first in this latest crop of splatter films with it’s first installment in 2004 by James Wan.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) Eduardo Sanchez & Daniel Myrick represents the first major film in the modern found footage horror sub-genre. It pieces together first hand footage to reconstruct the last terrifying moments of the original eye witness. Blair Witch also one of the first films to be marketed through the internet.

With roots going back to George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 the modern Zombie Apocalypse Cycle began when Danny Boyle breathed a new life into the undead genre with 28 Days Later in 2002. Recent Zombie films feed on our fears of a medical pandemic and the break down of society.