1. History of Horror genre
The horror genre was popular in the 1890’s up to the 1930’s, this time period
was when the film Frankenstein one of the most known horror film still being re
created to this day, this time period was obsessed with monsters such as the
hunchback of Notre dam and the golem.
Up to the 1940’s big film companies like universal studios had a film series called
Dracula, this was when the horror genre turned into gothic horror, with films
such as Dracula, the invisible man and bride of Frankenstein. The film “the
mummy” introduced Egyptology giving other directors more material to express
in the horror genre.
Once other companies saw the rise in interest for horror movies and how well
universal studios were doing, they started to make more horror films. MGM tried
to make a film based on a short story called “spurs” about a band of circus freaks
but they decided to disown the completed film after cutting about 30 minutes.
With the progression of the genre actors where building entire careers in such
films. With the advance of technology, the tone of horror films shifted from
gothic towards contempary concerns, two sub genres began to emerge, horror of
Armageddon and horror of the demonic. For example the films normally
consisted of humanity overcoming threats from “outside” such as aliens, mutated
animals such as Godzilla.
During the 1950’s Great Britain emerged as a producer of horror films, other
British film companies contributed to the boom of the horror genre in the UK
during the 1960’s.at the start of the 1960’s there was a lot of low budget horror
films, these films were low budget because of the improvement in technology,
digital cameras were cheap and easy to record with, they didn’t come with all the
complications that film did.
In the 1980’s slasher films were wildly popular and such films as Halloween,
Friday the 13th and nightmare on Elm Street, films that are still being remade to
this day. The 1990’s mainly consisted of sequels of films that did very well in the
1980’s Two main problems pushed horror backward during this period: firstly,
the horror genre wore itself out with the proliferation of nonstop slasher and
gore films in the eighties. Secondly, the adolescent audience, which feasted on
the blood and morbidity of the previous decade, grew up, and the explosion of
science fiction and fantasy films was capturing the replacement audience for
films of an imaginative nature instead.