JP: The History of Horror

The first horror movie was created by Georges Méliès in 1896 entitled "The Haunted Castle" (or "Le Manoir du Diable) and since this, film makers have attempted to emulate its impact on audiences at the time by conjuring stories that aim to scare their audience and invent new methods of production to achieve this. Subsequently, the horror genre has become one of the media's most successful and popular. Monsters are a main feature of the genre with Daniel Cohen stating:


"cultures create and ascribe meaning to monsters, endowing them with characteristics derived from their most deep-seated fears and taboos" 


Understanding this, we can therefore see through analysis that horror monsters in relation to their cultural contexts can provide an insight into the anxieties and concerns of the contemporary culture.

Here's some extracts from the document I looked at and images to accompany them, highlighting some key ideas and conventions that can be used in our production: -

Pre-World War II

"Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) has been a major influence on representations of vampires since its creation in Germany shortly after WW1. The vampire is an ‘invader’; he comes from ‘elsewhere’ and brings pestilence to the local community. His method of attack involves penetration and the exchange of bodily fluids. This can be read as a sexual metaphor but significantly the outcome of a vampire attack is death or infection."

"Frankenstein has many other possible readings that relate to the context of the time. For example, the sympathetic representation of the monster could be read as a critical perspective on the racial tensions that were present in American culture at the time. The monster’s eventual death is represented as a mob lynching of an individual who cannot integrate into the dominant culture. ‘The monster’ himself is not as monstrous as the abuse of scientific knowledge that creates him, the aristocrats’ abuse of power, or the mindless, murderous mob."

The Not So Swinging 60s

"The 1960s was a time of social change and this was mirrored in its horror monsters. The decade begins with Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) reflecting the impact of Freudian theories on the culture’s understanding of the human psyche. The monster here is a man whose family dynamics created an ‘abnormal psychology’. In the UK a similar story was told in Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960) where a dysfunctional family created another human monster. The monsters in both films were, on the surface, normal people but they brought horror close to home for the 1960’s audience. Arguably the mundane settings make the horror more effective than the distant, fantastical horror of the previous decades and the fact that the monsters now look like ‘us’ creates an unsettling realism."

 

"As horror moved into the 1970s the human monster became more sadistic. The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) became infamous for their sustained graphic violence. These films, like Psycho before them, located their horror in a mundane present; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre showed the effect of social and economic isolation and on a rural family whilst The Last House on the Left bought the horror into small-town America. Both films identified a society that, despite idealised appearances, had a brutal underbelly."

"The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1972) created a great deal of public and media attention and outrage for its depiction of a possessed girl. Like Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), The Omen (Donner, 1976) and The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973) in the UK, The Exorcist depicted the secularisation of society that had occurred since World War 2 and dealt with the unease and uncertainty this was causing by using devils, demons and pagans as its monsters. The Exorcist was also a film that identified post-war changes in the structure of the family. The possessed child is from a single-parent family headed by a working mother."

The End of an Era

"The 1980s saw a glut of slasher films as horror became a staple of the home video market. As the audience grew used to the genre’s visceral assaults, more outlandish and extreme spectacles were needed to maintain interest. Film franchises replicated the same ideas over and over, and the genre grew tired and clichéd, becoming less economically viable. In the mid-90s horror engaged with this familiarity for both comic and horrific effect. Scream (Craven, 1996) uses an ironic approach to the genre that is self-aware and self-referential. It uses the codes and conventions of the genre as a plot device, and the monster in the first Scream film is finally defeated by being hit with a television after a discussion of the effects of horror films on audiences."

Contemporary Monsters

"Recently horror has looked to its past and there have been remakes of many of the films mentioned in the earlier sections. Whether bringing them up to date has added anything more than CGI effects is a matter of personal opinion; but what is often lost in a remake is a sense of cultural context. Many remakes appear to be ‘style over substance’ as, whilst they may be more polished, slicker and gorier, they are more interested in the visceral experience rather than an exploration of cultural fears."

"Aside from remakes, perhaps the most notable development in contemporary horror is torture-porn which focuses on extreme visceral violence, nudity and sadistic torture. Saw (Wan, 2004) is a long-running series of torture porn films, utilising CGI to maximise the extreme nature of the violence depicted. It’s been suggested that perhaps audience desensitisation is at the heart of torture porn’s success. Mainstream television shows such as CSI (CBS) uses graphic imagery; and computer games have long used ‘splatter’, exposing players to more and more extreme violence. Torture porn does what horror has always had to do: attempt to find more and more extreme ways to scare (or repulse) the audience."

"The genre has the ability to adapt to allow it to tap into each generation’s preoccupations and concerns and its metaphorical approach can be used to deal with ideas and issues that appeal to a range of audience groups. Other genres such as Westerns may not be able to speak to modern audiences in the way they used to but horror continues to provide a cultural catharsis over 100 years since it first hit celluloid."