Difference between revisions of "Horror Film" - New World Encyclopedia
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With the demise of the [[Production Code|Production Code of America]] in 1964, and the financial successes of the low-budget gore films, plus an increasing public fascination with the [[occult]], the horror genre was reshaped by a series of intense, often gory horror movies with sexual overtones made as higher-budget "A-movies". Some of these films were even made by respected auteurs. <ref>http://www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms2.html</ref> | With the demise of the [[Production Code|Production Code of America]] in 1964, and the financial successes of the low-budget gore films, plus an increasing public fascination with the [[occult]], the horror genre was reshaped by a series of intense, often gory horror movies with sexual overtones made as higher-budget "A-movies". Some of these films were even made by respected auteurs. <ref>http://www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms2.html</ref> | ||
| − | [[Roman Polanski | + | The ideas of the 1960s were a significant influence for 1970's horror films, as the youth involved in the [[Counterculture of the 1960s|counterculture]] began exploring the medium. Wes Craven's ''The Last House on the Left'' (1972) and Tobe Hooper's ''The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'' (1974) both recalled the horrors of the [[Vietnam War]]; George Romero satirised the [[consumerism|consumer]] society in his 1978 zombie sequel, ''Dawn of the Dead''; Canadian director David Cronenberg updated the "mad scientist" movie subgenre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society. |
| + | |||
| + | Roman Polanski's ''Rosemary's Baby'' (1968) was a critical and popular success, and a precursor to the 1970s occult explosion, which included the box office smash ''The Exorcist'' (1973) (directed by William Friedkin) and scores of other horror films in which the [[Satan|Devil]] became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. Evil children and [[reincarnation]] became popular subjects, as in Robert Wise's 1977 film ''Audrey Rose'', which dealt with a man who claims his daughter is the reincarnation of another dead person. ''Alice, Sweet Alice'' (1976) is another Catholic-themed horror slasher about a little girl's murder and her sister being the prime suspect. Another popular Satanic horror movie was ''The Omen'' (1976), where a man realizes his five year old adopted son is the [[Antichrist]]. | ||
Satan-villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film, [[postmodernism|postmodern]] style, and a [[dystopian]] worldview. A notable example of this is ''The Sentinel'' (1977), in which a fashion model discovers her new brownstone residence may actually be a portal to [[Hell]]. | Satan-villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film, [[postmodernism|postmodern]] style, and a [[dystopian]] worldview. A notable example of this is ''The Sentinel'' (1977), in which a fashion model discovers her new brownstone residence may actually be a portal to [[Hell]]. | ||
| − | + | Also in the 1970s, horror author [[Stephen King]], a child of the 1960s, first arrived on the film scene. Adaptations of many of his books came to be filmed for the screen, beginning with Brian DePalma's adaptation of King's first published novel, ''Carrie'' (1976), which went on to be nominated for numerous Academy Awards. John Carpenter created the hit ''Halloween'' in 1978, kick-starting the modern "slasher film". This subgenre would be mined by dozens of increasingly violent movies throughout the subsequent decades. Other notable '70s slasher films include Bob Clark's ''Black Christmas'' (1974). | |
| − | + | At the same time, there was an explosion of horror films in [[Europe]], particularly from the hands of Italian filmmakers like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, as well as Spanish filmmakers like Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy) and Jess Franco, which were dubbed into English and filled drive-in theaters that could not necessarily afford the expensive rental contracts of the major productions. These films were influenced by the success of Hammer in the 1960s and early '70s, and generally featured traditional horror subjects, though treated them with a distinctive European style that included copious gore and sexuality (of which mainstream American producers were still a little skittish). | |
| − | + | Meanwhile, in [[Hong Kong]], filmmakers were starting to be inspired by Hammer and Euro-horror to produce exploitation horror with a uniquely Asian twist. Shaw Studios produced ''Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires'' (1973) in collaboration with Hammer, and went on to create their own original films. | |
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | Meanwhile, in [[ | ||
=== 1980s === | === 1980s === | ||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | + | The 1980s was a prolific time for horror filmmakers, with many hit productions launching into a lengthy line of sequels. 1982's ''Poltergeist'' (directed by Tobe Hooper), for example, was followed by two sequels and a television series. The seemingly-endless sequels to ''Halloween'', ''Friday the 13th'' (1980), and Wes Craven's supernatural slasher ''A Nightmare on Elm Street'' (1984) were the popular face of horror films in the 1980s, a trend reviled by most critics. | |
