HISTORY OF HORROR

By Alexander Rowden

THE START OF THE MOVEMENT

The term ‘Horror’ was brought to the public eye in 1764 by Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto used

supernatural jumps to start the horror craze that spread like wild fire and create some amazing horror writers like Matthew Gregory Lewis who wrote the

famous horror called ‘The Monk’. When talking about horror, people believe that Frankenstein is the

most memorable horror film and this was wrote because of the movement.

1930’s

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. The dreamlike imagery of the 1920s, the films peopled by ghostly wraiths floating silently through the

terror of mortals, their grotesque death masks a visual representation of 'horror', were replaced by monsters that grunted and groaned and howled. 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.

1940’s

Wartime horror movies were purely an American product. Banned in Britain, with film production curbed throughout the theatre of war in Europe,

horror movies were cranked out by Hollywood solely to amuse the domestic audience. 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 internalization of the horror market.

1950’s

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. Now there were more

recognizably human faces attached to evil. Faces who had fought on both sides in WW2, the

developers of the atom bomb, the death camps and mad scientists.

1970’s

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. By 1970, the party was over; 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.

1980’s

Horror movies of the 1980s 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.

1990’s

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) epitomizes 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.

2000’s

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.