History of the Horror Genre

 

 

History of the Horror Genre

·         19^th Century Horror Stories

The Gothic tradition began in the 19th century, in such works as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Enduring icons of horror derived from these stories include Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Monster, Count Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.  As long as there have been stories, there have been stories about the ‘Other’, the unrealities we might categorise today as speculative fiction. Early creation myths in all cultures are populated by demons and darkness, and early Abrahamic and Egyptian mythology resounds with tales of a world beyond the physical, a realm of the spirits, to be revered and feared. The term 'horror' first comes into play with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, full of supernatural shocks and mysterious melodrama. Although rather a stilted tale, it started a craze, spawning many imitators in what we today call the gothic mode of writing.

 

·         The Horror of the Silent Era – 1920s

Silent film offered the early pioneers a wonderful medium in which to examine terror. Early horror films are surreal, dark pieces, owing their visual appearance to the expressionist painters and their narrative style to the stories played out by the Grand Guignol Theatre Company. 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 (1922), where we see a vampire leaping amongst gravestones in what appears to be broad daylight, seem doubly surreal to us now. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), often cited as the 'granddaddy of all horror films', this is an eerie exploration of the mind of a madman, pitting an evil doctor against a hero falsely incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. Through a clever framing device the audience is never quite clear on who is mad and who is sane, and viewing the film's skewed take on reality is a disturbing experience, heightened by the jagged asymmetry of the mise en scene. This era of horror started just after the First World War and a lot of the horror movies reflected the war. For example, ‘Dr Caligari’ (the mad doctor) represented how society had gone crazy and the jagged asymmetry and clever framing of the films represented the weirdness of how society was evolving.

 

·         Monsters and Mad Scientists – 1930s and Universal Studios Horror

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 masks a visual representation of 'horror' which 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. 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. Some of the films included in this decade of horror are The Mummy (1932) with Egyptologists suffering the effects of an ancient curse, King Kong (1933) the chest-thumping giant gorilla atop the Empire State and Freaks (1932) a horror film that horrifies rather than frightens. It is worth noting that mad scientists were also represented in this decade's horror films. 1933, the year Hitler came to power, saw something of a peak in mad scientist movies; it seems the genre was horribly preminiscent of the scientific horrors to come in the Nazi-run concentration camps over the subsequent decade.

 

·         The Primal Animal Within; Werewolves and Cat People – 1940’s

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. It was wolves that posed the main global threat at the outset of the 1940s. Hitler himself strongly identified with the iconography and legends of the wolf. The name 'Adolf' means "noble wolf" in Old German. So it seemed a natural step for Universal to follow up their minor 1935 hit, The Werewolf of London. Although there is a well-established werewolf mythology extending back to the ancient world, there was no single established story (as with Dracula and the vampire myth) to use for easy adaptation. It fell to screenwriter Curt Siodmak to pen a story to fit the title Universal had been knocking around for a while. The Wolf Man (1941) is a mishmash of several wolf legends, with added ingredients. Siodmak stirs pentagrams, gypsies, silver bullets and the full moon together to create a robust myth. Never one to miss a trick, Universal followed this up with Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1943). Feline alternatives, Cat People (1942) was another that represented the internalisation of horror and follows a young woman, Irena who carries with her the belief that she is cursed, and will turn into a large, dangerous cat if she consummates her marriage. A mainly psychological thriller, much is made of what lurks in the shadows and the audience is left to make up their own mind.

 

·         Mutant Creatures and Alien Invaders – 1950s

The military action of WW2 had left over 40 million dead, homecoming soldiers and bereaved widows had too many horror stories of their own to appreciate fantasies on the big screen 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. The messages from WW2 were clear: no matter how heroic your men, how skilled your generals, how staunch your supporters on the Home Front, at the end of the day it was technology that counted. Bigger. Better. Deadlier. Like the atom bomb. The more advanced the technology, the more powerful the nation. The horror films of the 1950s are about science and technology run riot, an accurate enough reflection of reality for a confused populace, wary of the pace of technological change. The aim of the 1950s was thrills, thrills and more thrills, and these new breed of monsters never fail to deliver on the action front. Nonetheless, they are highly entertaining, and provide a crude, Technicolor snapshot of the way America desperately didn't want itself to be. Mutation on existing themes provided the inspiration for countless 1950s MONSTERS. Radiation (or other unspecified scientific processes) could either enlarge (Godzilla - 1954) or shrink (The Fly - 1958) existing life-forms. This era's obsession with the monster movie stems from the fears generated by co-existence with the atom bomb. Monster movies offered a vision of destruction created by non-humans; instead of generating chaos and disaster, humans represent a force for good, often manifested in a yearning for peace as nations and organisations unite against the common threat, thus providing a cathartic couple of hours' escapism from the realities of the Cold War.