| − | + | Nevertheless, original horror films continued to appear sporadically, with such smash hits as Clive Barker's ''Hellraiser'' (1987), Tom Holland's ''Child's Play'' (1988), and [[Stanley Kubrick]]'s ''The Shining'', which became one of the most popular and influential horror films of the decade. | |
| − | + | As the cinema box office returns for serious, gory modern horror began to dwindle, the genre began to find a new audience in the growing home video market. ''Motel Hell'' (1980) and Frank Henenlotter's ''Basket Case'' (1982) were the first 1980s films to campily mock the dark conventions of the previous decade (zombie films like ''Night of the Living Dead'' and ''Dawn of the Dead'' had contained [[black comedy]] and [[satire]], but were in general more dark than funny). In ''Evil Dead II'' (1987), Sam Raimi's explicitly [[slapstick]] sequel to the relatively sober ''The Evil Dead'' (1981), the laughs were often generated by the gore, defining the archetypal splatter comedy. New Zealand director Peter Jackson followed in Raimi's footsteps with the ultra-gory micro-budget feature ''Bad Taste'' (1987). | |
=== 1990s === | === 1990s === | ||
[[Image:Scream movie poster.jpg|right|thumb|199px|''[[Scream (film)|Scream]]'' (1996) revitalized horror of the 1990s and 2000s.]] | [[Image:Scream movie poster.jpg|right|thumb|199px|''[[Scream (film)|Scream]]'' (1996) revitalized horror of the 1990s and 2000s.]] | ||
| − | In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued with themes from the 1980s. | + | In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued with themes from the 1980s. It managed mild commercial success with films such as continuing sequels to the ''Child's Play'' and ''Leprechaun'' series. The slasher films ''A Nightmare on Elm Street'', ''Friday the 13th'', and ''Halloween'' all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which met with varied amounts of success at the box office. |
| − | Note: | + | Note: Wes Craven's ''New Nightmare'' series, which included ''In the Mouth of Madness'', ''The Dark Half'', and ''Candyman'', were part of a mini-movement of self-reflective horror films. That is, each film touched upon the relationship between fictional horror and real-world horror. ''Candyman'', for example, examined the link between an invented urban legend and the realistic horror of the racism that produced its villain. ''In the Mouth of Madness'' took a more literal approach, as its protagonist actually hopped from the real world into a novel created by the madman he was hired to track down. This reflective style became more overt and ironic with the arrival of ''Scream'' (1996). |
| − | + | Two main problems pushed horror backward during this period: firstly, the horror genre wore itself out with the proliferation of nonstop slasher and gore films in the eighties. Secondly, the adolescent audience which feasted on the blood and morbidity of the previous decade grew up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were being captured instead by the explosion of science-fiction and fantasy, courtesy of the special effects possibilities with computer-generated imagery. <ref>http://www.mediaknowall.com/Horror/eighties.html</ref> | |
| − | + | To re-connect with its audience, horror became more self-mockingly ironic and outright parodic, especially in the latter half of the 1990s. Peter Jackson's ''Braindead'' (1992) (known as ''Dead Alive'' in the USA) took the splatter film to ridiculous excesses for comic effect. [[Francis Ford Coppola]]'s ''Bram Stoker's Dracula'' (1992), featured an ensemble cast and the style of a different era, harking back to the sumptuous look of 1960s, and a plot focusing just as closely on the romance elements of the Dracula tale as on the horror aspects. Wes Craven's ''Scream'' movies, starting in 1996, featured teenagers who were fully aware of, and often made reference to, the history of horror movies, and mixed ironic humour with the shocks. Along with ''I Know What You Did Last Summer'', they re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre. | |
| − | + | Among the popular English-language horror films of the late 1990s, only 1999's surprise independent hit ''The Blair Witch Project'' attempted straight-ahead scares. But even then, the horror was accomplished in the context of a mockumentary, or mock-documentary. Other films such as M. Night Shyamalan's ''The Sixth Sense'' (1999) also concentrated more on unnerving and unsettling themes than on gore. [[Japan|Japanese]] horror films, such as Hideo Nakata's ''Ringu'' in 1998, and Masuru Tsushima's ''Otsuyu'' (aka ''The Haunted Lantern'') (1997) also found success internationally with a similar formula. | |
| − | |||
| − | Among the popular English-language horror films of the late 1990s, only 1999's surprise independent hit '' | ||
=== 2000s === | === 2000s === | ||
[[Image:Freddy Vs. Jason movie.jpg|left|thumb|199px|Poster art for ''[[Freddy vs. Jason]]'' (2003), which combined two long-running franchises.]] | [[Image:Freddy Vs. Jason movie.jpg|left|thumb|199px|Poster art for ''[[Freddy vs. Jason]]'' (2003), which combined two long-running franchises.]] | ||
| − | The start of the | + | The start of the 21st century saw the horror genre slowing dwindling. The re-release of a restored version of ''The Exorcist'' in September of 2000 was successful despite the film having been available on home video for years. Franchises such as ''Freddy Vs. Jason'' also made a final stand in theaters. |
