In the 1960s, two main horror subgenres emerged: horror-of-armageddon and horror-of-the-demonic. Horror-of-armageddon focuses on apocalyptic events like nuclear war, pandemics, or alien invasions. Horror-of-the-demonic suggests an evil spiritual presence undermines existence, often taking the form of demons or witches. Examples of each subgenre from the late 1950s-1960s are provided. George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead influenced the genre by blending psychological horror and gore to make the threat of zombies feel realistic and applicable to everyday life.

1. Horror in the 1960’s…

Early 1900's saw the production of many more horror
narratives such as; The Mummy (1932), The invisible man
(1933) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931). However it wasn’t
until the 1960's that two main sub genres began to
emerge. These were ‘Horror-of-armageddon’ and ‘Horror-ofthe-demonic’

2. Horror-of-armageddon
Horror-of-armageddon is a sub genre of horror that focuses on Apocalyptic fiction
and is concerned with the end of human civilization. The apocalyptic event is
usually in the form of nuclear warfare, cybernetic revolt, pandemic, extra-terrestrial
attack or supernatural phenomena. Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or
civilization after such a disaster.
Films of this genre are usually low budget and a very common theme is humanity
over coming a threat from outside in the form of alien invasion or deadly mutation.
Some examples of films of Horror-of-armageddon are:
The Thing from Another World (1951
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
The Tingler (1959)

3. Horror-of-the-demonic
The horror-of-the-demonic film is one of the sub-genres of the horror film that
grew out of mid- and late-20th-Century. It suggests that the world was horrible
because evil forces existed that were constantly undermining the quality of
existence.
The evil forces usually take place in the form of a spiritual presence or a
witch/demon/devil etc.
There are four themes that tend to lead to a film of this genre:
- the idea of vengeance
- the corruption of innocence
- mystic phenomena, especially possession
- mystic phenomena, especially possession

4. End of the 1960’s
Low-budget gore-shock films from the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis were also
very common towards the end of the decade. The idea was to fill the film with a
large amount of blood and gore that splattered the screen and sickened the audience.
An influential American horror film of this period was George A. Romero's Night of
the Living Dead (1968). The horror-of-Armageddon film about zombies blends
psychological insights with gore, moving the genre even further away from the
gothic horror trends of earlier eras and brought horror
into everyday life. This was scary for the audience as
it made the realities of the film realistic to them and begged
the question ‘could this happen to me?’. The effect of a film,
such as the above, was to keep the audience on edge and full
of anticipation even after the film was finished by making the
narrative applicable to an everyday scenario.