The document provides a history of the horror genre across different decades, from the 1700s to the 2000s. It details how the genre was established in the late 18th century through works like The Castle of Otranto. In the 1930s, the advent of sound films transformed horror with added dimensions of sound effects and voices. During the 1940s, wartime horror films produced in America solely entertained domestic audiences. By the 1950s, monsters became more humanized and reflected fears about developments like the atom bomb and death camps. The 1970s saw a return to big budget, psychological horror films addressing societal issues. Technical advances in the 1980s allowed for more realistic special effects and gore. While horror became overly rel

1. HISTORY OF HORROR
By Alexander Rowden

2. THE START OF THE
MOVEMENT
The term ‘Horror’ was brought to the public eye in 1764 by Horace
Walpole. The Castle of Otranto used supernatural jumps to start the
horror craze that spread like wild fire and create some amazing horror
writers like Matthew Gregory Lewis who wrote the famous horror
called ‘The Monk’. When talking about horror, people believe that
Frankenstein is the most memorable horror film and this was wrote
because of the movement.

3. 1930’s
Horror movies were reborn in the 1930s. The advent of sound, as well as
changing the whole nature of cinema forever, had a huge impact on the
horror genre. The dreamlike imagery of the 1920s, the films peopled by
ghostly wraiths floating silently through the terror of mortals, their
grotesque death masks a visual representation of 'horror', were replaced
by monsters that grunted and groaned and howled. Sound adds an extra
dimension to terror, whether it be music used to build suspense or signal
the presence of a threat, or magnified footsteps echoing down a corridor.

4. 1940’s
Wartime horror movies were purely an American product. Banned in
Britain, with film production curbed throughout the theatre of war in
Europe, horror movies were cranked out by Hollywood solely to
amuse the domestic audience. If the horror movies of the 1930s had
dealt in well-established fictional monsters, looking back towards the
nineteenth century for inspiration, the 1940s reflected the
internalization of the horror market.

5. 1950’s
It is hard to grasp the changes that took place in popular
consciousness between 1940 and 1950. In ten short years the concept
of a horrific monster had altered irrevocably. Now there were more
recognizably human faces attached to evil. Faces who had fought on
both sides in WW2, the developers of the atom bomb, the death
camps and mad scientists.

6. 1970’s
Horror movies of the 1970s reflect the grim mood of the decade. After the
optimism of the 1960s, with its sexual and cultural revolutions, and the moon
landings, the seventies were something of a disappointment. By 1970, the party was
over; the Beatles split, Janis and Jimi died, and in many senses it was downhill all the
way from there: Nixon, Nam, oil strikes, glam rock, feather haircuts, medallions...
However, when society goes bad, horror films get good, and the 1970s marked a
return to the big budget, respectable horror film, dealing with contemporary societal
issues, addressing genuine psychological fears.

7. 1980’s
Horror movies of the 1980s exist at the glorious watershed when
special visual effects finally caught up with the gory imaginings of
horror fans and movie makers. Technical advances in the field of
animatronics, and liquid and foam latex meant that the human frame
could be distorted to an entirely new dimension, onscreen, in realistic
close up.

8. 1990’s
By the end of the 1980s horror had become so reliant on gross-out gore and
buckets of liquid latex that it seemed to have lost its power to do anything more
than shock and then amuse. Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (1992) epitomizes this; a riot
of campy spatter, it climaxes with a zombie orgy through which the bespectacled
hero must cut his way with a lawnmower. It's hilarious, and not scary in the slightest.
The original creations of the late 1970s/early 80s were simply pastiches of their
former selves, their power to chill long having disappeared in a slew of sequels and
over-familiarity.

9. 2000’s
The film industry, already facing a recession, felt very hard hit as film-makers
struggled to come to terms with what was now acceptable to the viewing public.
Anyone trying to sell a horror film in the autumn of 2001 (as George Romero tried
with Land of the Dead) got rebuffed. "Everybody wanted to make the warm fuzzy
movies."(LA Times 30/10/05) There were even calls to ban horror movies in the
name of world peace. But, by 2005, the horror genre was as popular as ever. Horror
films routinely topped the box office, yielding an above-average gross on below-
average costs.