Movies are never created in vacuums. By virtue of being pieced together by real people based on how they view the world around them, films are destined (or doomed) to, consciously or subconsciously, reflect the filmmakers’ relationships to society and culture. As Wes Craven famously said in the 1991 documentary Fear in the Dark (dir. Dominic Murphy): “Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.”
While some films are absolutely intentional explorations of social issues, from Sophia Takal’s take on Black Christmas (2019), which overtly explores rape culture, to Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), which takes on American privilege and marginalization, many filmmakers are unconscious of the way their films are holding up a mirror to the anxieties gripping society at the time when their film is being made. In his foreword to the book Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present (2014), director Jeff Lieberman describes his surprise when audiences unearthed social and political commentary within his creepy-crawly horror Squirm (1976), about killer earthworms: “critics found some very profound subtexts which I myself wasn’t aware of. Nature getting revenge on man for his disrespect of ecology. The symbolism of man’s mortality and his inevitable fate of becoming worm food.… This could all very well be true, but if it is, it was not done purposely on my part.” And George Romero has famously commented that Night of the Living Dead (1968) was never intended to be a discussion about race.
The nuances of creating versus releasing fear can be lost a little when you’re writing an entire book dedicated to picking apart how horror moments are carefully crafted to get certain synapses in your brain to fire. But there’s something compelling about the idea that, consciously or not, horror is reflecting the fears of a public consciousness. It has always had this role. There’s a reason why some older horrors don’t resonate as sociocultural norms have shifted over time while other films, the ones that tap into evergreen fears, tend to persist.
Let’s test this theory by taking a quick tour of horror movie history, from the first on-screen terrors to today. This is by no means a deep dive; to do horror history justice, we’d want to dedicate an entire book to it. Instead, we will look at tentpole trends in horror, sometimes referred to as horror cycles, and look at whether the horrors represented in those cycles echo the horrors happening in the real world at the time.
At its very beginning, film was an extremely limited medium where storytelling is concerned. The Lumière Brothers’ Cinématographe, one of the earliest movie cameras, was hand-cranked and could record a whopping 16 frames per second. For reference, the contemporary standard frame rate is 24 frames per second, while some films, notably Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, have experimented with higher frame rates (holding at 48 fps). The human eyeball only begins to perceive the illusion of smooth and seamless movement from still images at roughly 18 frames per second, so while 16 frames per second does produce a sense of movement, it looks pretty jerky and jittery.
Early cameras also couldn’t hold much film, which meant that once the first moviemakers started crafting stories instead of just documenting real life, they had to be economical with their narratives. (Although, in the age of social media, thanks to extreme short-form media apps like Vine and TikTok, we’ve since mastered the art of telling complete and compelling stories in as little as six seconds.)
The arrival of film as a medium for the masses coincided with the shift from the Victorian era into Modernism, as the nineteenth century hinged over into the twentieth. This change in sensibility was concerned with a commitment to new beginnings and a rejection of the past. Outside of the art sphere, the world and society were also swiftly changing in the years leading up to World War I. In the decades after the industrial revolution, technological, scientific, and engineering advances persisted, transforming homes and society again and again.
While not the first film, let alone a horror film, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896, dirs. Auguste and Louis Lumière), known in English as The Arrival of the Train, is the film that we most often refer to when we are trying to paint a picture of how audiences experienced movies at the dawn of cinema—whether that picture is an accurate one or not. The fifty-second-long scene shows a train arriving at a station. The common myth attached to this film was that audiences were so naive to the film experience that when they first watched the image of a train pulling up toward the camera, they thought the train would burst through the screen. And so the audience responded accordingly, screaming and pressing toward the back of the auditorium. Of course, historians doubt that audiences who saw L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat were so panicked by the sight of a grainy and silent black-and-white train approaching them, and there are no surviving accounts of its first showings in Paris to shed light upon the truth. According to Martin Loiperdinger, a film scholar at the University of Trier in Germany, there likewise exist no police reports or newspaper articles about the incident. It’s unlikely that such a huge cinematic impression would leave zero paper trail in this way.
That said, the rumor about a celluloid train freaking out moviegoers is about as old as the movie itself. Maybe what we’re really talking about when we talk about L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat is the birth of the movie marketing gimmick.
A lot of the earliest horror films feel more like experimental uses of technique and technology than narrative ambitions. One trend that does seem clear from the earliest horrors, though, is that Faustian stories were popular. We saw Faustian tales in popular literature around this time too. Faust is said to have been based on a real figure—Dr. Johann Georg Faust—a German alchemist, magician, and accused blasphemer whose life straddled the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The legend that grew out of his life would become the “deal with the Devil” trope. Playwright Christopher Marlowe popularized the story in Europe in the late 1500s with his play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (although the most influential adaptation of the legend would come a few hundred years later in the form of a poem by Goethe). The play presents Doctor Faustus as an ambitious man who calls upon the Devil for knowledge and power. The Devil sends Mephistopheles as a proxy, who agrees to grant Faustus powers, for a time, in exchange for his soul. In Marlowe’s versions (there are two), Faustus squanders his powers and is dragged to hell at the end. Other adaptations have given the all-powerful Faustus the opportunity to repent and save his soul.
There’s something about the Faustian tale that seems to have appealed to the earliest filmmakers. It could simply be the fact that the story of Faust and Mephistopheles is a familiar one that had already persisted for centuries, but the more likely explanation is that horror stories were already reflecting societal fears. With themes exploring politics, morality, and whether ambitions of transcendence should be punished, it’s no surprise that Faustian parables experienced a resurgence around the turn of the twentieth century, into a fug of moral crisis and uncertainty. Tensions were mounting across Europe in the years leading up to World War I and the Balkan wars. In general, there was a fear that things had gone off track—a feeling that would only be exacerbated by World War I.
Le manoir du diable (1896, dir. Georges Méliès) is one such Faustian story, and it is credited as the first-ever horror movie, mostly thanks to the presence of horror staples, like the Devil, a transforming bat, and ghostlike figures. The movie itself doesn’t feel like it was built with the intent to scare, despite seeming to be a vampire narrative of some sort. In fact, most of the earliest horror films were more aligned with what we’d describe as horror comedies.
In 1897, a shorter, but strikingly similar film called Le château hanté (in English, The Haunted Castle) was released. It was also directed by Georges Méliès, but it tends to be misattributed to his contemporary George Albert (G. A.) Smith and is often considered to be a lost film because of this misattribution (sadly, most of the horror films from this era are considered to be lost films). While the term “lost film” makes it sound like someone accidentally misplaced a film reel somewhere, a huge factor in why so many of the oldest films are lost to the annals of time is because the film stock used to create the film was extremely unstable. Depending on the care with which nitrate-based film stock (made with a compound called nitrocellulose) was stored, it could last for one hundred years or more, or it could degrade into a powdery, highly flammable residue that might spontaneously combust. Chemistry aside, perhaps the biggest reason for so many lost films isn’t accidental destruction, but intentional destruction. With a few exceptions, early American film studios didn’t necessarily see the value in archiving film reels. Rather than saving shelf space for their works, reels were simply junked when they were no longer being circulated.
