History of Horror genre

History of the Horror genre

Horror is a film genre looking to create negative emotions for the viewers by playing on stereotypical primal fears. Horror films often try to startle the viewer using themes like macabre (signs and symbols of death) and supernatural. Horror frequently overlaps with other genres like ‘supernatural’ and ‘thrillers’.

1890-1930/the beginning

The horror genre was very popular from around 1890-1930.  The first depictions of supernatural events were created by a man called Georges Méliés, who created several short silent films, one of which is actually credited for being the first ever horror film. After Méliés’ magnificent breakthrough films like Frankenstein were inspired to be made and eventually remade over time and changed the history of horror from silent films to what we now know it as today .

1930-1940

This is the era where the horror make-up artists began to show their skills and change the faces of the horrorful characters to what we see them as today. In 1931 universal studios began to make 'Gothic horror’ which lead to inspire ‘Tod Browning’s’ Dracula, which aimed to thrill its audience, which is a example with the horror genre crossing with the thriller genre. Universal dominated the horror genre for a whole decade with films such as ‘the invisible man’, ‘Bride of Frankenstein’, ‘Son of Frankenstein’…

1950-1960

In the 50’s to 60’s the horror genre saw a massive advance in technology, which aloud produces to create scenes like alien invasions and zombie apocalypse’s, which they wouldn’t have been able to do in the past a they wouldn’t have the technology to create this. A good example of technology advancing horror was is 1955 a director called Hans Zeichmen created the film Sorcerer, Hans would never have been able to make this film before 1955 because he simply wouldn’t of had the technology to do so. Sorcerer involved creating the illusion of flying sorcerers to the audience.

Preliminary task- 60 second film


For our film we decided to base it around a document exchange between to people.  We enjoyed filming this as we hadn’t really done this before, however we didn’t really know how to uses the camera at times.

After filming our scenes and we were satisfied with what we had made, we came back to the classroom to edit the clips. For some reason not all of our clips were saved to the camera and we didn’t have enough time to film again so we couldn’t really create our film anymore.

So instead we tried to focus on the actual shots we had created rather than the story line. When we had finished editing our film didn’t make any sense because of the clips that were missing, however I feel that we focused on the shots quite well and put a good film together, even though it didn’t make any sense.

If we were to do this again we would be certain that all of our clips had saved to the camera before returning to the classroom, and also we would use actors that took the role more seriously to help us save time, as when we were trying to film It was hard for them to act it out with out laughing and having to start again.