"Fear is the most powerful emotion in the human race and fear of the unknown is probably the most ancient. You're dealing with stuff that everybody has felt; from being little babies we're frightened of the dark, we're frightened of the unknown. If you're making a horror film you get to play with the audiences feelings" -- John Carpenter
Since the dawn of cinema, audiences have flocked to theatres for the opportunity to be scared witless, whether it be by dodging death from a speeding bullet or train, or by witnessing a cruel and heartless murder at the hands of a German vampire or East End ripper. As the horror genre has matured, we can see certain trends coming and going.
In the 1930s, young upstart studio Universal wanted a quick buck and went after the horror market with a vengeance. They virtually cornered the market between 1933 and 1945 with a series of films that have since become synonymous with the Universal House style, among them the brilliant Frankenstein, which gave the world one of the most powerful images of horror ever in Boris Karloff's square-headed monster, by James Whale, and Karl Fruend's The Mummy (also starring Karloff), which was perhaps the pinnacle of the marriage of commercial and artistic success for the Expressionists.
Another whole style of film-making was given to us by a Frenchman, director Jacques Tourneur and an Englishman, producer Val Lewton who produced a series of wonderful films in the '40s and '50s. They kicked off with the startlingly feminist Cat People (far superior to Paul Schrader's awful blood-and-sex remake), the childlike fantasy of Return of the Cat People, the simply stunning I Walked with a Zombie and culminating with The Night of the Demon, a strong example of what can be achieved with tight direction, excellent scripts and little budget.
Meanwhile, in the States, the Cold War was on and the invaders took strange shapes indeed. Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing taught us to 'Look to the Skies' for our enemies, and both set new standards for clammy-palmed paranoia about the identity of our neighbours (of which, more later). Jack Arnold went to South America and unearthed The Creature From the Black Lagoon, a film which was hugely influential on the young Steven Spielberg (in particular, Arnold's use of water-level cameras was to imprint itself on Spielberg and re-emerge in Jaws).
By then, young English company Hammer had identified a market in horror, and set about exploiting it with a vengeance. With a cast of great British character actors and Freddie Francis' lurid colour photography, Hammer effectively worked their way through the same literary sources that had kept Universal at the top for 30 years.
Simultaneously, Roger Corman had been ploughing his own route back in the US, learning how to make movies without losing a cent, and what wonderful films they were - The Fall of the House of Usher, Tomb of Lygeia (somewhat spoiled by Vincent Price's ridiculous blonde wig), and best of all, The Masque of the Red Death.
As the sixties drew to a close, George Romero took horror by the collar and gave it a shake it would never forget. His cheapie Night of the Living Dead marked the beginning of a new, politically-charged horror cinema - the first movie dealt with racism, the second, Dawn of the Dead, with consumerism, the third, Day of the Dead, with the relationship between science and the military. The horror in Romero's films was the realisation that we, the survivors might be worse monsters than the zombies themselves.
And then there's Dario Argento, whose warped imagination brought us Suspiria, Inferno and Tenebrae, films that dripped menace and conspiracy, where things whispered in the shadows and spoke of things beyond our knowledge. David Cronenberg taught us to fear our own bodies, which are, in his films, ready to rebel and betray us at any time. Wes Craven gave us Nightmares that could kill us and horror with a dream logic. Sam Raimi told us that the only way to deal with horrors is with excessive force and hysterical laughter. The Blair Witch Project taught us again what we had always known - that there are wild places on the earth where we are not meant to be, and where we cannot control things. The Ring gave us rebellious technology and scientific programmes that backfire.
Article taken from the BBC