History and Development of the Horror genre

In order for me to understand the Horror genre, I must look back to the roots in which the Horror genre started and this will enable to me to see what the Horrors were like back then, but also get a clue to see which aspects of these films I can use to put into my own film.

Where the Horror genre started from.

The Horror genre first started in 1890 where a director called Georges Melies made a series of short silent films, the best known of these films was a film called "Le Manoir du diable" which stands for "The Haunted Castle".




George Milies



A scene from "The Haunted Castle"


Here is a picture of George Milies (on the left) and a scene from "The Haunted Castle" (on the right). As we can see from the right that the film looks old and withered, which is no comparison from the modern day horrors.




In 1910 Edison Studios produced the first feature length film for "Frankenstein" which was thought to be lost for many years.

Here is a picture of the "Frankenstein" in Ediston Studios 1910 production. The CGI compared to today do is nothing like what it was back then.  As you can see from the bottom right picture, the more "stereotypical" frankenstein has been re-modelled with much more colour and electrobes coming from the neck. If this modern day Frankenstein was swapped with the 1910 Frankenstein then i believe the audience of that time would be much more scared then the original. This is because the audience of 1910 would not be expecting the technology or the look of the modern day Frankenstein.

In 1923 the first production of the monster Quasimodo appeared in the film "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame". A British researcher found that there was a hunchback stone carver in Notre-Dame at the time the film was made, there has been presumptions that this is where the director has got his influence from. At this stage of the Horror genre being transformed and progressed, i have realised that the "bad guys" of the Horrors are monsters, there are no serial killers or physco's at this stage of the genre, this tells me that more people were afraid of fictional creatures then the real life human serial killers that are out there. 

With the modern day horror, a final girl theory has come into play. The final girl theory consists that in the modern day horror, the last victim from a physco killer is a women, this is unusual for a masculine genre. The horror genre is now a female genre because of this theory. The reason the final girl theory has come around is because females can show abject terror in the film, this shows more fear then the male actors and therefore the final victim tends to be a female. Therefore with the female always surviving the masacer the female audience tends to sway towards horros because they know that a women will survive in the end.

A quick example of the final girl theory is from the film



As you can see from this trailer that the film the Hitcher is a thriller about a person who is stalking a couple driving across the country, in the end the girl kills the stalker with a shotgun, the male character is killed from the stalker, this is proof that more and more horror/thriller films are having the female character survive at the end. This shows the development of the genre because the horror films in the 20th centuary were films about characters who nowadays are not as scary as they were back then, with the development of technology and understanding this has meant that characters have become more menacing and scarier to the audience.

From looking at the first version of horrors films in the 20th century i have found out that they were scary to the audience at the time that they were made, this has ment that when technology and the development of understanding the genre has ment that todays horrors are far more scarier then the ones made in the 20th century. The horror criminals have developed from being monsters and outcasts of society have transformed into the characters that we do not assciate with being outcasts, therefore we find this more scarier because these physco killers can be everybody around us, i believe this is what is scary about modern day horrors.