History of Horror

ByStefan Eric

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was one of the most influential German film directors with his best known work being Nosferatu (1922) which is the first vampire movie.

1931 was the release year for both movies Dracula which is a vampire-horror film (directed by Tod Browning and Karl Freund) and Frankenstein which is a horror monster film (directed by James Whale) which had a huge impact on how people viewed the horror genre.

1920s – 1930s

George Waggner went on to direct 3 films in the 1940s with The Wolf Man (1941) being his most well known movie and is arguably the best horror movie of the 1940s.

Frankenstein became a trend in the 1940s with movies such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) hitting the big screens.

1940s

The 1950s consisted of films which mostly included insects and creatures.

These films were Tarantula (1955) which is about a spider escaping an isolated desert laboratory and grew to a great size, The Fly (1958) this is about a man that merges himself with a fly when attempting to use a teleportation device and The Wasp Woman (1959) a Sci-Fi/ Horror film which was about a woman agreeing to be the first human to try an injection which eventually leads to her becoming a wasp like woman.

1950s

In the 1960s there was a huge change in what the public perceived as horrible. For instance there were movies like Psycho (1960) which was a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock showing us how monstrous a man can be.

Eight years later George A. Romero directed the movie Night of the Living Dead (1968) which is a zombie movie about a deadly disease spreading across the world as people get infected by the zombies.

1960s

When it hit the 1970s horror became one of the most popular genres with well known movies coming out such as The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Jaws (1975) and Alice, Sweet Alice (1976).

The Exorcist is about a girl who gets possessed by a demon and begins to do strange bizarre things such as stabbing her gut and so on, also the movie was banned for a short period of time, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is about a serial killer who murders people in a horrific way, Jaws was a movie where sharks would attack and eat the people swimming about in the sea and finally Alice, Sweet Alice was about a little 12 year old girl who started to savagely kill people around her.

1970s

Horror movies of the 1980s changed a lot as special visual effects finally caught up with the gruesome imaginings of the horror fans and movie makers.

The Shining (1980) is a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick and is about a family going to a hotel where an evil presence influences the father into violence.

Wes Craven directed A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) which is a horror-fantasy film.

1980s

The horror movies of the 1990s and 2000s began to concentrate more on psychopaths and demons with movies such as Scream (1996) a slasher horror film, Saw (2004) a film about a serial killer who tortures a bunch of people and finally there are demonic movies such as Drag me to Hell (2009).

1990s - Present