HISTORY OF HORROR MOVIES
What is it about horror that
makes us leave the comfort of our homes and sit for two or three hours of
suffering and fraying nerves? Does it appease the animal inside us to delight
in horror films or theatre? Fear is a very primitive emotion. As children
we are afraid of the dark. We are afraid of the unknown. This is why telling
scary ghost stories, writing novels, making theatre, or horror films appeal
to us. We are able to play with the audiences' emotion. Lovecraft suggested
that "horror is created when some "natural law" is violated.
When this occurs, life as we once knew it starts to function according to
laws we do not understand and over which we have no control" (Taborini
and Weaver, 3). Horror is a word borrowed by many -- to sell product, to impart
strange brands of morality, to create a community of fans, and to deeply scare
as many people as possible. Whether or not a comfortable genre tag, or a catch-all
for the extremes of emotive story-telling, it has proven a resilient and ever-changing
designation. (link to web page http://www.tabula-rasa.info/DarkAges/Timeline1.html)
This web site gives a descriptive timeline of the origins of horror in all
parts of the world.
Horror movies have only been
around for the last century. Silent short film Le Manoir du Diable
directed by Georges Mèliès in 1896 was the first horror movie
and the first vampire flick. The movie only lasted two minutes, but audiences
loved it, and Mèliès took pleasure in giving them even more
devils and skeletons. In the early 1900's, Germans were making all the horror
flicks. Films such as Der Golem directed by Paul Wegener in 1913 and
F.W. Murnau´s Nosferatu
(1922), was the first full length vampire movie.
Robert Wiene´s work of
genius The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, still held up as a model of the
potent creativity of cinema even to this day. Early Hollywood drama dabbled
in horror themes including versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1923) starring Lon Chaney, the first American horror-film movie star.
It was in the early 1930´s
that Universal Studios established the horror movie genre with the release
of the successful gothic films, Dracula,
Frankenstein (both 1931) and The
Mummy
(1932) - all of which spawned numerous sequels. No other studio
had as much success with the genre (even if some of the films made at Paramount
and MGM were better). "In Hollywood, the 'old dark house' mysteries of
the silent era, like Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (1927) and
horror spectacles like Phantom of the Opera (1925), owed much more
to the Grand Guignol than Expressionism. In 1928, Robert Florey directed the
first acknowledged Hollywood Grand Guignol film, The Film Coffin, which
was criticized as "queer" and "impressionistic", terms
that accurately defined the real Grand Guignol." (Gordon, 42). After
the film Mad Love (1935), directed by Karl Freund, however, the Grand
Guignol as a cultural icon disappeared from Hollywood. And with it went all
its step-children. By the end of the thirties, vampires, zombie-masters, lunatics,
werewolves, insane scienctits and their vengeful creations became the subjects
of silly parodies and low-grade shockers.
In the nuclear-charged atmosphere
of the 1950´s the tone of horror films shifted away from the gothic
and towards the modern. Aliens took over the local cinema, if not the world,
and they were not at all interested in extending the tentacle of friendship.
Humanity had to overcome endless threats from outside: alien invasions, and
deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. Two of the most popular films
of the period were The Thing From Another World (1951) and Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1956). (Bullen, 1).
In the late fifties horror movies
became gorier and gruesome due to easier and cheaper ways to successfully
achieve technical cinematography. During this time rises in studio production
for horror films were in full both America and Britain. Hammer Films, a British
production company and American International Pictures (AIP) were the big
name production companies. AIP made a series of films from the stories of
Edgar Allan Poe.
The 1960's were a landmark for
horror films. Movies such as Psycho
and Peeping Tom
are examples of pieces that bridged the gap between performer and audience
member. It took the "monster" and fear to a new level. Instead of
something supernatural, it was human. In the late sixties and seventies budgets
for films began to skyrocket. The bar was raised with films like Rose Mary's
Baby and The Exorcist. "Unhealthy black comedies that revealed
the gothic under trappings of contemporary life, like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho
(1960) and Richard Aldridge's What ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
surfaced in the same period and led Hollywood back into the filmic grand-guignolesque"(Gordon,
43). It was a chance to show off technical skill and special effects. The
public was indeed fascinated with these type movies and it gave horror films
the chance to go commercial. In 1975, Jaws was the highest grossing
income movie ever. "The genre fractured somewhat in the late 1970´s,
with mainstream Hollywood focusing on disaster movies such as The Towering
Inferno, while independent filmmakers came up with disturbing and explicit
gore-fests such as Tobe Hooper´s The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (Bullen,2). American directors
in the mid-70's developed their own Grand- Guignol-like-sub-genre. In 1978,
John Carpenter's Halloween
was the start of the 1980's 'teen's threatened by some superhuman-monster-evil'
horror film. Following arrived Wes Craven's The
Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday
the 13th. In the 1990's we run
into the parody and self-mocking teenager scary movie such as Scream and Scary
Movie. The contemporary horror film is essentially a history of articulated
fear and anxiety in the twentieth/ twenty-first centuries.
The horror genre has no clearly
defined boundaries and Science Fiction and Fantasy genres overlap. Mainstream
thrillers in recent years have absorbed the generic elements found in these
movies. The differences between horror and science fiction are as follows:
(click here for
table) "It could be further stressed that there is no great
uniformity in either the narratives or pre-occupants of the genre across the
years, and that it accommodates a superfluity of topics, which in themselves
demand different responsibilities and call upon different critical perspectives"
(Wells, 8).