While he didn’t direct The Haunted Castle, G. A. Smith did serve up some spooky fare of his own in the late 1890s, including X-Ray Fiend (1897) and Photographing a Ghost (1898). The latter is often considered to be the film that birthed the paranormal investigation subgenre.
While most Faustian tales of this era ended with Faust being dragged to hell, Faust et Méphistophélès (1903, dir. Alice Guy), quite possibly the first horror movie directed by a woman, grants Faust an apparently happy ending, saved from eternal damnation and reunited with his love Marguerite.
Similar to the Faustian legend, adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein were also popular among the earliest horror filmmakers. The short 1910 version of Frankenstein (dir. J. Searle Dawley), from Edison Studios (which also gave us one of the first Faustian films), was probably the first of these. In a thematic vein similar to that tapped into by Faustian stories, Frankenstein explores human progress and fears associated with expanded knowledge and the dangers of ambitious pursuits.
In other parts of the world, early filmmakers were also drawn to what might be considered horror narratives. In Japan, a film manufacturing company called Konishi Honten (which would, 130 years after its founding in 1873, merge with the more well-known camera and tech company Minolta) released two films written by Ejiro Hatta: Shinin No Sosei, or Resurrection of a Corpse (1898), and Bake Jizo, or Jizo the Spook (1898), which are both now considered to be lost films. Shinin No Sosei allegedly told the story of a man who comes back from the dead after finding himself freed from a dropped coffin. There’s no preserved description of Bake Jizo, but in Japanese legend, Jizo is a deity who acts as a guardian to children, especially children who have died before their parents.
This is a stab in the dark, given the sheer lack of information on these films and overall dearth of records on Japanese film from this era, but reports that the actors in Shinin No Sosei were Konishi Honten employees seems to suggest that these might have been early demonstrations of film techniques by a camera company. The presence of death and spirits in these first films isn’t surprising. While a Western lens readily interprets images of undead men and ghostly guardians as horror tropes, it’s hard to say without seeing the films whether the spirits featured in them were evil or not. Japanese culture has a very different relationship with spirits than other parts of the world. They’re not so much enemies to be defeated as material beings that coexist alongside humans. Generally speaking, this era in East Asia was seeing dominance shifting for the first time from China to Japan, as Japan was experiencing huge growth and industrialization as part of the Meiji Era Restoration. Cultural anxieties relating to these major changes would be more apparent in the horror films that followed in decades to come. As if holding fast to tradition, until well into the 1920s many Japanese films leaned into performance techniques developed for traditional stage entertainment and storytelling, such as Nō and Kabuki, rather than evolving a new visual language for film.
While the first few decades of film saw the medium getting its footing as a storytelling tool, horror films soon began developing the visual tropes that would continue to resonate for the next hundred years and counting. Growth of the film industry into the 1920s also spelled a demand for longer horror films that could more fully explore themes of fear.
The end of World War I saw the rise of German Expressionism. The burdens of postwar losses, economic crisis, and political extremism left German filmmakers exploring their medium as a form of bold artistic and stylistic pursuit as well as a means for elaborating narratives much darker than those being built by their Hollywood counterparts. The shadowy atmosphere and exploration of themes such as madness and betrayal associated with German Expressionist cinema are often considered to be what birthed the aesthetics of the cinematic subgenres of film noir and gothic horror as we understand them today. Memorable horror films from this era are The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, dir. Robert Wiene), Nosferatu (1922, dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau), and M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang). Eventually, Hollywood would pick up threads of German Expressionism overseas with films like The Phantom of the Opera (1925, dir. Rupert Julian).
The harshness of Expressionism aside, the Roaring Twenties saw Americans enjoying relative comfort during postwar economic expansion, but as the decade wore on, the tides of good fortune began to turn.
In 1929, the stock market collapsed completely and the United States saw a cataclysmic economic downturn. Families lost their jobs and homes. Around the same time, droughts destroyed houses and agricultural opportunities, ushering in the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression. In the United States, movies with fantastic and fabulist elements became a favorite way to escape the weight of the Great Depression, and horror movies were no exception to this rule.
While some horror films certainly were found unsatisfying at the time—largely because they lacked those fantastical elements and dealt with darker and uneasy themes, like the ones explored in Freaks (1932, dir. Tod Browning)—what did suit audiences’ desires for fantasy were the movies that Universal Pictures presented as their first forays into the horror genre with their classic gothic monsters. The first on the scene were The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923, dir. Wallace Worsley) and The Phantom of the Opera, although these days, they aren’t the films that people tend to recall first when the words “Universal” and “monster” are spoken together in the same breath. The Universal Classic Monster A-Team generally includes Boris Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale) and The Mummy (1932, dir. Karl Freund), Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931, dirs. Tod Browning and Karl Freund)—and sometimes Claude Rains’s The Invisible Man (1933, dir. James Whale) gets to join too. Later, the team was rounded out with Lon Chaney’s The Wolf Man (1941, dir. George Waggner) and Ricou Browning and Ben Chapman’s jointly uncredited roles as the Gill Man from The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, dir. Jack Arnold).
These iconic monsters were often depicted in ways that walked the fine line of showing a monster as a threatening, inhuman “Other” and as a sympathetic, often lonely creature that acknowledges the human condition. As Stephen King describes it in Danse Macabre, there’s “something so sad, so miserable there that our hearts actually go out to the creature even as [we] are shrinking away from it in fear and disgust.” In this way, the monsters become convenient and recognizable stand-ins for audience anxieties, displacing them just enough outside of the human sphere that they can be experienced from a safe fantasy vantage point.
This distancing through fantasy likely served as a useful tool as oversight of the film industry became stricter. By 1922, outside forces were pushing back against Hollywood. At the local level, religious leaders would make up morality rules and would hack up movie reels until they were deemed fit for audiences to consume. In 1930, former postmaster general Will Hays developed a set of thirty-six production rules and recommendations for conserving wholesome content in film. These rules had a wide scope, basically strangling depictions of anything that might be deemed to lower the morality of the audience or place the audience in a position where they might feel sympathetic toward evil, crime, or sin. This meant that religious figures could not be ridiculed or otherwise treated comedically, characters couldn’t be shown nude (or even dancing suggestively), and topics like sex, passion, crime, and violence were off the table. The Hays Code was supposed to be a voluntary system, but Hays’s political influence allowed him to set up this new production code system in such a way that, if filmmakers wanted their movies to actually be shown in theatres, they’d have to toe the line of propriety.
