Resit: History of Horror

0"If movies are the dreams of the mass culture... horror movies are the nightmares"
— Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Horror has been around for thousands of years, it is an ancient art form. People like horror films due to the rush of adrenaline and the thoughts of things that are not natural. Horror stories are used to tell tales from times long ago and the type of things that doesn't normally happen in everyday life.

Horror films not only tell tales from long ago they can give hints and clue to what is happening in the time of writing, for example Nosferatu (1922)  This tells the story of not just vampires but, but offers images of a town suffering from random deaths these are echoes of the Great War and the Great Flu Epidemic fatalities.

Every generation has the "bogeyman". In the 1940's when Hitler created a large shadow over the world the character which inspired much fear was one that was half human half wolf, this was to show the animistic things that was going on in the world at the time. The use of animals became redundant as make up and the character becomes more in depth, horrors such as "Hannibal Lecter: Silence of the Lambs"  (1991) used human characters to create fear as people could relate to the character and the situation became real as people could imagine it happening to them.

During the 1960's horror films changed from stories of monsters to those surrounding family life, this was due to teenagers who have grown up with horror films in the 1950's. They became sterile to the small budget and small set up of horror films and wanted a film that they could identify with.

Horror films have changed over the years from physiological thrillers to films containing gore and violence, these films became large after the large success of the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974) which contained scenes with large violent content. The audience was shocked by this amount of gore which led to films such as the Saw franchise starting in 2004 ending in 2010.

Horror films have changed from being small budget small production films to large blockbusters with large budgets, this is to match the need for adrenaline that the audience needs to think that the film is scary.


By Will Howlett