Timeline of horror genre
Inspired by gothic literature
- The ghost like creatures in white that walked around was not replaced with
grotesque sounds.
E.G: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy
The
1950s are also the era when horror films get relegated well and truly to the
B-movie category
1920: The Silent Era
1930: Re-birth of Horror
- Introduction of sound- an important element to induce fear
-
Main audiences
are teenagers
-
This era's obsession with the monster movie stems from the
fears generated by co-existence with the atom bomb
1960:
-
Changes in popular
culture changed cinema
-
open to nudity, onscreen violence, and other tropes that
challenged social mores
-
challenged old taboos
-
they wanted horror films to be more realistic, more
believable and sophisticated
-
E.G: Psycho, Manson Family
1970:
1970s marked a return to
the big budget, respectable horror film, dealing with contemporary societal
issues, addressing genuine psychological fears.
Children are the focus
of horror in 1970. At the outset of the decade, Village of The
Damned (1960)
reinforces that kids can be spooky.
And do bad things to
their parents. This theme continued in the 1970s where it dominated cinema.
1980:
Horror movies of the
1980s exist at the glorious watershed when special visual effects finally
caught up with the gory imaginings of horror fans and movie makers. Technical
advances meant that the human frame could be distorted to an entirely new
dimension, onscreen, in realistic close up.
- Body gore was a common subgenre of horror in the 1980s
There were to be no more
monsters with zippers up the back. But did this mean that horror films became
more or less scary? Opinion is divided on the image/imagination debate. Some
films which show no monsters at all (eg Cat
People, and later, The
Blair Witch Project) manage to terrify through suggestion,
providing triggers for the audience's imagination and letting them scare
themselves. Others take a quite literally visceral approach, providing images
of blood and gore which induce a physical reaction of nausea and fear,
challenging the audience to keep watching despite their revulsion.
-
Horror films have always dealt with the taboos surrounding
Death, and in the 1980s they began to deal with evisceration, pulling apart the
human body and turning it inside out, with all the bloody, slimy contents on
display. As the tagline for Re-Animator (1985) intoned, "Death Is
Just The Beginning", and viewers of 1980s horror films get shown many of
the processes which occur after that.
1990:
-
It can be argued that the so-called psychological thriller
took precedence over horror in the first half of the 1990s, and indeed, many
dark, disturbing films of this period describe themselves as thriller, not horror.
Yet directors such as Jonathan Demme were adopting the codes and conventions of
the horror genre, when pacing their plot,
-
Rise of the psychological horror
-
Global convergence
-
During the early 20th century cinema and the
horror genre in particular ancillary levels fell, people didn’t want to see
horror films
-
2005: revived the age of horror movies rather than monsters
and psychopathic killers horror films were now a social commentary for
societies problems.
E.G Final Destination