Other parts of the world saw similar restrictions. The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) introduced an “H” rating (for “horrific”) in 1933 and openly discouraged the production of films that would befit an H rating. Meanwhile in Japan, the film industry had been policed by tight regulations as early as 1917, to control against obscenity—a term that refused to be pinned down by a concrete definition. Unsurprisingly, the result of this sort of control meant that fewer horror movies tended to be produced for wide release … at least until studios realized that they were losing out on profits and picked up the horror thread anew.
Post-Hiroshima and post-Nagasaki fear of nuclear radiation and how it could affect us suffused society in the ’50s. In 1950, President Truman made the controversial decision to supercharge research into nuclear weapons, adding fuel to the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the development of the hydrogen bomb, and schoolchildren everywhere practicing how to hide under their desks in case of a nuclear attack, guided to “duck and cover” by a cartoon turtle.
The term “Doomsday Clock” was coined around this era as a metaphor to describe how close humanity has come to nuclear annihilation. By 1953, the clock had been revised to state that humanity was “two minutes till midnight”—that is to say: approaching the end.
This fear ushered in a new era of movie monsters: the radioactive mutants. Them! (1954, dir. Gordon Douglas) is one of the first and most well known of these features, in which a colony of giant ants are discovered, apparently mutated from the first nuclear tests at the Trinity site in New Mexico. Dr. Medford (played by Edmund Gwenn), the entomologist who helps to destroy the killer ants, directly cites the real horror of the film when he observes, “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.” Unsurprisingly, what followed was a wave of “big bug” copycat films, like the humongous stop-motion scorpion of The Black Scorpion (1957, dir. Edward Ludwig), the hundred-foot-tall tarantula of Tarantula! (1955, dir. Jack Arnold), and other non-arthropod mutant monsters.
In other parts of the world, similar threats resonated. In 1954, the first Godzilla (dir. Ishirō Honda) film was released in Japan (later to be reedited and introduced to North America as Godzilla, King of the Monsters in 1956). A later release, Matango (1963, dir. Ishirō Honda), or Attack of the Mushroom People, was almost banned when it was first released in Japan. The victims portrayed in the film are abandoned on an island where the local flora and fauna seem to have been mutated by nuclear waste. When they eat the monstrous (and monstrously addictive) mushrooms native to the island, they find themselves transforming into mutant mushroom people. What was so controversial about this film was that it was apparently felt that these transforming mushroom people appeared strikingly similar to victims of atomic bombings in Japan. Director Ishirō Honda has also commented that Matango reflects other relevant fears of the time, including drug use and addiction (not unlike drug-related fears that were unfolding in Britain and the United States around the same time, as heroin use began to climb).
Not everyone was afraid of radiation, though. Despite the horrors of the atomic bomb, excitement was still running high about the potential powers of radiation. This led to a lot of ill-advised personal products, from a conceptual nuclear-powered car (the Ford Nucleon) to actual uranium sand houses, which were briefly popular cure-all spaces where you could book an appointment to rest your feet in some mildly radioactive uranium sand.
One of the weirder fads to come out of the Atomic Age was a hobby known as gamma gardening, which took hold both in parts of Europe and the United States. It’s unclear where the rumor started, but reports popped up around 1947 alleging that plants that grew in the atom-blasted soil in and around Nagasaki were larger and yielded more than regular crops. It wasn’t long before government experiments enlisted farmers in the United States to observe the effects of radiation on crops—essentially to understand just how messed up agriculture would become if an important crop-growing region got nuked, and also to see if radiation could in fact create useful mutations. The Giant Insect movies of the 1950s tended to draw a straight line between the idea of radiation causing mutations and its worst-case scenarios. The giant locusts of Beginning of the End (1957, dir. Bert I. Gordon) were even born thanks to regular locusts chowing down on beachball-sized tomatoes and strawberries grown in an experimental gamma gardening laboratory.
Tied to fears of radiation were fears about communism. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was famously quick to equate any form of protest with communism, and Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, who is well known for his fear tactics during this era, terrorized others (especially Hollywood) with hair-trigger accusations of subversion or treason without much, if any, evidence. McCarthyism fostered an environment in which paranoia and mistrust flourished.
The resultant fear that people you see every day might secretly be enemies is reflected in horrors of this era—notably Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, dir. Don Siegel). Alien invasion movies had their moment in the 1950s as the totalitarian takeovers presented in films like The War of the Worlds (1953, dir. Byron Haskin) and The Thing from Another World (1951, dir. Christian Nyby) resonated with moviegoers worried about Soviet occupation.
One such alien invasion movie, The Blob (1958, dirs. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., and Russell S. Doughten, Jr., uncredited), has seen its red, amorphous, all-consuming alien interpreted as a metaphor for the Red Scare. In an interview, producer Jack Harris dismissed the association as “hogwash.” According to Harris, Yeaworth saw the Blob as a parable “about God’s wrath upon evildoers.” I’m not exactly sure who Yeaworth envisions were evildoers in The Blob, unless he’s referring to punishing teen sexuality, given that the entity was discovered by some youngsters (played by Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsaut, who were twenty-eight and twenty-five, respectively, and look it) who had been on a romantic venture to the local lovers’ lane.
From nuclear bugs to extraterrestrial monstrosities, some of the forms that fears took in the 1940s and 1950s were really out there. Once you center a movie around a giant radioactive killer eyeball with tentacles—hi, The Trollenberg Terror (1958, dir. Quentin Lawrence)!—how do you top that? It was almost inevitable that horror would recalibrate by pulling back from the cosmic horrors with a return to the familiar.
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE (1960s)
Two key movies appeared on the scene in 1960 to mark the shift from creature features to the unknowable terrors held within the minds of other humans. Those movies were Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) and Peeping Tom (1960, dir. Michael Powell).
While both films depicted serial killers of sorts—Psycho, adapted from the novel of the same name by Robert Bloch, drew inspiration from killer Ed Gein’s crimes in the late 1950s, the same man who would later inspire Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—the now-household term “serial killer” had yet to become familiar in the way it would in the decades to come, as more families would begin to have TV sets in their homes where they could watch the news of national and international crimes unfold.
Psycho’s Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) seemed an awkward but polite young man, hardly a threatening figure until he shocked audiences by dispatching with the film’s heroine within the first hour of the film. Peeping Tom’s Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is another average-looking, shy young man who hides murderous voyeurism (born of a lifetime of systematic psychological abuse and conditioning at his father’s hands). With the world recovering from one war and moving into another, the reality of horrors taking human form on-screen was poignant to audiences. This is a fear that seems to reappear more often than others throughout decades of horror cinema, easily spanning fears of communism from the turn of the century and in the 1950s and, well, fears of communism in the 1980s: that the people that you see every day, your neighbors, your friends, or the polite young man working the receptionist’s desk, might secretly be your enemies.
