The document traces the history and evolution of horror films from the late 19th century through the 2000s. Some of the earliest horror films adapted novels like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and were produced in the late 1890s and early 1900s. German Expressionist films of the 1920s like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were influential on the genre. Universal Studios produced many iconic horror films in the 1930s featuring characters like Dracula and Frankenstein. The genre continued to evolve with films incorporating new themes like nuclear radiation throughout the 1950s-1970s and trends like slasher films emerging in the 1980s. In the 2000s, the zombie subgenre became popular again and torture porn emerged as a new extreme

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The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by the film pioneer
Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the best known being Le Manoir du diable, which is sometimes credited as
being the first horror film
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The second monster appeared in a horror film: Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame, who had appeared in
Victor Hugo's novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Films featuring Quasimodo included Alice Guy's Esmeralda
(1905), The Hunchback (1909), The Love of a Hunchback (1910) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1911).
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German Expressionist film makers, during the Weimar Republic era and slightly earlier, would significantly
influence later films, not only those in the horror genre. Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920) and Robert Wiene's
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (also 1920) had a particular impact.
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Hollywood dramas used horror themes, including versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The
Monster (1925) both starring Lon Chaney, the first American horror movie star.

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During the early period of talking pictures, the American Movie studio Universal Pictures began a successful
Gothic horror film series. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi, was quickly followed by James
Whale's Frankenstein
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Some of these films blended science fiction with Gothic horror, such as Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) and,
mirroring the earlier German films, featured a mad scientist. These films, while designed to thrill, also
incorporated more serious elements. Frankenstein was the first in a series which lasted for many years, although
Karloff only returned as the monster in Bride of Frankenstein.
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Other studios followed Universal's lead. Tod Browning made the once controversial Freaks (1932) for MGM,
based on "Spurs", a short story by Cintia Gomez, about a band of circus freaks. The studio disowned the
completed film after cutting about 30 minutes; it remained unreleased in the United Kingdom for thirty years.

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With advances in technology, the tone of horror films shifted from the Gothic towards contemporary concerns. Two
sub-genres began to emerge: the horror-of-armageddon film and the horror-of-the-demonic film.
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A stream of (usually low-budget) productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside": alien invasions
and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. In the case of some horror films from Japan, such as Godzilla
(1954) and its sequels, mutation from the effects of nuclear radiation were featured.
Filmmakers continued to merge elements of science fiction and horror over the following decades. Considered a
"pulp masterpiece"[11] of the era was The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), from Richard Matheson's existentialist
novel. While more of a science-fiction story, the film conveyed the fears of living in the Atomic Age and the terror of
social alienation.
During the later 1950s, Great Britain emerged as a producer of horror films. The Hammer company focused on the
genre for the first time, enjoying huge international success from films involving classic horror characters which
were shown in color for the first time.
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The end of the Production Code of America in 1964, the financial successes of the low-budget gore films of the
ensuing years, and the critical and popular success of Rosemary's Baby, led to the release of more films with occult
themes during the 1970s. The Exorcist (1973), the first of these movies, was a significant commercial success, and
was followed by scores of horror films in which the Devil represented the supernatural evil, often by impregnating
women or possessing children. The genre also included gory horror movies with sexual overtones, made as "Amovies“.
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The ideas of the 1960s began to influence horror films, as the youth involved in the counterculture began exploring
the medium. Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
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Also in the 1970s, the works of the horror author Stephen King began to be adapted for the screen, beginning with
Brian De Palma's adaptation of Carrie (1976), King's first published novel, for which the two female leads (Sissy
Spacek and Piper Laurie) gained Oscar nominations.

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In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued many of the themes from the 1980s. The slasher films A
Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween and Child's Play all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which
met with varied amounts of success at the box office, but all were panned by fans and critics, with the exception of
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) and the hugely successful Silence of the Lambs (1991).
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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 replacement audience for films of an imaginative
nature were being captured instead by the explosion of science-fiction and fantasy films, courtesy of the special
effects possibilities with advances made in computer-generated imagery.
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To re-connect with its audience, horror became more self-mockingly ironic and outright parodic, especially in the
latter half of the 1990s.

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The start of the 2000s saw a quiet period for the genre. The release of an extended version of The Exorcist in
September 2000 was successful despite the film having been available on home video for years.
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There has been a major return to the zombie genre in horror movies made after 2000. The Resident Evil video game
franchise was adapted into a film released in March 2002. Six sequels have followed. The film I Am Legend (2007),
Quarantine (2008), Zombieland (2009), and the British film 28 Days Later (2002) featured an update on the genre
with The Return of the Living Dead (1985) style of aggressive zombie.
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A larger trend is a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-budget,
exploitation horror from the post-Vietnam years. Films such as Audition (1999), Wrong Turn (2003), and the
Australian film Wolf Creek (2005), took their cues from The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre (1974), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977).
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An extension of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with emphasis on depictions of torture, suffering
and violent deaths, (variously referred to as "horror porn", "torture porn", "splatterporn", and "gore-nography") with
films such as Ghost Ship (2002), Eight Legged Freaks (2002), The Collector, The Tortured, Saw, Hostel, and their
respective sequels, frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this sub-genre.