The Early Beginning of Horror Movies

The Early Beginning of Horror Movies

Being married to someone who is an up and coming screenplay writer adores horror that is a genre we have watched a lot of in our home. It is a genre that is loved by many during the month of October. Horror is a film genre that was discovered even before the beginning of the 20th century and developed over time. Personally, the best way during the first half of the 20th century.

Horror movies have a primary goal of wanting to elicit fear in the audience for entertainment purposes. The first depictions of the supernatural on the screen appeared in several of the short silent films created by the French pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès in the late 1890s. The best known of these early supernatural-based works is the two and a half minute short film Le Manoir du Diable (1896), known in English as both "The Haunted Castle" or "The House of the Devil."

In 1923, Universal Pictures started producing movies based on Gothic Horror literature from authors like Victor Hugo and Edgar Allan Poe. This series of pictures from Universal Pictures has retroactively become the first phase of the studio's Universal Classic Monsters series that would continue for three more decades.

On 14 February 1931, Universal Pictures premiered their first film adaptation of Dracula, the famous story of an ancient vampire who arrives in England where he preys upon a virtuous young girl. On 21 November 1931, Universal Pictures released another hit film with Frankenstein. The story is about a scientist and his assistant digs up corpses in the hopes of reanimated them with electricity. In November 1933, Universal Studios premiered another iconic character with Dr. Jack Griffin, aka the Invisible Man, in the classic science fiction-horror The Invisible Man.

Going into the 1950s, with advances in technology, the tone of horror films shifted from the Gothic towards contemporary concerns. Three known horror movies that were made during this period were The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, and House on Haunted Hill. A well-known film done in 1956 was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It focused on an extraterrestrial invasion where aliens can reproduce a duplicate replacement copy of each human. It is considered the most popular and most paranoid film from the golden age of American sci-fi cinema.

3D was a film concept used during the original House of Wax, which was filmed in 1953. It tells a story of a disfigured sculptor who repopulates his destroyed wax museum by murdering people and using their wax-coated corpses as displays. Well, known actor Vincent Price portrayed the murderer. But due to this film, he was typecast for the rest of his life as a horror movie Icon.

Alfred Hitchcock was a name that was known by many in the film industry for many years. He created two well-known horror movies Psycho (1960s) and The Birds. (1963). Also, in 1968 an up-and-coming filmmaker named George Romero. Someone who was given the name the god of zombies. He created the first zombie film called "Dawn of the Dead" in 1968, which launched five films over a long period. Dawn of the Dead was done in black and white. A famous line from the film being, "They are coming to get you, Barbara." Produced and directed by Romero on a budget of $114,000, it grossed $30 million internationally. Considered to be the first actual zombie movie, the film began to combine psychological insights with gore. Distancing the era from earlier gothic trends, the late 1960s films brought horror into everyday life.

Horror movies have gone in an entirely different direction over time. But a good Halloween delight is movies made during the first half of the 20th century. All have a happy Halloween all!