Directors in Italy picked up where Psycho and Peeping Tom left off to form their own pulpy, stylish take on human violence with giallo. Named after the yellow covers of cheap crime novels (originally those published by Mondadori, starting in 1929, but eventually yellow became the go-to cover color for publishing houses publishing pulp), gialli delivered crime thrillers that used sensory motifs and violence as transgression to tensions in Italy around the time—similar in some ways to shifts that were occurring in America, but without the repression of a Production Code.
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963, dir. Mario Bava), with its undeniably pulpy mood and style, is usually identified as the first giallo film, but we often associate the aesthetics of the genre with later entries, like the vibrant color-saturated sets and sensational murder scenes of Blood and Black Lace (1964, dir. Mario Bava) and the black-gloved killers and gloppy red blood of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970, dir. Dario Argento). A lot of the stylistic elements built up by gialli would be borrowed when American slashers would begin to hit their groove in the late 1970s and early ’80s. In the meantime, the 1960s would still see social tensions rise and spill over onto the screen, just not in such a splash-tastic, Technicolor way.
VIOLENT ENDS (LATE 1960s–1970s)
In public, people were taking to the streets to protest racist policies and to march for civil rights for Black Americans; by the late 1960s, public spaces were also filled with bodies joining the anti-war movement, and still others were protesting for an end to institutional sexism. With society practically vibrating with civil unrest and pushing for change (and others in power pushing back against it), it’s unsurprising that horror movies started to reflect fears of what that change might entail.
As social commentary from this era, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir. George A. Romero). This is the movie that usually comes up in conversation first when people talk about cultural commentary in horror. Of course, Romero didn’t necessarily intend his story of strangers trapped in a house while undead ghouls pressed in from every direction as a commentary on race and society. But the moment he cast a Black actor (Duane Jones) as the surviving hero Ben, who outlasts a night of relentless terrors only to die by the hands of a white police officer in broad daylight—a police officer who may or may not have recognized that Ben was not a ghoul at all before he pulled the trigger—it became very hard not to read the film as a social commentary.
Of course, racial tensions weren’t the only issues making the people in power shift uncomfortably in their seats. Second-wave feminism, the introduction of the birth control pill in 1968, and the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 all clearly influenced horror in this era. There were anxieties about what this so-called sexual revolution would do to the picture-perfect ideal of the nuclear family that was produced and promoted in the 1950s.
More tangibly, the discovery that the drug Thalidomide, prescribed in the mid-1950s worldwide for morning sickness, had teratogenic effects and could cause severe congenital abnormalities in growing embryos (if the affected embryos managed to survive) took frankly ableist fears that children may be born disabled and produced monstrous depictions of children. Together, these resulted in a lot of pregnancy horror, like It’s Alive (1974, dir. Larry Cohen), Rosemary’s Baby (1976, dir. Roman Polanski), demonic children like Damien in The Omen (1976, dir. Richard Donner) and Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973, dir. William Friedkin), and a number of films that seemed to punish women for apparently destroying the nuclear family ideal, like The Stepford Wives (1975, dir. Bryan Forbes) and The Brood (1979, dir. David Cronenberg).
Cronenberg in particular rose to prominence for focusing on the body, especially the sexualized body, as a site for horror. Under his direction, human bodies developed pulsing parasitic nodules that ramped up their sex drives (Shivers, 1975), or developed bizarre genital-like formations where they didn’t belong—like a phallic armpit stinger (Rabid, 1977) or a distinctly yonic new hole in an abdomen (Videodrome, 1982)—and generally saw perverse invasions and transformations. These films had a huge role in developing body horror into a horror subgenre unto itself.
By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, talk of cults and serial killers became common. We can see echoes of fears stirred up by the Manson family cult and murders clearly in films like the X-rated I Drink Your Blood (1970, dir. David E. Durston) and more obliquely in folk horror films like The Wicker Man (1973, dir. Robin Hardy) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971, dir. Piers Haggard), where hippie communes are replaced with pagan groups with occult or satanic practices.
News of so many nicknamed serial killers at large in the United States around this time inspired new fears doubly represented as human threats that might be lurking in public spaces or their own backyards, and threats that might take the extra step to invade their homes and safe spaces. Everywhere you looked there were new threats becoming household names, from “the Dating Game Killer,” to “the Golden State Killer,” to “the Son of Sam,” “the Hillside Stranglers,” “the Vampire of Sacramento,” “the Torso Killer,” and more. These real murders paved the road for their cinematic counterparts: the human violence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper), The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976, dir. Charles B. Pierce), and extremely violent home invasion films like Straw Dogs (1971, dir. Sam Peckinpah) and The Last House on the Left (1972, dir. Wes Craven).
SCARE SPOTLIGHT: BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974, DIR. BOB CLARK)
Black Christmas is often cited as the first of the new slasher subgenre, building off the proto-slashers Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) and Peeping Tom (1960, dir. Michael Powell), both released over a decade earlier. The film fits perfectly among other movies of this new era concerned with serial killers and sexuality: the plot follows an unnamed, unseen (except fleetingly as a pair of hands or a watching eye) killer who methodically stalks, taunts, and kills women in a sorority house at Christmas break. His cryptic telephone calls to the house recall the urban legend of the babysitter and the killer upstairs, but otherwise reveals nothing about the killer’s motivations (although these would later be developed by Glen Morgan in his 2008 remake of the film, fully sanctioned by Clark).
It was scary because a home was being violently invaded for no real reason, and no real prevention was possible. With real families in this decade still reeling over news reports of serial killers and rapists breaking into complete strangers’ homes to enact violence, this story hit close to home. Reportedly, Black Christmas’s television premiere years later in 1978 was met with controversy, since its appearance on TV screens across America coincided with sorority murders by a then-unknown killer (later to be identified as Ted Bundy) mere weeks earlier.
Black Christmas put us as the audience into the killer’s shoes. The perspective was filmed with a head-mounted camera setup created by camera operator Bert Dunk specifically for the film; the Steadicam wouldn’t be introduced until 1975. You can see the genetic connection between Black Christmas and the slashers that would follow. John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) opens similarly with a scene told from an unseen killer’s perspective, although, unlike in Black Christmas, the killer is revealed to us in a literal and figurative unmasking.
In an interview with Icons of Fright, director Bob Clark jokes that he had once had a conversation with John Carpenter pre-Halloween as to whether he’d ever make a sequel to Black Christmas. He had no plans to dig deeper into the Black Christmas sandbox, and told Carpenter as much, but that if he ever did a sequel, “it would be the next year and the guy would have actually been caught, escape from a mental institution, go back to the house and they would start all over again. And I would call it Halloween.” While this sounds suspiciously familiar, Clark goes on to say that Halloween, while definitely drawing inspiration from Black Christmas, is absolutely its own film and wholly an original creation belonging to Carpenter and Debra Hill.