| − | However, horror as a medium took two directions. The first, a minimal approach which was equal parts Val Lewton's theory of "less is more" (usually employing low-budget techniques seen on 1999's '' | + | However, horror as a medium took two directions. The first, a minimal approach which was equal parts Val Lewton's theory of "less is more" (usually employing low-budget techniques seen on 1999's ''The Blair Witch Project'') and the emergence of Japanese horror movies which have been remade into successful Americanized versions, such as ''The Ring'' (2002), and ''The Grudge'' (2004). |
| − | The second was a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-budget, exploitation horror from the Seventies and the post-Vietnam years. Films like '' | + | The second was a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-budget, exploitation horror from the Seventies and the post-Vietnam years. Films like ''Final Destination'' (2000), ''Wrong Turn'' (2003), ''House of 1000 Corpses'' (2003), ''The Devil's Rejects'' and the Australian film ''Wolf Creek'' (2005), took their cue from ''The Last House on the Left'' (1972), ''The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'' (1974), and ''The Hills Have Eyes'' (1977). A particular sub-genre of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with its emphasis on depictions of torture, suffering and violent deaths, (variously referred to as "horror porn", "[[Splatter film#"Torture porn"|torture porn]]" and even "gore-nography") with films such as Turistas, Captivity, Saw, Hostel and their respective sequels in particular being frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this sub-genre. |
<!-- Commented out because image was deleted: [[Image:saw 2004.jpg|right|thumb|200px|''[[Saw (2004 film)|Saw]]'' is a very popular horror/thriller film.]] —> | <!-- Commented out because image was deleted: [[Image:saw 2004.jpg|right|thumb|200px|''[[Saw (2004 film)|Saw]]'' is a very popular horror/thriller film.]] —> | ||
| − | |||
| − | There has been a return to the zombie genre in horror movies made after 2000. '' | + | There has been a return to the zombie genre in horror movies made after 2000. ''28 Days Later'' (2002) has been partially responsible for not just bringing zombies back into the forefront but also updating their overall attitude (although, the "zombies" in this film are not actually the living dead). Where they'd always been slow, lumbering creatures, in this film they became agile and intelligent. Following this movie, an updated remake of ''Dawn of the Dead'' (2004) was made as well as ''Land of the Dead'' (2005) and the comedy-horror ''Shaun of the Dead'' (2004). More recently the popular video game franchise ''Silent Hill'' (2006) was made into a feature film, based on an original story. |
| + | |||
| + | One of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the decade was the British horror film ''The Descent'' (2005). Its all-female cast was a departure from "tough-guy" male-dominated stereotypes or other archetypal dispositions common in horror films. | ||
| + | |||
| + | ==Controversy== | ||
| + | |||
| + | Horror films have continued to cause controversy since they first began to push the envelope one hundred years ago. In the [[United Kingdom]], during the 1980's, the growth in home video led to growing public awareness of gory horror films, and concern about the ease of availability of such material to children. Many films were dubbed "video nasties" and banned (notably foreign films such as The Anthropophagus Beast, A Blade in the Dark, The New York Ripper and Tenebre but US and Canadian films like Madman, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Don't Go in the House & Maniac. In the USA, ''Silent Night, Deadly Night'', a very controversial film from 1984, failed at theatres and was eventually withdrawn from distribution due to its subject matter: a killer Santa Claus. | ||
| + | |||
| + | Though they do not receive as much criticism as video games due in regards to propelling violent tendencies in audiences, particularly children, horror films still receive their fair share of blame in this regard. The theory is that the disturbing actions on screen can incite in viewer's a temptation to act out in real life similar actions. | ||
==Notes== | ==Notes== | ||
Revision as of 15:37, 20 December 2007
|
Horror Film Portal |
Horror films are films of the horror genre that are designed to elicit from audiences fright, fear, and terror. In horror film plots, evil forces, events, or characters—oftentimes of supernatural origin—intrude into the everyday world. Common horror film archetypes include vampires, zombies, monsters, serial killers, demons, and ghosts. Early horror films often drew inspiration from classic literature, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's ''Frankenstein'', William Bernard's The Mummy, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In contrast, more contemporary horror films often draw inspiration from the insecurities of life since World War Two. In all, there are three distinct subgenres of the horror film genre. This includes: horror-of-personality, horror-of-Armageddon, and horror-of-the-demonic. The last subgenre may be seen as a modernized transition from the earlier horror films, expanding on the earlier emphasis on supernatural agents that bring terror to the world.
