A Brief Introduction to the Horror Genre

Horror as a movie genre was born in the 1930s and it was heavily influenced by gothic literature and specifically by Bram Stocker and his Dracula, Allan Poe and his short stories and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Since its objective was to create fear in the audience, this was the perfect inspiration for the early creations of the genre.

There are a lot of different types of horror movies today, but at the very beginning there was only one and most of the themes it dealt with were monsters like the ones the authors mentioned above created. Since then we have added a lot of themes and new monsters to deal with in horror like ghosts, aliens, vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons, evil clows, witches… And even day-to-day human trauma and fears are now an inspiration!!

As it usually happens with everything related to cinema, the origin of horror movies goes back to France. Even though today we wouldn’t be afraid of it,  the first movie labelled as horror was L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat from the Lumière brothers in 1896. In the same year we could also watch Le manoir du Diable, a short movie of only 3 minutes of length by George Méliès. This one deals with a devil that stalks the viewers and it was created as a comedy piece, but the audience was horrified by it, making it one of the first examples of horror in cinema.

But when the horror genre really took off and was considered a real genre was in 1923 when Universal Pictures started producing these types of movies. The very first movie was The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Wallace Worsley and two years later, in 1925 The Phantom of the Opera came out, a classic these days. From here on, a lot of other movie producers started creating horror movies and the rest is history!

And now, what is your favourite horror movie?  😱