In the same year that Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) found herself laughing in fear in the back of a pickup truck, the final and only survivor of the Sawyer family’s violence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Black Christmas furthered the concept of the Final Girl with Jess (Olivia Hussey) as a woman who discovers horror and manages to resourcefully stay alive while her friends are picked off like scabs around her. That said, Jess is missing a lot of the Final Girl standards: she smokes and drinks, has sex, and is considering an abortion when she discovers she’s pregnant. Altogether she’s a portrait of a second-wave feminist and liberated woman, officially free to make choices about her own body since Roe v. Wade was passed the year before. For contemporary audiences she seems cool as hell, but in 1974 her depiction, along with those of her coeds, were considered hyper-sexualized (critic Gene Siskel, who hated most horror movies anyway, famously derided the characters as “junk roles” who talk dirty). The film doesn’t quite treat Jess like a Final Girl either: after seeming to be rescued, she is ultimately left in the house with the killer, sedated and lying in bed, and her fate is left ambiguous.
To simplify Carol Clover’s definition, a Final Girl was originally described as a woman who acts as an embodiment of terror, who is aware of the killer, either through the discovery of her loved ones’ bodies or by watching the villain kill them right in front of her, but who manages to survive long enough to either be rescued or to kill the villain herself. Jess Bradford checks some of these boxes, but not enough to be more than a precursor to a definitive Final Girl. The trope wouldn’t be solidified as we know it today and cemented in our hearts as a horror tradition until Laurie Strode would stride on-screen four years later in Halloween.
This new obsession with violent serial killers likely helped to pave the way for violence entering mainstream cinema in a big way. Violent exploitation films, previously relegated to low-budget grindhouse theatres, started to get booked on bigger screens.
When it comes to film, “exploitation” is more of an approach than a genre. As an approach we can loosely define the exploitation film as a work that keys into current trends and untapped audiences and—well—exploits them, often while couching content in lurid imagery and reinforced stereotypes. By this definition, exploitation films are defined by the audiences that they intend to exploit: blaxploitation films have been largely produced by and for Black audiences, Ozploitation deals specifically with Australian themes and settings while making the most of the dawn of the R rating in Australia in 1970, and so on. It was under this exploitation film umbrella that subgenres like the slasher and the splatter film could thrive. While exploitation cinema emerged as early as the late 1950s, we tend to associate the classification with the gorier, more violent horror films of the 1970s, mostly meant to target teenagers and young men. The Hays Production Code was officially over in 1968, giving way to the MPAA rating classifications in nearly the same form we use today. Filmmakers no longer had to worry about abiding by the code’s thirty-six rules for propriety (not that they weren’t already subverting the code any chance they got). Inevitably, horror films got a lot more violent. As you might expect, this is also when a lot of horror film traditions were born.
Vampire movies, while they never really left the scene, seemed to explode anew in the 1970s. But the Universal Classic Bela Lugosi type (Dracula, 1931) wouldn’t cut it anymore. The dissolution of the Hays Code meant that religious themes, especially perversions of religious themes, could be explored anew, not to mention the sexual metaphors that often go hand in hand with vampire folklore. So it isn’t really surprising at all that the era of the sexual revolution was a welcome space to revisit fanged fiends. Of note were films featuring Black vampires, riding the very specific wave of blaxploitation. These were works like the intricate art film Ganja and Hess (1973, dir. Bill Gunn) and the vampire film Blacula (1972, dir. William Crain), the latter of which would spawn a series. In different ways, these films used the classically othered vampire figure to explore issues of race and identity. Other, non-vampire blaxploitation films produced during this period include Blackenstein (1973, dir. William A. Levey), which, of course, was a Black Frankenstein film (set against the Vietnam War), and the zombie revenge flick Sugar Hill (1974, dir. Paul Maslansky).
Sensing an opportunity to cash in on this movement of low-budget high violence, studios started to get in on the exploitation action. In 1980, Paramount took a gamble and picked up the independently produced Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham) and spun it into a franchise after its wide release turned out to be wildly successful. This would mark the start of the tidal wave of slasher franchises that would define the horror landscape for the next decade.
SLASHERS, SATANIC PANIC, AND VIDEO NASTIES (1980s)
When you try to classify horror in the 1980s, a clear theme is hard to pin down. VHS videocassette tapes had become available for families to start renting and watching movies in their own homes instead of having to catch them on cable or in the cinemas. This was a bit of a boon for low-budget horror movies because they could be distributed direct-to-video, while they probably wouldn’t have been released to many, if any, movie theatres. Some of the earliest direct-to-video movies—the ones that weren’t video music albums—were horror movies, like Blood Cult (1985, dir. Christopher Lewis) and the blaxploitation B-movie Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984, dir. Chester Novell Turner).
Perhaps channeling the excesses of the decade, the genre seemed to veer toward fantastic elements. While the slasher genre was still going strong, the more human killers were yielding to supernatural weapon-wielding murderers like Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven). Existing slasher staples like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers just seemed to become more explicitly supernatural as their series progressed through the decade.
Even contrast The Slumber Party Massacre (1981, dir. Amy Holden Jones) and its sequel The Slumber Party Massacre II (1987, dir. Deborah Brock). The first features Russ Thorn as a bizarre but definitely human serial killer who wields an industrial drill to attack anyone who crosses his path (especially if that person is a woman). Fast-forward to the sequel and our killer has been replaced by a singing, dancing driller killer with a drill-mounted electric guitar and a Freddy Krueger–esque ability to warp perceptions of reality. His own realness is also questionable. Both movies are in line with killer aesthetics at the time of their release—like a toilet paper roll, horror seems to be moving through aesthetic trends faster as we approach the present.
In 1984, PG-13 was added to the MPAA rating system, which ushered in a new era of horror marketed to a wider family audience—like Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), which might have been a bit of a confusing experience for families who expected the puppet-driven film to be more of the E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg) variety. This addition to the ratings system might have also had a hand in chasing horror from a countercultural niche into a more mainstream light. Millennials can thank the new PG-13 for the fun-for-the-whole-family horrors that gave them childhood nightmares, like The Gate (1987, dir. Tibor Takács) and Critters (1986, dir. Stephen Herek).