Horror films have been criticized for their graphic violence and are often dismissed as low budget B-movies or at least films not to be taken as serious art. Nonetheless, some major studios and respected directors have made forays into the genre, and more serious critics have analyzed horror films through the prisms of "genre theory" and the "auteur theory". Some horror films incorporate elements of other genres such as science fiction, fantasy, mockumentary, black comedy, and thriller.
History
The horror genre is nearly as old as film itself, with the first depictions of supernatural events appearing in several of the silent shorts created by film pioneer Georges Méliès in the late 1890s. The most notable of these was Le Manoir du diable (1896) (aka "The House of the Devil") which is by some sources credited as being the first horror film.
The genre expanded succesfully in the early 20th century beginning with the first monster to appear in a full-length horror film, Quasimodo, the hunchbacked character taken from Victor Hugo's novel, "Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831). Films featuring Quasimodo included Alice Guy's Esmeralda (1906), The Hunchback (1909), The Love of a Hunchback (1910) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1911). [1]
Many of the earliest feature length 'horror films' were created by German film makers in the 1910s and 1920s, many of which would come to have significant influence on contemporary Hollywood films. Paul Wegener's The Golem (1915) was seminal in its morbid telling of an eerie statue brough to life. In 1920 Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was both controversial with American audiences, due to postwar sentiments, and influential in its Expressionistic style. The most enduring horror film of that era was probably the first vampire-themed feature, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. [2]
1930s & 1940s
It was in the early 1930s that American film producers, particularly Universal Pictures, popularized the horror film, bringing to the screen a series of successful features including Dracula (1931), and The Mummy (1932). Some other popular works blended science fiction with Gothic horror, such as James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933). These films, while designed to thrill, also incorporated more serious elements. In this decade, some actors centered their entire careers
on the horror genre, most notably Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
Universal's horror films continued into the 1940s with The Wolf Man 1941—not the first werewolf film, but certainly the most influential. Throughout the decade Universal also continued to produce more sequels in the Frankenstein series, as well as a number of films that teamed up several of their more popular monsters. Also in this decade, Val Lewton would produce atmospheric B-pictures for RKO Pictures, including Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Body Snatcher (1945). These were lower-budget, more sensational pieces that would forever create the stigma of the horror genre's association with "cheesy effects" and absurd plotlines.
1950s-1960s
With the dramatic changes in technology that occurred in the 1950s, the tone of horror films shifted away from the gothic and more towards science fiction. A seemingly endless parade of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside intruders". These included alien invasions, mutants, and dormant monsters come to life. These films provided ample opportunity for audience exploitation, with gimmicks such as 3-D imagery and "Percepto" (producer William Castle's pseudo-electric-shock technique used for 1959's The Tingler) drawing audiences in week after week for bigger and better scares. The classier horror films of this period, including The Thing from Another World and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, managed to channel the paranoia of the Cold War into atmospheric creepiness without resorting to direct exploitation of the events of the day. Filmmakers would continue to merge elements of science fiction and horror over the following decades. [3]
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of production companies focused on producing
horror films, including the British company Hammer Film Productions. Hammer enjoyed huge international success from full-blooded technicolor films involving classic horror characters, often starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), and The Mummy (1959). Hammer, and director Terence Fisher, are widely acknowledged as pioneers of the modern horror movie. Other companies contributed to a boom in horror film production in Britain in the 1960s and '70s, including Tigon-British and Amicus, the latter best known for their anthology films like Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965).
American International Pictures (AIP) also made a series of Edgar Allan Poe–themed films produced by Roger Corman and starring horror legend Vincent Price. These sometimes controversial productions paved the way for more explicit violence in both horror and mainstream films.