 

·         Ghosts, Zombies, Satanism and Your Family – 1960’s – 1970s

Despite the often tragic events of this era, there was a seeming feeling of optimism, the sense that humanity was moving forward, onward and upward. The concept of Cold War lost heat and the mutant monsters of the 1950s now looked a little silly. No aliens had turned up either. If every generation gets the monsters it deserves, then the horror movie goers of the 1960s got... themselves. Going to the cinema to be scared at this time was the equivalent of gazing in the mirror, and noticing, for the first time, that there was something a little... strange about your own face. A number of ghost stories hit the screen in the early 1960s that still have the power to startle today, transcending their black and white photography and minimal special effects. They are simple stories that only require the audience to suspend disbelief in increments, and often, as in The Haunting (1963) operate from a position of scepticism. The characters do not believe that they are being affected by supernatural forces until too late (if at all) and the horror lies in the journey the protagonist takes between sanity and psychosis. These movies reflects a change as woman were put on the frontlines and the woman that ‘misbehaved’ according to the old order would be the first (or even the only) characters to die. Were these movies subliminal warnings to women, an exhortation to behave, or suffer the consequences? These movies throb with psychosexual tension, and take a sadistic satisfaction in the suffering of the beautiful heroine. The protagonist is a final sacrifice rather than a Final Girl. A few Zombie movies also made their way into this decade. Night of the Living Dead (1967) is an incredibly influential horror film which contained some tight performances, excellent make-up and special effects, and those genuinely terrifying moments.

 

·         Hammer Horror – 1970s- Mid 80s

Hammer Films is a film production company based in the United Kingdom and is best known for a series of Gothic "Hammer Horror" films made from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. Films from this decade were sometimes known as Video Nasty’s as they could make films for less money. Children are the focus of horror in many key 1960s and really reinforces that kids can be spooky. Yet this theme dominates the 1970s, as the crumbling family unit becomes the source of much fear and mistrust. This time around 'the enemy within' is not a shape shifting alien from another planet altogether. This time the enemy is to be found in your own home. This theme is definitely shown in The Exorcist (1973) which has been voted ‘the scariest movie of all time’. It is also shown in Shivers – 1975 (It’s your Mum), The Shining  - 1980 (Your Dad) and The Omen – 1976 (Your little Boy).

 

·         Slasher Movies and their Descent into Postmodern Parody – 1980s

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. Everything that had lurked in the shadows of horror films in the 1950s could now be brought into the light of day. But did this mean that horror films became more or less scary? Some films which show no monsters at all manage to terrify through suggestion, providing triggers for the audience's imagination and letting them scare themselves. A slasher film is a subgenre of horror film, and at times thriller, typically involving a mysterious psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims usually in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a knife or axe. Although the term "slasher" may be used as a generic term for any horror movie involving graphic acts of murder, the slasher as a genre has its own set of characteristics which set it apart from related genres.  Halloween (1978) was one of the first slasher movies that really represented the ‘final girl theory’.  Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was another and also Scream (1996). Around this time, the horror genre became so predictable that along came the horror parody’s.  Scary Movie (1989) is a brilliant example of this.

 

·         Format Fears and Moral Panics

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 rather than amuse. It seemed that horror had become safe, a branded commodity bringing easy recognition and a rigid set of expectations. However, each generation needs something to be scared of, and the 1990s got its own special brand of boogeyman: the serial killer. As horror appeared to run out of original ideas, more film-makers turned to re-making old ones, re-interpreting old narratives through a postmodern, 1990s lens. Serial killers are often represented as having more-than-human powers, which is where movies about them stray into the horror genre, rather than being thrillers; although the monster is human, he has a supernatural edge which makes him all the more frightening.

 

·         Gore returns with a Vengeance – ‘Gore-nography’ or ‘Torture Porn’ – 2000s

The year of 2001 brought with it the unfortunate events of September 11^th. 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. But, by 2005, the horror genre was as popular as ever. The monsters have had to change, however. Gone were the lone psychopaths of the 1990s and along came the ‘Torture Porn’.  If you’re the sort of person who like to watch good surgery on un-anesthetized people you can join millions with the film Hostel (2005) which is jam-packed with torture and dismemberment. Other films filled with blood and guts are The Devils Rejects (2005) and of course the very gruesome Saw (2004). A lot of people are baffled as to how far this new stuff goes and why so many people nowadays are so obsessed with torture.

 

(A few references from ‘Horror Film History’ and ‘Wikipedia’)