The history of horror



1890s - 1920s

- In the 1890s horror consisted in silent short clips created by the film pioneer Georges Melies.

- Films included 'The haunted castle' and 'The cave of the unholy one'. 

- Movies then started to feature monsters such as in 'The hunchback of Notre Dame', this became more eveident towards the 1920s.

 

1930s

- Horror was said to be reborn in this decade mainly due to the improvement in sound for the cinema.

- They discovered that sound was an important element of horror so they used this to their advantage.

- Horror films in this time included 'Frankenstein' (1931) and 'Dracula' (1931).

 

1940s-1950s

- This time produced horror's based on real life events such as world war 2.

- The horror genre increasingly featured the male or female the subject of an emergence of a promal animal identity, an exmaple of this would be 'Pinocchio' (1940).

- The 50s often used ideas such as animals or species taking over the world who generated chaos and disaster towards the human race. 'The fly' is an example of this.

 

1960s

- This period was when females were often the villains in horrors, this went against the norm of females being the victims of horror as they were more vulnerbale than men.

- More gore was introduced in this period which made the horrors more realistic and interesting, an example of a film would be 'Blood Feast'

- 'Night of the living dead' gave the audience an isight to zombies.

1970s
- Children were mainly the focus in horrors in the 60s, but in the 70s it was the oppossite and thery became the villains.
- The enemy came within 'our own home'
-This was eveident in the 'The shining' and 'The omen'.
- 'Jaws' came out in 1975 which was a massive success as audiences seem to love the suspense of people being naive to the fact that a killer shark is looming.

1980s
- Special effects were used a lot in this decade as they were improving all the time.
- Gory images and graphic scenes could be created which were very popular.
- This period again used a lot of monster based horrors which generally came from supernatural origins.
- The Video nasties were banned in this time as these horrors were deemed to frightful.

1990s
- Psychological horror was introduced in this decade which was a new way of scaring the audience.
- Big budget films were created such as 'The exocrist' which plays on societies issues of children.

2000s
- Horrors used real life events again to create horror such as the 9/11 tradgedy
- 'Final destination' was introduced which used a chain like of events which excited people as they knew what was coming to that specific character.