Low-budget "splatter" films from the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis also appeared. Examples included 1963's Blood Feast (a devil-cult story) and 1964's Two Thousand Maniacs, which featured an excess of splattering blood and bodily dismemberment.
1970s
With the demise of the Production Code of America in 1964, and the financial successes of the low-budget gore films, plus an increasing public fascination with the occult, the horror genre was reshaped by a series of intense, often gory horror movies with sexual overtones made as higher-budget "A-movies". Some of these films were even made by respected auteurs. [4]
The ideas of the 1960s were a significant influence for 1970's horror films, as the youth involved in the counterculture began exploring the medium. Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) both recalled the horrors of the Vietnam War; George Romero satirised the consumer society in his 1978 zombie sequel, Dawn of the Dead; Canadian director David Cronenberg updated the "mad scientist" movie subgenre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society.
Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) was a critical and popular success, and a precursor to the 1970s occult explosion, which included the box office smash The Exorcist (1973) (directed by William Friedkin) and scores of other horror films in which the Devil became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. Evil children and reincarnation became popular subjects, as in Robert Wise's 1977 film Audrey Rose, which dealt with a man who claims his daughter is the reincarnation of another dead person. Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) is another Catholic-themed horror slasher about a little girl's murder and her sister being the prime suspect. Another popular Satanic horror movie was The Omen (1976), where a man realizes his five year old adopted son is the Antichrist.
Satan-villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film, postmodern style, and a dystopian worldview. A notable example of this is The Sentinel (1977), in which a fashion model discovers her new brownstone residence may actually be a portal to Hell.
Also in the 1970s, horror author Stephen King, a child of the 1960s, first arrived on the film scene. Adaptations of many of his books came to be filmed for the screen, beginning with Brian DePalma's adaptation of King's first published novel, Carrie (1976), which went on to be nominated for numerous Academy Awards. John Carpenter created the hit Halloween in 1978, kick-starting the modern "slasher film". This subgenre would be mined by dozens of increasingly violent movies throughout the subsequent decades. Other notable '70s slasher films include Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974).
At the same time, there was an explosion of horror films in Europe, particularly from the hands of Italian filmmakers like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, as well as Spanish filmmakers like Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy) and Jess Franco, which were dubbed into English and filled drive-in theaters that could not necessarily afford the expensive rental contracts of the major productions. These films were influenced by the success of Hammer in the 1960s and early '70s, and generally featured traditional horror subjects, though treated them with a distinctive European style that included copious gore and sexuality (of which mainstream American producers were still a little skittish).
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, filmmakers were starting to be inspired by Hammer and Euro-horror to produce exploitation horror with a uniquely Asian twist. Shaw Studios produced Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1973) in collaboration with Hammer, and went on to create their own original films.
1980s
The 1980s was a prolific time for horror filmmakers, with many hit productions launching into a lengthy line of sequels. 1982's Poltergeist (directed by Tobe Hooper), for example, was followed by two sequels and a television series. The seemingly-endless sequels to Halloween, Friday the 13th (1980), and Wes Craven's supernatural slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were the popular face of horror films in the 1980s, a trend reviled by most critics.
Nevertheless, original horror films continued to appear sporadically, with such smash hits as Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987), Tom Holland's Child's Play (1988), and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which became one of the most popular and influential horror films of the decade.
As the cinema box office returns for serious, gory modern horror began to dwindle, the genre began to find a new audience in the growing home video market. Motel Hell (1980) and Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case (1982) were the first 1980s films to campily mock the dark conventions of the previous decade (zombie films like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead had contained black comedy and satire, but were in general more dark than funny). In Evil Dead II (1987), Sam Raimi's explicitly slapstick sequel to the relatively sober The Evil Dead (1981), the laughs were often generated by the gore, defining the archetypal splatter comedy. New Zealand director Peter Jackson followed in Raimi's footsteps with the ultra-gory micro-budget feature Bad Taste (1987).
1990s
In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued with themes from the 1980s. It managed mild commercial success with films such as continuing sequels to the Child's Play and Leprechaun series. The slasher films A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which met with varied amounts of success at the box office.
Note: Wes Craven's New Nightmare series, which included In the Mouth of Madness, The Dark Half, and Candyman, were part of a mini-movement of self-reflective horror films. That is, each film touched upon the relationship between fictional horror and real-world horror. Candyman, for example, examined the link between an invented urban legend and the realistic horror of the racism that produced its villain. In the Mouth of Madness took a more literal approach, as its protagonist actually hopped from the real world into a novel created by the madman he was hired to track down. This reflective style became more overt and ironic with the arrival of Scream (1996).
