History of Horror

History of horror

The genre horror seeks to bring out a negative emotional reaction from their target audience by playing on the target audience’s most common fears. They often have scenes in them that startle the audience through the means of gruesome effects. Many horror movies overlap with other genres most commonly thriller but can be any really for example scary movie is a horror movie but overlaps with comedy. The first representations of supernatural events appear in several silent short films created by directors in the late 1890s such as Georges Melies his most notable being Le Manoir du diable “the house of the devil” which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. It was in the 1930s that American film producers, particularly Universal Pictures Co. Inc. made the genre horror very popular bringing to the cinema a series of successful movies such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) which also overlapped science fiction films with gothic horror such as James Whale’s the invisible man (1933). With the rapid pace of new technologies been developed that occurred around the 1950s the tone of horror film shifted from gothic toward concerns that some saw as being more relevant to the late-centenary audience. The horror film was seen to fall into two subgenres: the horror of Armageddon film and the horror of demonic film. A flurry of low budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from “outside”: alien invasions and deadly mutations to people, plants and insects most notably in films imported from japan, whos society had first-hand knowledge of the effects of nuclear radiation. In 1964, the financial successes of low budget gore films, and the critical and popular success of Rosemary’s baby (1968), led to the release of more films with occult themes in the 1970s, such as The Exorcist (1973).  The first half of the 1990s, the genre continued many of the themes from the 1980s. Sequels from the Childs play and leprechaun series enjoyed some commercial success. The slasher films. A nightmare on elm street and Friday the 13^th all sequels in the 1990s, most of which met with varied amount of success at the box office. The start of the 100s saw a quiet period for the genre. Franchise films such as Freddy vs Jason made a stand in cinemas. Final destination (2000) marked a successful revival of teen-centred horror and spawned many sequels.