The horror genre originated from Latin terms meaning "to shudder" and was present in early mythologies featuring monsters. While the modern horror genre began taking shape in the 18th century, the first horror films emerged in the late 19th century as "spook tales". Some key early films included Le Manoir du Diable (1896) and those produced by Universal in the 1930s like Dracula and Frankenstein. Common conventions in horror include using settings like abandoned buildings, handheld camerawork, point-of-view shots, lighting/color contrasts, and iconic props or villains.

1. Annabelle Thijssen-Green
HORROR GENRE

2. ORIGINS
• Originally from the Latin word, from ‘horrere’ to ‘shudder, or have
(of hair) stand on end’
• Every culture, religion, continent, and language has ‘horror
stories’, stories told by ancestors. Myths were first told as stories
around the early Abrahamic and Egyptian times, where tales of
classical mythology were discovered.
• Classical mythology like Cerberus, the minotaur, and Medusa
were all part of a genre that had monsters as main characters.
• The modern horror genre known today began around 200 years
ago, it has already begun to have forms and conventions around
the eighteenth century. Cerberus, the three
headed ‘dog’

3. THE FIRST HORROR FILMS
• The first horror films were silent. They started at the end of the nineteenth
century, and were referred to as ‘spook tales’, as the term ‘horror’ wasn’t
created until the 1930’s.
• The first short horror clip was created by the Lumière brothers in 1895 and
featured a dancing skeleton.
• However the first horror film on record is Le Manoir du Diable (1896) created
by Georges Méliè.
• It has a running time of just over three minutes, but still manage to include
all the now usual patterns of horror:
• Bats, witches, ghosts, devils, trolls, devils, and lots of appearing and
disappearing in smoke.

4. 1930’S
The 1930’s were a very prominent time for the horror genre to appear and begin.
• Dracula was originally put out into cinemas in 1931, and became very very
successful for Universal, a now very big film company.
• Frankenstein was also first aired in 1931 to audiences.
The Mummy aired in 1932
Notes: Universal. Produced: Carl
Laemmle, Jr. Directed: Karl Freund
Script: John L. Balderston Plot: Nina
Wilcox Putnam, Richard Schayer
Special Effects: John P. Fulto
King Kong aired in 1933
Director
Merian C. Cooper
Writers
James Ashmore Creelman
Ruth Rose

5. KEY NAMES AND DIRECTORS IN HORROR
Ridley Scott
‘ Alien, Blade Runner,
Hannibal’
George A. Romero
‘Night of the Living Dead, The
Crazies, Dawn of the Dead,
Creepshow, Day Of The Dead,
Monkey Shines, The Dark Half,
Land of the Dead’ Alfred Hitchcock
‘The Lodger, The Lady Vanishes,
Rope, Dial M for Murder, Rear
Window, Vertigo, Psycho, The
Birds, Frenzy’

6. CONVENTIONS
• Setting
• Technical
• Iconography

7. SETTING
• Binary opposites: very urban environments or completely urban rural settings
• Often places with ‘dark’ histories: abandoned hospitals, warehouses, psychiatric
hospitals, hospitals, or ‘haunted’ hotels and houses
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Abandoned hospitals
Cities ‘after’ the apocalypse

8. TECHNICAL
Handheld shots are used to connote fear and emotion, as the handheld cameras are held by those
who are experiencing the film as a real life event. Grave encounters is an example of this as the film
is a ‘documentary’ on the paranormal inside an abandoned psychiatric asylum. Everything in the film
is filmed by the documentary ‘crew’.
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POV shots are used to either show
the character’s point of view and
what they are seeing, or can also be
used so the audience can look
through the eyes of the villain. For
instance in Evil Dead there is a
chase in the POV of the monster.
Camera angles are also used to connote
fear and desperation. High or low camera
angles show this.
Sounds are also key for horror films and
are used to show the emotion of the
character, to build suspense, and
sometimes silence is used at the pinnacle
of the chase, or just after the suspense
has been built with loud music, so that the
audience can’t know what will happen
next.

9. ICONOGRAPHY
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• Colours and Lighting
They are usually either dark or bright to give normalcy
before the horror begins. This is an example of a binary
opposite film. A film example of this would be Paranormal
Activity, who has a light normal atmosphere at the
beginning and then slowly becomes darker and more
scary as the film progresses.
• Props
In certain horror films props can be used to show
the exact storyline of the film. For instance a
chainsaw and mask would insinuate a murder
storyline in the horror film, while supernatural
symbols would connote paranormal storylines.
The actual ‘villains’ of the horror genre vary,
because murderers can be human and are villains,
yet ghosts and werewolves and vampires are also
villains because they go against the protagonist in
the story usually.
In Paranormal Activity the films goes
from a bright daytime to dark nights like
the picture above, or are filmed in night
vision like the picture right.