Recoiling from the splatter and violence of the exploitation films of the 1970s, the U.K. experienced a wave of moral panic in the early 1980s that led to the ban of a lot of horror films labeled as “Video Nasties.” What resulted was the Video Recordings Act being instituted in 1984, and the eventual accumulation of seventy-two banned films. The criteria that were implemented for banning films seem inconsistent at best. Some of the usual suspects like Cannibal Holocaust (1980, dir. Ruggero Deodato) and Blood Feast (1963, dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis), and the film that likely launched the Video Nasties moral panic, The Driller Killer (1979, dir. Abel Ferrara), were among the earliest films to be banned (even if by ’80s standards many of the depictions of gore and blood, especially in Blood Feast, were already verging on campy). On the other hand, not even critically acclaimed, award-winning horror was immune: The Exorcist was never officially prosecuted or banned—you won’t find it on any Video Nasty lists—but the BBFC did manage to put up major obstacles to its release on home video in the U.K. The Exorcist, rated uncut and 18A, finally made it into homes and video stores in 1998. A number of the films banned under the Video Recordings Act, which began to lose steam around the late ’90s and was officially replaced by a new Video Recordings Act in 2010, have been re-rated and released only relatively recently in the U.K.
The United Kingdom wasn’t the only country reeling with moral panic; in the United States, the Reagan administration was pushing for a return to conservative family values. Reagan blamed poverty, which he described as “welfare culture,” on the disintegration of traditional family ideals. In 1984, he called for a “rededication to bedrock values of faith, family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.” A year later, he dug his heels in deeper in his State of the Union message, stating that “as the family goes, so goes our civilization.”
Satirical skewerings of Reagan-era family values in horror look a lot like parodies of midcentury Leave It to Beaver ideals. The real threats in films like Parents (1989, dir. Bob Balaban) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were the parents who continued to perpetuate the beliefs and values that they were taught by bestowing them upon their children. The other side of the Reagan administration involved a neoliberal economic shift (including, unsurprisingly, major tax cuts afforded to the wealthy and benefits cuts to the poor) that was dubbed “Reaganomics.” As a president, he was anti-communist and pro–mass surveillance. He celebrated consumerism and the rags-to-riches idea of the American Dream. Clear horrors that comment on these facets of Reagan-era society are They Live (1988, dir. John Carpenter) and Society (1989, dir. Brian Yuzna), both of which set up worlds filled with alien imposters—echoes of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers narratives of past anti-communist waves.
A HORROR … SLUMP? (1990s)
When horror fans bring up the 1990s, there’s a weird pattern of people describing the decade as a bit of a horror drought, if not the decade where horror died. I personally disagree with this take, but I am also biased because this is the era when I came of age as a young horror fan. I grew up through childhood nightmares soaked in scares from Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990, dir. Joe Dante), It (1990, dir. Tommy Lee Wallace), Candyman (1992, dir. Bernard Rose), and The Lawnmower Man (1992, dir. Brett Leonard)—somehow absorbed into my consciousness without actually watching the movies. This absorption was thanks to movie posters and cardboard standees at the local video rental store and trailers that aired on TV when I should have been asleep. My true gateway to horror in the ’90s, though, came in the form of thrillers like Single White Female (1992, dir. Barbet Schroeder), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992, dir. Curtis Hanson), and Kiss the Girls (1997, dir. Gary Fleder). Like a lot of kids, I wasn’t allowed to watch scary movies; unlike for a lot of kids, titles that the internet qualifies as “erotic thrillers” were fair game. According to my mom, this was because thrillers were “more realistic.” Go figure.
Horror in the ’90s pulled back dramatically from the flash and fabulism of the previous decade and turned the lens to more realistic, and sometimes procedural, portrayals of horror. A lot of the horrors from this decade tended to straddle the line between thriller and horror. In particular, the crime thriller, the psychological horror, and movies built around serial killers flourished. The capture of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in 1991, along with other infamous crime stories, like the capture of Canadian killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka in 1993, and the murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in 1996, helped spur the popularity of the subgenre. The public had renewed interest in true crime, and in consuming narratives that claimed to tease apart the inner workings of a killer’s mind. This interest gave us the twisty, sometimes cerebral violences of The Silence of the Lambs (1991, dir. Jonathan Demme) and Se7en (1996, dir. David Fincher).
As Alexandra West notes in The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula, teen movies in the 1990s were born of an intersection where “male run studios were willing to recognize the powerful intersection between women, horror, youth, and films. The heyday of the 1980s slasher films had died at various stages with killers at the forefront, and now it was time to focus on the Final Girls.”
Easily the most popular Final Girl to arrive with this shift was Sidney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell), the teen survivor of Scream (1996, dir. Wes Craven). While not an especially developed character in the first installment of the franchise, Sidney stands out among Final Girls for breaking the rules so painstakingly set up within the movie universe. She has sex with her boyfriend, she claims ownership of her situation in a way that almost seems to break the fourth wall (“Not in my movie,” she says as she shoots one of her would-be killers), and yet she still comes out on top (although, understandably, not without trauma that is explored in the sequels). Here was a Final Girl we could celebrate for transcending the frankly suffocating social rules meant for women relegated to the Final Girl role.
In many ways, the 1990s Teen Horror Cycle felt like the response to the John Hughes Brat Pack movies of the 1980s, but rather than subverting those usually feel-good comedies, a surprising number of teen horrors reinforced the tropes, character archetypes, and messaging that we have come to expect from teen movies. Also, despite putting the Final Girl figure front and center, and often sporting narratives that, at first glance, appear to be eschewing ideas of conformity, upon a deeper look these films seem to punish teens for pushing boundaries and striving for independence, much as earlier psychological thrillers like Fatal Attraction (1987, dir. Adrian Lyne) punished independent or sexually aggressive women for daring to violate patriarchal structures. At the end of the day, horror movies for teens were still being made predominantly by adult white men.
The Craft (1996, dir. Andrew Fleming) feels like horror’s countercultural answer to Clueless (1995, dir. Amy Heckerling). Taking the place of the polished, bubbly, and fashionably dressed rich girls of Clueless are the disillusioned lower- and lower-middle-class high-schoolers who dabble in magic to improve their individual lots in life and love. Each of the teen witches in The Craft is punished in turn for seeking to harness power that “shouldn’t” belong to them. Similarly, The Faculty (1997, dir. Robert Rodriguez) gives us a group of teens fighting to hold on to their individuality against a parasitic alien race that assimilates its hosts into a hive mind. The teens, who at the beginning of the film represented The Breakfast Club–esque social archetypes, from the goth loner, to the drug dealer, to the football jock, find themselves at the conclusion of the film—aliens defeated thanks to their pluck—drifting further from their initial archetypes and closer than ever to the status quo, seemingly happier for having shed those hard-won identities without the help of an alien threat.
Meanwhile, Japanese horror embraced the end of a millennium with a slew of apocalyptic horror films—notably, Suicide Circle, released in the United States as Suicide Club (2001, dir. Sion Sono), Uzumaki (2000, dir. Higuchinsky), and Pulse (2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)—which all looked at alienation, isolation, and the importance of human connection when all of our communication seems to be mediated by either technologies or consumer products and media. The closest American counterpart I can think of from this period with this theme is The Matrix (1999, dirs. Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski), although The Matrix is of a distinctly sci-fi flavor and the Japanese films mentioned above are very effective horrors.
