History of the Horror Genre

When you see it…

Early history The horror film genre started off with short silent films

made by Georges Méliès which showed signs of supernatural behaviour. These films are given gratification of the human need for the gothic.

This was shown by early German expressionism in the early forms of the horror genre.

In the early 1930’s universal pictures created a series of Dracula films which created a gothic horror genre.

Along with this new genre the horror and thriller genres were gripped by things such as the Mummy (1932) which gripped people by the knew knowledge of Egyptology.

I walked with zombies (1943) was an early zombie film that pushed its limitations and boundaries.

The boom of the genre.

The horror genre took a large boom between the 1950’s to the 1980’s this was due to the need for the gothic by human nature.

This boom also came with the new release of better filming technologies which also created better experiences for the audience.

The 1950’s started with Godzilla which was based on a huge lizard attacking Tokyo due to radiation it grew massively. This film came at around the time just after the Hiroshima bombings during world war 2 and the plunging into the cold war, this film shows signs of trying to make light of recent events by films directors.

The 60’s was a glorious age for the horror genre as more and more horrors being made about demonic possession.

The 70’s and 80’s came with their own new type of horror that was just set out to cause fear into the heart along with the boom of b list actors and b list movies jumping it into a new form of genre.

Modern genre However the boom ended during the 90’s due to

the fact that a lot of the films genre lost its premise.

This was because of the fact that the more iconic films were slowly becoming more and more generic within the ever growing film genre.

Such films like the blair witch project that were seen to define the genre during this decade.

However a lot of the history of this genre at the time shows a lot of different styles of horror showing through the blair witch project leading the path for a new form of held camera horror.