The history of horror films

The term 'horror' first comes into play with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, full of supernatural shocks and mysterious melodrama. Although rather a stilted tale, it started a craze, creating many imitators in what we today call the gothic mode of writing. Better writers such as Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Gregory Lewis The Monk took the form to new heights of thrills and suspense. The first great horror classic Frankenstein 1818 was written by a Romantic at the heart of the movement: Mary Shelley.

During the mid- nineteenth century, novelists tried their hand at horror fiction, as the gothic style was dying out. Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories the best perhaps being The Signalman, the best known A Christmas Carol. Herman Melville mixed many supernatural elements into Moby Dick, as did Nathaniel Hawthorne with The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. As the century advanced, many writers turned to the short story or novella form to spook their readers -, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Willkie Collins, but also Edgar Allen Poe.

 Edgar Allan Poe

Reviled for many years as an alcoholic hack, Poe is now gaining his rightful place in the literary canon; his terse also suggestive prose style carries him through several volumes of original short stories and some heartbreaking poetry. He is credited with inventing the modern detective story The Murders in The Rue Morgue in 1841and with being the first writer to explore psychoanalysis within a literary format. The funereal landscapes and grotesque characters he wove into his stories have become staple corps of the horror genre. Reading him now, it is hard to imagine how innovative and creative his work was in the 1830s and 1840s. Sadly, he was ahead of his time, and struggled his whole life with poverty and lack of recognition. He suffered to his death as he was found badly beaten and raving in Baltimore, and died in hospital before recovering his faculties.

The stories which lie beyond the boundary which are called “sanity” deal not with events, but with the slow unravelling of minds; the reader is left to decide whether the causes are supernatural or psychological. Henry James played with the mind of a nanny in The Turn of the Screw in 1898, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman weaves a diatribe against patriarchy into The Yellow Wallpaper in 1899. And of course Bram Stoker's Dracula 1897 inspired by Romanian History spiced up the psychological with the sexual, creating an anti-hero in the Count whose appeal shows no sign of diminishing over a century later. The Grate war also contributed in changing the way horror was presented within horrors that not one of these literary minds could have conceived.

From the ballads of the ancient world to modern urban myths, audiences willingly offer themselves up to sadistic storytellers to be scared witless, and they are happy to pay for the privilege. Horror stories serve a wider moral purpose, reinforcing the rules and taboos of our society and showing the macabre fate of those who transgress.
Horror movies deliver thrills by the hearse load, as well as telling us stories of the dark, forbidden side of life and death. They also provide a revealing mirror image of the anxieties of their time. Nosferatu in 1922 is not simply a tale of vampirism, but offers heart-rending images of a town beleaguered by premature and random deaths, echoes of the Great War and the Great Flu Epidemic fatalities. At the other end of the century Blade in1998 is not just a tale of vampirism either, but reflects a fear of the powerful yet irresponsible elements in society, echoes down the corridor indeed of the seemingly impuritive behaviour of those at the top.
Each generation gets the horror films it deserves, and one of the more fascinating aspects of the genre is the changing nature of the monsters who present a threat. In the early 1940s, a world living under the shadow of Hitler's predatory tendencies identified a part-man, part-wolf as their bogeyman, whose bestial nature caused him to tear apart those who crossed his path. As we move on into the twenty first century, the ghosts and zombies are back in vogue as Eastern and Western superstitions converge, and once more we desire for an evil that is beyond human. In an era of war and water boarding, supernatural terror is more acceptable than the fear inherent in news headlines.