HORROR FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM (2000s)
A strange whiplash occurred in North America as society tipped over into the year 2000. Movies were tiptoeing around depictions of violence, especially violence involving teens, after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999 left America feeling bruised. If movies featuring teen violence resonated, it was because death was dealt by strange and supernatural means, set apart from real-world human behaviors—by werewolf attacks in Ginger Snaps (2000, dir. John Fawcett), and by Death itself in Final Destination (2000, dir. James Wong). Teen screams featuring human killers, like Scream 3 (2000, dir. Wes Craven), only served to poke at the bruise.
Filmmakers in other parts of the world had no qualms with centering horror upon schoolchildren—Battle Royale (2000, dir. Kinji Fukasaku) depicts a class of fifteen-year-olds being forced by adults to wield weapons and engage in battle with each other, a narrative that reminded the director of the horrors of his youth, forced to work at a munitions factory during World War II and consequently having to see his classmates die when the factory came under fire. Although considered a cult classic now, the first theatrical release of Battle Royale wouldn’t happen in the United States until 2011, over a decade after its initial release in Japan.
But then on September 11, 2001, four airliners were hijacked in a coordinated terrorist attack. Two of the planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, killing thousands, the third was steered into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the final plane crashed into a field on its way to Washington, DC. President George W. Bush responded to the attack by launching the War on Terror, which persists at the time of this writing, almost twenty years later, and which launched a sequence of events that changed public perceptions of violence forever.
Torture as a form of violence isn’t new by any means, but for the most part, people in North America were able to go about their daily lives without thinking about torture happening in other parts of the world, let alone at the hands of their compatriots. In the aftermath of 9/11, at Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo Bay prison, the realities of torture were being unavoidably thrust into the public eye. With this new discomfort, along with new xenophobia created in the wake of 9/11 and the Bush administration, a brand-new horror subgenre was born to articulate fears of violence at the hands of other people, specifically “othered” other people (read: not American).
The term “torture porn” is often used to describe the horrors of this new subgenre—although that term is met with criticism. The addition of “porn” to the term implies a voyeuristic appeal to watching extreme depictions of violence and, for the most part, people don’t tend to describe the viewing of such entries as Hostel (2005, dir. Eli Roth) and Turistas (2006, dir. John Stockwell) as enjoyable so much as they create safe spaces to explore the horrors of senseless violence and have the potential to be cathartic. Both Hostel and Turistas deal with horrors that Americans might face if they leave their homeland; entries like Saw (2004, dir. James Wan) bring torture into American spaces as a reminder that Americans are just as capable of torture as the non-American “other” that we are told to fear.
If there’s a signature element of torture horror, outside of ultraviolence, it’s that there is nobody who swoops in to save the day at the end and almost everybody dies. If there is a survivor, a bespoke Final Girl, the genre differs in that torture horror never seems to conclude with society restored to any sort of order. And we, as an audience living through a decades-long war with no resolution in sight, don’t exactly expect to see order restored.
New French Cinema (or French Extremity) is often associated with the torture horror movement, but, despite surface similarities, the two subgenres are distinct. French Extremity films, such as Martyrs (2008, dir. Pascal Laugier), High Tension (2003, dir. Alexandre Aja), and Raw (2016, dir. Julia Ducournau), are graphic and transgressive, and the violence depicted is meant to explore the limits of the human body (and will), but these films almost always involve a narrative and structural complexity not present in torture horror films. While some horror fans see French Extremity films as a challenge to how much grim imagery they’re willing to stomach, there’s a distinct national identity to the subgenre that seems to specifically criticize France and the French film industry for its real tolerances (or, at the very least, inaction) toward violences such as racism, rape, and pedophilia.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the United States’ desire to double down on its own national identity during this era, we saw a spike in the popularity of adaptations of Japanese and Korean horror films being brought into North America from across the world. Usually these adaptations took the form of swapping out the original stories’ protagonists for a usually blond, white American woman: Sarah Michelle Gellar for The Grudge (2004, dir. Takashi Shimizu), Naomi Watts for The Ring (2002, dir. Gore Verbinski), and, for a brunette exception, Jennifer Connelly in Dark Water (2005, dir. Walter Salles). These films are distinctly supernatural in nature, dealing primarily in vengeful spirits. In their original forms, these films speak to tensions between the ideals of “traditional Japanese” roles and sociocultural transformations that promise to move Japan further away from its past. In his analysis of contemporary Japanese horror, Nightmare Japan, Jay McRoy sees both Ringu (1998, dir. Hideo Nakata) and Dark Water (2002, dir. Hideo Nakata) as emblematic of “the various (re)constructions of the ‘family,’” given that both films feature a single mother confronting ghosts.
The shift back toward violence made room in the early and mid-2000s for glossy remakes of horror classics reworked and recast with teen heartthrobs and influencers to specifically target teen audiences, a natural extension of the 1990s Teen Horror Cycle. This was the era that saw the Vincent Price vehicle House of Wax (1953, dir. André De Toth) remade with Paris Hilton (2005, dir. Jaume Collet-Serra), William Castle’s classic 13 Ghosts (1960) remade as Thir13en Ghosts (2001, dir. Steve Beck), and slasher originator Black Christmas (1974) remade as Black Xmas (2006, dir. Glen Morgan). Although often disparaged for “ruining” the original films, the teen horror remakes have lately been seeing a resurgence of appreciation from horror fans.
It can be hard to place trends in horror while you’re in the middle of a cycle. I’m sure ten years from now, critics will be able to cherry-pick one or two major events to highlight in the same way I’ve treated every other decade in this chapter, but while history is actively unfolding around you, it’s easy to see factors for every facet of life shaping horror without any one dominant trend pointing to what presently has the greatest influence.
Recent horrors have seen a return to familiar stomping grounds, like familial horror, with Hereditary (2018, dir. Ari Aster) and The Witch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers), which, like the familial horrors of the 1980s, explore intergenerational horror and the sins that parents visit upon their children. Where A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, told this story with a bright, darkly comedic palette, these new horrors-at-home are much more bleak, both in coloring and in outcome.
Ongoing social movements formed to combat systemic inequities, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, paired with calls for better representation in the film industry, have allowed for a slow but ever-growing presence of American horror films from historically marginalized perspectives. Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele) managed to garner a lot of attention for its quietly terrifying look at the myth of a “post-racist” society. Candyman (2021, dir. Nia DaCosta) revisits the ’90s horror franchise through a contemporary lens. Other films, like the Spanish film The Platform (2020, dir. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia) and the South Korean film Parasite (2019, dir. Bong Joon-ho), directly take on class disparity and poverty.
