As we approach Halloween, the usual stream of movies designed to scare the pants of their respective audiences is beginning. Movies being released range from the sixth installment of the incredibly violent Saw series to the psychological ghost thriller Paranormal Activity. While these two movies have come to epitomize the modern horror industry, they’re a far cry from the what the industry considered “horror” at recent as twenty to thirty years ago.
Rewind back to the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and what we see is unrecognizable compared to a modern horror film. The Devil’s Castle, released in 1896, is widely considered to be the first true horror movie, although it was simply a two minute long vampire flick with none of the violence, gore, or special effects of its modern day counterparts.
Since The Devil’s Castle, the horror industry has taken on a life of its own as its evolved through the decades. What was considered horror in the early 1900’s consisted of lots of campy makeup and more of a focus on conceptual horror, as is evidenced in Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein. Both such movies were simple in context, showed very little in terms of violence, and still managed to scare a considerably less desensitized 1930’s audience compared to modern-day moviegoers.
Fast forward thirty some years to the early 1960’s and we see the evolution of horror movies that manage to scare audiences while showing next to nothing in terms of ghosts, ghouls, and the like. Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) chronicled a mother and her two children living in a supposedly haunted house, although throughout the movie we don’t see a single apparition, with the horror lying solely in the minds of the audience. Similarly, Robert Wise’s The Haunting managed to accomplish the same goal as its predecessor as a successful ghost movie that terrified moviegoers and lived by the idea that less is more.
The 1970’s brought forth a lull of sorts for the genre, but also saw the popularizing of the modern zombie movie made famous by filmmakers such as George Romero. A so-called “modern” zombie movie was revolutionary in the sense that suddenly audiences were seeing the horror itself—the fear brought forth was explicit instead of implicit.
After George Romero came a slew of gory zombie flicks, each more violent than the last, until we get to Sam Rami’s Evil Dead trilogy. Rami satirized the whole genre with campy dialogue, purposely low budget special effects, and some pretty gratuitous violence (i.e. a scene in which the main character attaches a chainsaw to his arm).
Nowadays we see movies such as Hostel and the Saw series that show unprecedented violence and gore designed to send its audience running out of the theater screaming. In the midst of this special effect/red corn syrup-driven gore, low-budget horror that can’t afford to show anything has risen to popularity.
Movies like The Blair Witch Project and the haunted house flick Paranormal Activity are finding new ways to scare audiences without having to watch someone’s eyes get gouged out by a masked psychopath (see Saw). Paranormal Activity, completely shot on a camcorder, had a budget of around $11,000 and made over $7 million in its opening weekend. With no money for special effects, gore, or an animatronic monster, it’s managed to draw rave reviews from critics and the average moviegoer alike.
The horror genre has rapidly evolved over the last century, beginning with a two minute long silent film, and culminating in everything from the timeless horror of the 60’s to the gore-fests of the last three decades. The odds are that if there's something that scares you, it's been made into a successful horror flick--it's really just a question of going out there and making yourself watch it, with one eye closed (just in case).
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