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Horror Films: Haunting
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Other classic horror films of the 1930s and early 1940s included one of the best adventure/horror films of all time - it was the "beauty and the beast" classic King Kong (1933). Special effects expert Willis O'Brien created many of the models for the film. After his success with Dracula (1931), Tod Browning directed the unusual, gothic Freaks (1932) with real-life side-show "freaks" - one of his best works. It told how a group of freaks took revenge on a beautiful gold-digging trapeze artist and turned her into a monstrous half-human, half-bird. This cult film redefined the concepts of beauty, love, and abnormality, but was so disturbingly ahead of its time that audiences stayed away in huge numbers, and it was even banned for 30 years in England. After this film, Browning's career would never be the same - he directed only a few more films through 1939 before retiring.
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Horror films: current research on audience preferences and reactions Edited by James B. Weaver, III & Ron Tamborini. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1996. Series title: LEA's communication series. UCB Main PN1995.9.H6 H72 1996 UCB Moffitt PN1995.9.H6 H72 1996 Contents: Preface / James B. Weaver III and Ron Tamborini -- 1. Frightening Entertainment: A Historical Perspective of Fictional Horror / Ron Tamborini and James B. Weaver III -- 2. Evolution of the Horror Genre / Dolf Zillmann and Rhonda Gibson -- 3.
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With the dramatic changes in technology that occurred in the 1950s, the tone of horror films shifted away from the gothic towards science fiction. A seemingly endless parade of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside": alien invasions and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. These films provided ample opportunity for audience exploitation, with gimmicks such as 3-D 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 (1951; attributed on screen to Christian Nyby but widely considered to be the work of Howard Hawks) and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) 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. [6] One of the most notable films of the era was 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man, from Richard Matheson's existentialist novel.
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Horror film: creating and marketing fearEdited by Steffen Hantke. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Main Stack PN1995.9.H6.H674 2004 Contents: Horror film and the apparatus of cinema / Steffen Hantke -- Spectral vampires: Nosferatu in the light of new technology / Stacey Abbott -- Imaging the abject: the ideological use of the dissolve / Claire Sisko King -- The camera's eye: peeping tom and technological perversion / Catherine Zimmer -- A film is being beaten: notes on the shock cut and the material violence of horror / David S. Diffrient -- The horror "event" movie: The mummy, Hannibal, and Signs / Philip L. Simpson -- "There is only one": the restoration of the repressed in The exorcist: the version you've never seen! / Michael Arnzen -- Proliferating horrors: survival horror and the resident evil franchise / Richard J. Hand -- Simulating torture, documenting horror: the technology of "nonfiction filmmaking" in Devil's experiment and Flowers of flesh and blood / Jay McRoy -- A nasty situation: social panics, transnationalism, and the video Nasty / James Kendrick -- From SBIGs to Mildred's inverse law of trailers: skewing the narrative of horror fan consumption / K.A. Laity -- Horror meets noir: the evolution of cinematic style, 1931-1958 / Blair Davis -- Queering consumption and production in What ever happened to Baby Jane? / Lorena Russell.
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Cowan and O'Brien (1990) randomly selected 56 horror movies from local video outlets and content analyzed each movie to test the assumption that females suffer most in slasher films. These researchers found no significant differences between the number of male and female victims in the sample of films. The same result was found by Weaver (1991) who examined the 10 slasher films with the highest box-office earnings through 1987. Molitor and Sapolsky (1993) content analyzed 30 slasher films, 10 films released in 1980, 1985 and 1989. Females were found to be no more often the victims of violence than were males. These three studies, which looked at a total of 83 different slasher films all found that, contrary to popular beliefs, females are not singled out for attack in such films.
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Note: New Nightmare, with In the Mouth of Madness, The Dark Half, and Candyman, were part of a mini-movement of self-reflective horror films. 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.
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