As this book was being drafted in 2020, the world went on lockdown as a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, known colloquially as COVID-19, spread in a global pandemic. In a fascinating turn, as the public was waiting to learn more about the virus that was quickly taking hold across the globe, a nearly decade-old movie, Contagion (2011, dir. Steven Soderbergh), jumped to the top of the rentals list on Apple iTunes, not to mention top ten popular streaming lists where it was available. There was comfort and catharsis in watching a terrifyingly virulent infection paralyze the planet, and a vaccine successfully manufactured within a fictional space on-screen (yes, I was one of those people who watched Contagion while in lockdown)—it defined a sort of arc of events that we could expect to more or less follow in the real world where there was only uncertainty.
The COVID-19 pandemic also brought us Host (2020, dir. Rob Savage), which unspooled its narrative over the length of a single forty-minute Zoom call. Host reflected the stresses of trying to connect with loved ones over unreliable technology during quarantine, while adding in a supernatural twist.
Horror has been right next to us, exploring cultural shifts as we go through them. One of my favorite aspects of returning to older horrors, especially horrors that predate my lifetime, isn’t so much that I get a peek into what was making the films’ original audiences collectively anxious at the time. It’s more that I get a snapshot of context telling me why they were afraid and how they engaged with their fears. In the one hundred–ish years that we skimmed through during this chapter, we saw a lot of social fears that repeated themselves. Even so, when horror movies revisited fears, visual representations and filmic approaches to those familiar fears were often, if not always, transformed.
Speaking of representations, it’s time to move on to one of the most important genre mainstays, the one responsible for giving recognizable physical forms to even our most nebulous fears: the monster.
IN CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDRA WEST
Alexandra West is the author of Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity and The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula. She is the co-host for the Faculty of Horror podcast, which tackles “all things horror with a slash of analysis and research.”
People, horror fans included, often cite the ’90s and early ’00s as a period that experienced a relative dearth of horror movies. Can you comment on this perception versus the reality of horror in this era?
Horror in the early ’90s was just coming out of a heavily codified era in the 1980s with the rise of the slashers and all their sequels. Before that prestige horror like Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, The Stepford Wives, and The Exorcist in the late ’60s and into the ’70s proved that horror could have huge cultural moments alongside then indie films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and I Spit on Your Grave. The early ’90s still had a great horror films like Candyman, Silence of the Lambs, Army of Darkness, Jacob’s Ladder, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and Misery, among others, but they were all quite different. They weren’t easily labeled, so it’s harder to qualify them, which is what we like to do as fans and/or culture writers. By the mid-’90s, with films like The Craft and Scream, a clear trend emerged through box office receipts—teen horror, which borrowed heavily from films aimed at teens of the ’70s and ’80s.
In what ways, if any, are these ’90s horror films reflections of their era?
My perception is that ’90s horror films (particularly the teen ones) were heavily influenced by the rise of third-wave feminism, and wider access to media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Nineties teen horror has a strong emphasis on the darkness of being a teenage girl, particularly with many narratives centered around bullying and sexual assault (I think The Craft and The Rage: Carrie 2 are good examples of this), while films like Scream incorporate those elements as well as the influence of a gratuitous news cycle that seeks to turn personal tragedy into national tragedy.
You mention that ’90s teen horror borrows from the ’70s and ’80s. In what ways was teen horror in the ’90s a response to the past and a template for teen horrors that we see today?
Nineties teen horror centers a female experience while grappling with trauma, the characters are less disposable, and the backgrounds of the protagonists are darker. Final Destination is an important turning point: it was just far enough away from the Columbine shooting (which affected the release of the other Devon Sawa–led horror film, Idle Hands) that audiences could handle teens getting readily and easily disposed of by the literal specter of death and the elaborate traps. The setups and wince-inducing deaths were an early indicator that audiences would respond positively to films like Saw and Hostel, which led the Torture Porn cycle.
Do you have any personal favorites?
The Craft and Scream were two films I grew up on, so they’ll always be favorites. I think The Rage: Carrie 2 is a much more powerful and heartbreaking film than people recognize, and I Know What You Did Last Summer is a very effective and entertaining slasher.
You’ve also done a deep dive into horrors of the New French Extremity and violent films that speak to French society. Setting aside how people often confuse these films with “torture porn,” what are the social or historical elements that birthed this form?
I consider the rise of New French Extremity to be linked with the rise of authoritarian right-wing politics in Europe. After the bloodshed that happened throughout Europe during WWII, Europeans are naturally more inclined to fear the rise of the right. In France in particular, the LePen family (Jean-Marie and Marine specifically), who both led the anti-immigration far-right National Front party, as well as mainstream politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy, spread fear and hatred. France has always seen cinema as an important art form, so it became a natural place for artists to react and showcase the horrors that were beginning to infiltrate their society.
What’s the distinction between “violent films” and “films about violence”? Do these films have different goals for their audiences?
Films about violence depict characters before, during, and after violence enters their lives. It becomes important for audiences to know these characters and understand the impact of violence in their lives, how it changes them. Violent films tend to focus less on the characters and more on their deaths, which serve to titillate the audience to either cheer as two-dimensional characters meet their deaths or wince and look away due to the gore on-screen.
In terms of horror and national identity, are there other similar national horror cycles (not French Extremity or American horrors) that speak as strongly to a nation’s social fears that you feel are overlooked or bear discussion?
I think Canadian horror has taken some interesting twists and turns in the last decade, with films like Pyewacket, Possessor, Violation, The Void, and Come True, among many others.
U.K. horror is having an interesting moment with contemporary anxieties, with films like Host, Censor, Caveat, His House, Dashcam, and You Are Not My Mother.
Latinx horror has produced some incredible films, like La Llorona, Tigers Are Not Afraid, and Terrified.
As a Canadian, I often think about body horror as specific to Canadian horror.
I personally think Canadian horror has more to do with identity, and body horror is a vessel for that. I also think the space and land that characters occupy is incredibly important to Canadian horror. It’s not often touched upon but it’s pretty central in many ways (see the French-English divide in Pontypool, the camping trip of Backcountry, the remote location of Pyewacket, and everything about Blood Quantum and Night Raiders).
Are you currently digging into a different era of horror?
I recently did a deep dive into the adult/erotic thrillers of the late ’80s through the ’90s, films like Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, Basic Instinct, Sleeping with the Enemy, Dead Calm, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, A Perfect Murder, Unlawful Entry, Jennifer 8, and many, many, many more. Overall, they’re all pretty reactionary to third-wave feminism to various degrees and culminate in some form of misogyny. There are also incredibly problematic depictions of mental health, the treatment of the few characters from marginalized communities is really awful, and there is an overall homophobic vibe in many of them. These were mainstream films that came out not too long ago (certainly in my lifetime anyway) whose politics are so contrary in many ways to our discourse now that it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come and what we used to think was acceptable.