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Horror Film

“Horror Movie” redirects here. For Skyhooks song, see Horror Movie (song).
“Scary movies” redirects here. For the horror movie parody series, see Scary Movie film series.

1922’s Nosferatu Horror Portal
Horror films are movies that strive to elicit fear, horror and terror from viewers. In horror film plots, evil forces, events, or characters, sometimes of supernatural origin, intrude into the everyday world. Horror movies usually include a central villain. Early horror films often drew inspiration from characters and stories from classic literature, such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Later horror films, in contrast, often drew inspiration from the insecurities of life after World War II, giving rise to the three distinct, but related, sub-genres: the horror-of-personality film, the horror-of-Armageddon film, and the horror-of-the-demonic film. The last sub-genre may be seen as a modernized transition from the earliest horror films, expanding on their emphasis on supernatural agents that bring horror to the world.

Horror films have been criticized for their graphic violence and dismissed as low budget B-movies and exploitation films. Nonetheless, all the major studios and many respected directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola, have made forays into the genre. Serious critics have analyzed horror films through the prisms of genre theory and the auteur theory. Some horror films incorporate elements of other genres such as science fiction, fantasy, mockumentary, black comedy, and thrillers.

History (1890s-1920s)

Lon Chaney, Sr. in The Phantom of the OperaThe horror genre is nearly as old as film itself. The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by film pioneers such as Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the most notable being his 1896 Le Manoir du diable (aka “The House of the Devil”) which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. Another of his horror projects was 1898’s La Caverne maudite (aka “The Cave of the Demons”, literally “the accursed cave”).  Japan made early forays into the horror genre with Bake Jizo and Shinin no Sosei, both made in 1898. In 1910, Edison Studios produced the first film version of Frankenstein, thought lost for many years, film collector Alois Felix Dettlaff Sr. found a copy and had a 1993 rerelease. It can now be viewed on youtube.

The early 20th century brought more milestones for the horror genre including the first monster to appear in a full-length horror film, Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame who had appeared in Victor Hugo’s novel, “Notre-Dame de Paris” (published in 1831). Films featuring Quasimodo included Alice Guy’s Esmeralda (1906), The Hunchback (1909), The Love of a Hunchback (1910) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1911).

Many of the earliest feature length ‘horror films’ were created by German film makers in 1910s and 1920s, during the era of German Expressionist films. Many of these films would significantly influence later Hollywood films. Paul Wegener’s The Golem (1915) was seminal; in 1920 Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with its Expressionist style, would influence film-makers from Orson Welles to Tim Burton and many more for decades. The era also produced the first vampire-themed feature, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), though more of a science fiction film, is considered a landmark film of the German Expressionist era.

Early Hollywood dramas dabbled in horror themes, including versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Monster (1925) (both starring Lon Chaney, Sr., the first American horror movie star). His most famous role, however, was in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), perhaps the true predecessor of Universal’s famous horror series