According to Wikipedia, "Horror is a film genre seeking to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's primal fears. Horror films often feature scenes that startle the viewer; the macabre and the supernatural are frequent themes. Horror films often deal with the viewer's nightmares, hidden fears, revulsions and terrors of the unknown. Plots within the horror genre often involve the intrusion of an evil force, event, or personage, commonly of supernatural origin, into the everyday world.
Tim Dirks, film critic and editor/writer of Filmsite.org, describes horror films as "unsettling films designed to frighten and panic, cause dread and alarm, and to invoke our hidden worst fears, often in a terrifying, shocking finale, while captivating and entertaining us at the same time in a cathartic experience. Horror films effectively center on the dark side of life, the forbidden, and strange and alarming events. They deal with our most primal nature and its fears: our nightmares, our vulnerability, our alienation, our revulsions, our terror of the unknown, our fear of death and dismemberment, loss of identity, or fear of sexuality.
The first appearance of the above traits in what would later be deemed the horror genre occurred in 1896, in Georges Melies' three-minute short Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle). Although the film was intended to amuse people with its use of traditional pantomimes, film historians consider it the first horror movie ever made.
Le Manoir du Diable
The first film version of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein was produced in 1910. Between 1906 and 1911, four versions of Victor Hugo's 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) were released, with Quasimodo and his grotesque hunchback as the "villain". German Expressionist filmmakers caught on to the horror trend in the '20s, with Paul Wegener's The Golem and, one of my favorites, Robert Weine's silent film about a somnambulist, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (both released in 1920).
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
And then came Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), the world's first vampire-themed horror film. Nosferatu is technically the first version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, written in 1897, but because of rights issues to the novel, all of the names in the film were changed. Once the film was released, Stoker's lawyers and heirs to his estate sued Prana Film (the production company) for copyright infringement. They won, despite the name changes, and, by court ruling, every copy of Nosferatu was burned, except of course the one copy that had already been distributed around the world.
In 1929, Spanish director Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali made the silent film Un Chien Andalou (The Dog from Andalou), a surrealist short film comprised of a series of disjointed dream-like sequences. The film is most famous for the scene where a woman's eye is slit open with a razor blade in conjunction with a shot of the moon.
Un Chien Andalou
From there, the horror genre more or less exploded. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, was the first in a series of Gothic horror films distributed by Universal Pictures.
By the '50s, with advances in technology, the tone of horror films shifted from Gothic (the combination of horror and romance, or a sort of pleasing terror), to more contemporary concerns (Armageddon, the Devil, alien invasions, mutations, etc.) Remember in the '50s, WWII had just ended and the threat of Cold War hovered in the air, so "contemporary concerns" in horror films were extremely real.
In 1960, the first "slasher" film, Peeping Tom, was made by British director Michael Powell. The film features a "peeping tom" who captures his victims final faces of terror on a video camera before he kills them. At the time, the world wasn't ready for Peeping Tom and the film was eventually banned, destroying Powell's film career. But the film is now considered a cult classic, and Powell one of the best directors of British cinema.
And then there was Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, with its infamous shower scene in which Janet Lee is stabbed to death. Psycho was another example of the emerging slasher film and its effect and appeal on the psyche of horror film enthusiasts.
George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was maybe, in my opinion, the first horror movie to blend "contemporary concerns" with the political and racial dynamics of the time. Released in 1968, during the peak of the civil rights protests that tore the country apart, the film stars Duane Jones, a black man, whose character basically survives a zombie apocalypse only to be shot by a couple white redneck cops. From a less racial perspective, the film moved the horror genre further away from the Gothic trends of earlier horror and into everyday life.
During the '70s and '80s, horror movies became much more gory, often featured sexual overtones (which meant nudity), and played with the idea of "evil children" either reincarnated or possessed by the Devil himself: The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), Alice, Sweet Alice (1977).
Following Romero's path with everyday life horror, Wes Craven made his first film in 1972, The Last House on the Left, maybe my favorite horror movie ever made. The film was absolutely shocking and terrifying in that it didn't feature anything supernatural; everything "evil" that happens could totally happen to an average person. The plot revolves around two young girls in a quiet town who are terrorized, raped, and eventually killed by a group of wild, drug addicted escaped convicts.
Along with Last House, three other films were made in the '70s that I absolutely love. Sam Peckinpah released his psychological thriller Straw Dogs in 1971. Brian de Palma's Carrie was released in 1976. Based on Stephen King's novel, the film is about a young girl with supernatural powers who takes revenge on her high school classmates after they pour pig's blood over her head at prom. Carrie was the first of Stephen King's novels to be adapted for the screen. In 1978, the controversial rape and revenge film I Spit On Your Grave was made.
A series of slasher films were made in the late '70s and early '80s that would epitomize the cult classic horror movie: John Carpenter's Halloween (1978); Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980); and Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
For me, the horror genre ended in the '80s. Most slasher films of the '90s were sequels (there are 9 Nightmare on Elm Streets), or they were remakes, which is so boring. A few stood out: The Silence of the Lambs (1991); Seven (1995); Scream (1996). The best horror film I saw in the 2000s was Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, a zombie apocalypse film.
And now The Conjuring, although the film lacks the cinematic cult classic appeal of earlier films. It was scary enough to give me nightmares for three days, which is okay in my book.
The end.
No comments:
Post a Comment