If you look at the last 100 years of the movie industry, you’ll see that certain things are slow to change. Despite innovations in technique and storytelling, special effects and technology, the genres themselves haven’t much evolved. His Girl Friday could just as easily be made today, while Saving Mr. Banks could have been made in the 1930s. But you can’t say that about horror films; you’d be laughed out of a Fangoria convention if you did.
No other genre has changed, shifted, and evolved as much or as many times over as horror. While some aspects remain consistent, trends and subgenres shift from one year to the next. Trying to draw a straight line from 1922’s Nosferatu to The Conjuring would be like a drunk trying to sign a bar tab, a squiggly line running all over the page.
IT ALL BEGAN WITH THE MONSTER MOVIE
In the beginning, horror films were simple and straightforward; from Dracula and Frankenstein, to the Mummy and the Wolfman, monsters were the thing. Lon Chaney, star of Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, rose to fame in the 1920s; as did director James Whale in the ‘30s, the same time that Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff became movie stars.
THE CAMPINESS OF THE ‘50S
Horror came into its own in the 1950s, a cinematic era just as well-known for the emergence of the melodrama. Social commentary was injected into the genre with such films as The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invaders from Mars, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers; as was science fiction campiness with The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, and House of Wax.
On the other side of the globe, Japan was still recovering from WWII when it introduced Godzilla, Mothra, and Gamera. These creatures would become among the most popular ever to appear on the silver screen, and prove to be far more influential than just about anything coming out of Hollywood.
“The 1950s is the so-called golden era of Japanese cinema,” says filmmaker Hideo Nakata, director of Ringu, one of the first influential Japanese horror films of the mid-1990s. “The movies were considered to be the best entertainment among all kinds [of media], so the major studios were competing with each other to attract audiences.”
Movies featuring huge, Armaggeddon-inducing monsters, gained an enormous cult following, taking them from the weekend movie matinee and transforming them into 21st century tent pole fodder. This summer saw the release of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, which featured the same kind of behemoths that used to run rampant over Tokyo six decades back.
POLANSKI, ROMERO, AND THE 1960S
Horror’s next shift came in the 1960s. While the British Hammer films introduced a decidedly Anglo touch to the genre, and Roger Corman was churning out traditional low budget fare that stayed close to the classic creepers of years past, European directors like Roman Polanski were changing the game yet again. First with Repulsion, then Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski captured a more realistic world of horror, in both cases focusing on a woman who suffers at the hands of forces beyond her control. In the first case, she is battling her own solitude; in the second, a malignant pregnancy that may or may not be fathered by Satan himself.
Meanwhile in Pittsburgh, George Romero had conceived something else entirely new: the zombie flick. While Night of the Living Dead was an immediate cult hit that would lead to a line of sequels, including the scathing social commentary Dawn of the Dead, it would still be decades before the zombie fad would truly take hold. Along the way, it begat franchises like Resident Evil and The Walking Dead, a TV show about the survivors of a zombie apocalypse that would become one of the most popular cable shows of all time.
THE GENRE GETS REAL
Just as Italian auteur Dario Argento ushered grislier forms of horror into the late ‘60s, American cinema saw a similar change in sensibility. Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre were watershed films that introduced moviegoers to genuinely evil figures; bogeymen who were the kind of real-life monsters that really did roam the countryside. The downturn in American fortunes, the cynicism and bleakness of the times, was reflected in the movies of the era.
“I think there is something about the American dream,” Craven has been quoted as saying, “the sort of Disneyesque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they can; and the flip side of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter, that gives American horror films, in some ways, an additional rage.”
Craven followed up Last House with The Hills Have Eyes; Hooper did The Hills Have Eyes;and then there was I Spit on Your Grave, perhaps the most misogynistic and cynical of them all. In these films, nubile teenagers were terrorized, hunted down by psychos who used any kind of sharp objects readily at hand. The psychological scares of the genre were now compounded by graphic portrayals of ritualized murder and mayhem.
And audiences loved it.
THE SLASHER FILM
With Halloween, John Carpenter changed the game again. As the weapon-wielding psychos of the ‘70s became exhausted, horror films of the ‘80s saw the reintroduction of the supernatural as part of the storytelling technique. With the success of such franchises as Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, Leatherface gave way to Michael Myers, Freddy Kruger, and Jason Voorhees; mystical, unkillable creatures who cared only about terrorizing teenagers.
The rise of the slasher film brought new filmmakers like Sam Raimi into the game. Raimi and his partner Rob Tapert, wanting to make a horror movie, went to see one that was doing a lot of business. When they walked out of their matinee two hours later, they didn’t get what the fuss was about, but returned that night to see the movie with a full theater. The reaction of a packed house showed them the power of frightening a crowd and they went on to make Evil Dead. The movie they saw? Halloween.
Throughout the ‘80s, more and more slasher films came along until, just like every previous horror fad, the pattern grew stale.
HORROR COMEDY, J-HORROR AND TORTURE PORN
In the early’90s, just as the horror film seemed to be running out of steam, Wes Craven’s Scream breathed new life into the genre by making fun of it; all the tropes and clichés picked apart to hilarious effect. I Know What You Did Last Summer followed in its wake, albeit without the tongue-in-cheek attitude and self-reference.