Two main problems pushed horror backward during this period: firstly, the horror genre wore itself out with the proliferation of nonstop slasher and gore films in the eighties. Secondly, the adolescent audience which feasted on the blood and morbidity of the previous decade grew up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were being captured instead by the explosion of science-fiction and fantasy, courtesy of the special effects possibilities with computer-generated imagery. [5]
To re-connect with its audience, horror became more self-mockingly ironic and outright parodic, especially in the latter half of the 1990s. Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) (known as Dead Alive in the USA) took the splatter film to ridiculous excesses for comic effect. Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), featured an ensemble cast and the style of a different era, harking back to the sumptuous look of 1960s, and a plot focusing just as closely on the romance elements of the Dracula tale as on the horror aspects. Wes Craven's Scream movies, starting in 1996, featured teenagers who were fully aware of, and often made reference to, the history of horror movies, and mixed ironic humour with the shocks. Along with I Know What You Did Last Summer, they re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre.
Among the popular English-language horror films of the late 1990s, only 1999's surprise independent hit The Blair Witch Project attempted straight-ahead scares. But even then, the horror was accomplished in the context of a mockumentary, or mock-documentary. Other films such as M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999) also concentrated more on unnerving and unsettling themes than on gore. Japanese horror films, such as Hideo Nakata's Ringu in 1998, and Masuru Tsushima's Otsuyu (aka The Haunted Lantern) (1997) also found success internationally with a similar formula.
2000s
The start of the 21st century saw the horror genre slowing dwindling. The re-release of a restored version of The Exorcist in September of 2000 was successful despite the film having been available on home video for years. Franchises such as Freddy Vs. Jason also made a final stand in theaters.
However, horror as a medium took two directions. The first, a minimal approach which was equal parts Val Lewton's theory of "less is more" (usually employing low-budget techniques seen on 1999's The Blair Witch Project) and the emergence of Japanese horror movies which have been remade into successful Americanized versions, such as The Ring (2002), and The Grudge (2004).
The second was a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-budget, exploitation horror from the Seventies and the post-Vietnam years. Films like Final Destination (2000), Wrong Turn (2003), House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil's Rejects and the Australian film Wolf Creek (2005), took their cue from The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). A particular sub-genre of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with its emphasis on depictions of torture, suffering and violent deaths, (variously referred to as "horror porn", "torture porn" and even "gore-nography") with films such as Turistas, Captivity, Saw, Hostel and their respective sequels in particular being frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this sub-genre.
There has been a return to the zombie genre in horror movies made after 2000. 28 Days Later (2002) has been partially responsible for not just bringing zombies back into the forefront but also updating their overall attitude (although, the "zombies" in this film are not actually the living dead). Where they'd always been slow, lumbering creatures, in this film they became agile and intelligent. Following this movie, an updated remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) was made as well as Land of the Dead (2005) and the comedy-horror Shaun of the Dead (2004). More recently the popular video game franchise Silent Hill (2006) was made into a feature film, based on an original story.
One of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the decade was the British horror film The Descent (2005). Its all-female cast was a departure from "tough-guy" male-dominated stereotypes or other archetypal dispositions common in horror films.
Controversy
Horror films have continued to cause controversy since they first began to push the envelope one hundred years ago. In the United Kingdom, during the 1980's, the growth in home video led to growing public awareness of gory horror films, and concern about the ease of availability of such material to children. Many films were dubbed "video nasties" and banned (notably foreign films such as The Anthropophagus Beast, A Blade in the Dark, The New York Ripper and Tenebre but US and Canadian films like Madman, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Don't Go in the House & Maniac. In the USA, Silent Night, Deadly Night, a very controversial film from 1984, failed at theatres and was eventually withdrawn from distribution due to its subject matter: a killer Santa Claus.
Though they do not receive as much criticism as video games due in regards to propelling violent tendencies in audiences, particularly children, horror films still receive their fair share of blame in this regard. The theory is that the disturbing actions on screen can incite in viewer's a temptation to act out in real life similar actions.
Notes
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
External links
- IMDb Entry on Best/Worst "Horror" Titles
- About: Horror & Suspense Movies — News and reviews about current and classic horror movies
- Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies Articles and reviews on Classic and Modern Horror Films
- "How to Write a Horror Movie Review"
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