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Horror Movies: Horror Films
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Horror films are films of the horror genre that are designed to elicit fright, fear, terror, or horror from viewers. In horror film plots, evil forces, events, or characters, sometimes of supernatural origin, intrude into the everyday world. Common horror film figures include vampires, zombies, monsters, serial killers, demons, ghosts, aliens and a range of other fear-inspiring characters. Early horror films often drew inspiration from characters and stories from classic literature, such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, The Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Later horror films, in contrast, often drew inspiration from the insecurities of life after World War II, giving rise to the three distinct, but related, sub-genres: the horror-of-personality film, the horror-of-Armageddon film, and the horror-of-the-demonic film. The last sub-genre may be seen as a modernized transition from the earliest horror films, expanding on their emphasis on supernatural agents that bring horror to the world.[1]
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Horror films have been criticized for their graphic violence and are often dismissed as low budget B-movies and exploitation films. Nonetheless, some major studios and respected directors have made forays into the genre. This is a list of the ten greatest horror films of all time.
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This is one of those mexican movies that try to recreat the look of old Universal horror films. The vampire is dressed in the sort of tux Bela Lugosi wore in Dracula. The Universal atmosphere is ruin by cut rate stop motion special effects. This was the kind of effects used on the TV show BEWITCHED. The vampire often appeared and disappeared in a stop motion effect and like wise would suddenly turn into a rubberly bat the same way. At the films end the vampire in bat form circles around the hero.
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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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Katharine Ross stars in this classic horror film as Joanna, a woman who moves to Stepford, Connecticut, along with her husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and her best friend Bobbie (Paula Prentiss). As the two women meet the other housewives who live in Stepford, they begin to notice that all of them are interested only in cooking, cleaning, and pleasing their husbands. Joanna and Bobbie are further alarmed when their husbands join the mysterious Stepford Men's Club, which convenes in a heavily guarded mansion and harbors a nefarious secret agenda. Based on the novel by Ira Levin (ROSEMARY'S BABY) and followed by the made-for-television sequels THE REVENGE OF THE STEPFORD WIVES, THE STEPFORD CHILDREN, and THE STEPFORD HUSBANDS.
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Horror films developed out of a number of sources: folktales with devil characters, witchcraft, fables, myths, ghost stories, Grand Guignol melodramas, and Gothic or Victorian novels from Europe by way of Mary Shelley or Irish writer Bram Stoker. In many ways, the expressionistic German silent cinema led the world in films of horror and the supernatural, and established its cinematic vocabulary and style.
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