From demons in the dark, to monsters of the mind: a history of horror cinema

Clockwise from top left: Halloween (1978); Raw (2017); The Bride of Frankenstein (1935); Dawn of the Dead (1978); Nosferatu (1922); Saint Maud (2019)

IT is reputed that Romantic poet Percy Shelley swooned in terror the first time he heard a recitation of Coleridge’s haunting 1798 lyrical masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Now, whether this was due solely to the great poet’s sensitive nature, or if his fondness for opium played any part in his fainthearted reaction, this incident certainly proves that it used to be a hell of a lot easier to scare people.

In over 120 years of horror cinema, with the first ever horror film considered to be Georges Méliès’ Le Manoir du Diable (The House of the Devil) in 1896, the onscreen depictions of mankind’s fears have changed in tandem with social and cultural upheavals.

But while the boundaries of acceptable screen violence may have been altered in the wake of ever more lax censorship laws, the basic tropes of the genre have largely remained the same, with the primordial fears of darkness, the unknown, and bodily autonomy prevailing across the decades.

It may have been a Frenchman who invented the genre, but it was arguably the Germans who codified it with the stark monochromatic beauty of German Expressionism. The lush shadows of two notable films from the early 20th century still loom large to this day: Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920), a nightmarish tale of a murderous sleepwalker that unfolds in a deliberately theatrical world of off-kilter set designs and claustrophobic dread; and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), virtually the great-grandfather of vampire movies.

Hollywood wasn’t long on getting in on the act, with Universal Studios unleashing a ghouls’ gallery of classic monsters in the 1930s and ‘40s, one of the best of which is The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

One of the first self-referential horror-comedies, James Whales’ follow-up to his own seminal 1931 original not only beautifully captures the romantically flighty spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel but is so replete with iconic images that even 80 years on, the Monster and his Bride remain instantly recognisable figures in popular culture and mainstays of Halloween fancy dress parties around the world.

The creepily atmospheric Carnival of Souls (1963)

In the nuclear age of the 1950s horror was somewhat sidelined in favour of science fiction, but the early ‘60s saw horror cinema make a lucrative return to the drive-in. Cobweb-draped castles and squeaky rubber bats were abandoned, though, in favour of more politically charged, or viscerally gruesome, movies.

Three years after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (both 1960) individually played their part in shaping the modern slasher film, Herschell Gordon Lewis created the gore movie with 1963’s Blood Feast, a cheap-as-chips but bloody as a rare steak piece of grisly grindhouse. That same year saw the release of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, which compensates for its budgetary constraints and uneven acting with an abundance of creepy atmospherics and dreamlike imagery.

As the decade was coming to an end, George A. Romero took the conventions of the horror movie and transplanted them from spooky castles to picket-fenced suburbia in the seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968). He would go on to make a pair of ‘70s classics that continued to explore the idea that real horror comes not from the outside but from within, in the homes and sleepy streets of a disintegrating social order.

In The Crazies (1973), a leaked military chemical weapon turns the populace of a small town into homicidal loons; while Dawn of the Dead (1978) portrays the definitive zombie apocalypse, as a dwindling group of survivors fending off hordes of blue-faced ghouls seal their own doom by barricading themselves inside that last great tomb of consumerism, the American shopping mall. Romero’s message, forged as it was in the disillusioned heart of his society’s post-Vietnam spiritual crisis, is clear: man is the ultimate monster - even when dead.

Robert Englund as the dream-stalking Freddy Krueger, in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Also released in 1978 was the greatest holiday-themed slasher movie ever, Halloween. John Carpenter’s classic about an escaped maniac returning to his home town for a night of butchery may have been made for peanuts, but thanks to the director’s swooping brio with a steadicam and an atmosphere dripping with dread Halloween was successful enough not only to spawn a slew of sequels, but an entire subgenre.

All manner of masked or disfigured madmen stalked the screen in the wake of Halloween, with Friday the 13th (1980) and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) giving rise to extended franchises of increasingly variable quality.

So oversaturated did the horror market become, thanks in no small part to the rise of home video which gave licence to a host of independent filmmakers to knock out cheap and nasty quickies, that by the 1990s the genre had become something of a joke, with the easy target of slasher films lampooned in Craven’s Scream (1996). The end of the 90s did see the release of the most successful independent horror film of all time, The Blair Witch Project, a perfect exercise in the mechanics of pure terror.

The dawn of the 21st century brought a new form of body horror onto our screens in the dubious form of torture-porn, with explicit, ultra-realistic and often highly sexualised violence a standard feature. A particular standout was Tom Six’s deranged The Human Centipede 2 (2011) an ugly, tar-black satire that very nearly scales the height of transgressive art to become one of the most daring and demented pieces of filth ever to stain celluloid.

With the cancel culture of the selfie generation engendering a more socially conscious breed of viewer, some of the more successful modern-day entries in the genre have grappled with issues of gender and racial identity through the lens of old-fashioned horror.

Samantha Robinson as Elaine, The Love Witch (2016)

Sweetening the sting by marinating it in comedy, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) begins as a caustic social satire, before a surreal third-act lurch into a Wicker Man-esque farce as Daniel Kaluuya’s unwitting American college student Chris gradually uncovers the sinister truth festering behind the creepy charm of his new girlfriend’s well-heeled WASP family.

Also released that year was Julia Ducournau’s stunningly stylish debut Raw, a French feminist cannibal movie infected with Cronenbergian body-horror, in which introverted freshman Justine abandons her lifelong vegetarianism with a voracious vengeance following a gruesome hazing ritual during her first week at veterinary school.

If horror cinema has always used monsters as metaphors for real world fears, many modern filmmakers are embracing the monsters as mere symptoms of psychological disorders, with a new wave of female horror directors injecting fresh blood into the reanimated corpse of conventional scare tactics.

Independent Australian chiller The Babadook (2014) may on the surface appear a standard spook story, but in its creepily underplayed exploration of a grieving widow's battle to save her disturbed son from the titular boogeyman haunting their home, debutante director Jennifer Kent creates a stylish study of the crippling effects of depression and the importance of facing up to our inner demons.

Likewise, the devils stalking our (anti)heroine in Saint Maud (2019) are most probably all a product of her damaged psyche, with demonic possession a visual substitute for the disintegration of a young woman's mind in director Rose Glass' chilly debut feature, a British shocker soaked through with all the mizzly doom and gloom of a wet weekend by the sea.

And abandoning the realism for a pure celebration of form, Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016) is a joyously camp technicolour love letter to the lurid charms of '60s and '70s horror movies, but beneath the glossy lipstick is a razor-sharp bite that sinks deeply into such meaty topics as contemporary gender stereotypes and the hypocrisy of sexual politics.

So, the next time you feel in the mood for a fright, sample some lesser-known scares from the vaults of horror cinema, and befriend the monsters that helped us overcome our fear of the dark - and more importantly, the darkness within us all.