At the same time, Japanese filmmakers like Nakata were making movies that approached the genre from a completely different direction.
“When I made Ringu in 1997, the horror movie was considered to be a straight to video thing, but the taste of J-horror reached the young audience's sensibility. They became a bit bored with the over the top gruesome spluttery horror,” he explains. What set his and other Japanese films in the genre apart? “The long sustained quiet moments before and after the jumpy scary expressions. An American teenage boy gave me a fan letter, saying, ‘I like your quiet horror.’”
Thanks to producers like Roy Lee, these Japanese films were remade by Hollywood studios, and with them came hundreds of millions of dollars in domestic grosses. Films like The Ring and The Grudge, both based on Japanese predecessors, made Hollywood sit up and take notice, and soon studios began remaking films that had been successful three and four decades earlier. Suddenly, there was a new Nightmare on Elm Street, a new The Hills Have Eyes, a new Last House on the Left.
In between the comedy slashers and Japanese horror remakes came another fast-rising phenomenon, a sub-genre that captured the imaginations of horror fans with new levels of misanthropy and inventiveness: torture porn. Leigh Whannell and James Wan’s Saw opened people’s eyes to the truly macabre, taking the idea of punishment and elevating it to a whole new level. With Saw, its many sequels, and numerous rip-offs, it wasn’t enough to just kill someone. The instrument of destruction for Jigsaw, Saw’s angel of death, was always a Rube Goldbergian contraption that made the victim see that not only was the end nigh, but that it was going to hurt. A lot.
Eli Roth built his fledgling career on this new innovation, following his debut hit Cabin Fever with the much more violent Hostel. And while audiences initially flocked to theaters, these titles flamed out, too. It took half a decade to reach saturation point, and by that time, the market was not only thick with horror remakes, but filmmakers had found yet another method to scare audiences senseless. This one became so popular, it crossed numerous genres.
THE FOUND FOOTAGE FORMAT
The success of The Blair Witch Project offered further proof that the genre wasn’t exhausted, as it introduced the found footage format, a method not simply isolated to terrorizing audiences. Though the vast majority of the projects were horror-based, soon there were found footage superhero movies (Chronicle) and comedies (Project X). The simplicity of the format and its natural fit with horror was capitalized on by Jason Blum, whose production shingle Blumhouse, is at the forefront of the low-budget scarefest boom. Blum’s responsible for the single most profitable franchise in cinematic history: Paranormal Activity, a movie that changed his whole perspective.
“That’s when I realized that micro-budget filmmaking combines the two paths in my career,” Blum says. “Independent production that I learned at Miramax with big studio distribution and marketing, which I saw first-hand when producing movies like The Tooth Fairy. Our model gives us the best of both worlds—directors get to make the movies they want with no studio interference and the movies are supported by the massive studio machines.”
This gets to the core of why studios have been fans of the horror genre for a century—the movies don’t cost a lot to make and people love to see them, it’s a cinematic match made in heaven. Why people flock to see them in such droves is another question, but Wes Craven has made himself clear on that subject, too. “Horror films don’t create fear,” he has said. “They release it.”
THE GRANDMASTER
Dozens of projects have come from the fertile—and let’s face it, devious—mind of Stephen King, who’s sold millions of books that trade on the single concept that people like to be scared. Filmmakers know this, which is why they keep coming back to King’s material.
Setting aside the two most popular adaptations of the Maine native’s work, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, his movies have still made hundreds of millions of dollars, are revered by fans the world over, and continue to influence filmmakers. More than three decades after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is still the subject of debate and speculation, as featured in the documentary Room 237. This weekend will see the release of the Carrie remake, 37 years after the original version made Sissy Spacek a star.
No matter how many forms it takes, horror clearly never goes out of style. Neither, it seems, does Stephen King.
THE FUTURE OF HORROR
So how will fans release their fear in the future? With horror, everything old is eventually new again. There are a host of monster movies in the works, featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Universal is talking about rebooting The Mummy franchise yet again. There are more Stephen King adaptations in the offing, as well as remakes aplenty, with titles like The Birds, I Know What You Did, and Poltergeist all popping up on development scrolls.
The possibility of a new batch of period horror films is interesting, like The Last Voyage of Demeter, about the ship that delivered Dracula to England; and Driving While Dead, about a bunch of teens who get lost on their way to a late night party and discover they’ve somehow crossed over into hell. Many of these tales put new spins on an age old ideas, but ask an expert, and it’s clear that a fresh take on the genre is only part of the battle.
“It has probably become more difficult [to predict], as global audience sensibilities are now close to each other as we have internet tools,” Nakata says. “But I will go back to the basics and think hard what kind of story and horror expressions will look fresh to young audience's eyes.”
Blum has his eye on that same prize, too. “This may be a much simpler answer than you are looking for,” he says, “but I really think it all comes down to quality. The genre succeeds when the movies are good and it fails when the movies tell boring, tired stories.”
The genre’s continued evolution is what will keep it thriving. Luckily, there are filmmakers like Nakata and Blum with the talent and the understanding to make it so.
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