The History of Horror Films
Early horror films were made in the late 1800’s and largely based on classic literature of the gothic/horror genre, such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So the Horror genre is almost as old as film itself. The first horror film was made by a man called Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the most notable being The House of the Devil which wasn’t at first supposed to be a horror it was in fact made to be a comedy. The House of the Devil was made in France and was released on Christmas Eve In 1896 which ran for only 2 minutes. In 1910, Edison Studios produced the first film version of Frankenstein. It wasn’t till the late 1930’s when American film studios created the first modern horror genre. Some of the films that were made during the 1930’s were Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy. In the 1950’s horror changed from gothic, to a new type of horror featuring; alien invasion and deadly mutation to people, insects, and plants. A Famous actor called Boris Karloff started to build a carrier around this genre. In the late 1970s horror went downhill as disaster movies like The Towering Inferno and jaws became more popular. But in 1978 John Carpenter’s Halloween became a good popular success and the teens-threatened-by-superhuman-evil theme carried on in the 1980s was Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street was first made. In the early 2000s a mixture of horror films were made like Final destination, The Ring and the Descent.
