Scary Movies

For nearly as long as there has been cinema, there have been scary movies. The horror film is one of cinema’s oldest genres; from F.W. Mumau’s classic silent film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens to Eli Roth’s Hostel, there has always been something in the movies to scare us out of our wits or gross us out to the point where we can’t stomach our popcorn and raisinettes.

In the early days of movies with sound, westerns, comedies, and dramas ruled the cinematic roost, but the horror movie was there, lurking in the shadows and waiting for the perfect moment to pounce on unsuspecting moviegoers. Finally, in the 1930’s, the time was right and Universal began releasing the films that are now known as their classic “monster” movies. 1931 saw the release of Tod Browning’s version of Dracula and James Whale’s version of Frankenstein. The following year gave us The Mummy and there were plenty of others to come and go in the ensuing years. While these movies are considered classics today there’s not much of anything in them that might qualify them as scary movies anymore, but in their day they horrified audiences. Director James Whale once related a story in which he was called by a famous actress at about three a.m. on the night that Frankenstein premiered. When he asked why she was calling so late she told him “if I’m not going to sleep tonight, neither are you.”

The 1950’s ushered in the nuclear and space ages and the movies followed suit, giving us science fiction/horror films based on radioactive mutations. Many of these centered on the concept of giant insects. Them! had giant ants, The Beginning of the End featured giant grasshoppers, and Day of the Triffids had, well, killer triffids. Triffids are plants, not bugs, but it still fits the mold.

Another branch of the sci-fi/horror genre in the fifties was the McCarthyism influenced “red under every bed” picture. Titles like Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers taught us just how dangerous it was to be different.

In the late sixties and early seventies we started to see movies that played up the gore in order to scare us. The shower scene in Psycho is remembered as one of the most frightening and sickening thirty seconds or so ever shot, but has almost no gore at all by today’s standards. Still you can almost feel the knife plunging into poor Janet Leigh’s body and you can definitely "hear" it. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead took a different approach by being a truly frightening film regardless of the gore and then pouring on the gore for good measure anyway. Tobe Hooper brought us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 and it is remembered as one of the goriest movies ever made. Truth be told, however, there is probably more blood seen in Psycho than in TCM – but TCM was banned in several countries anyway.

The eighties gave us the slasher film, a genre that still hangs around in one way or another to this day. The 1979 release of John Carpenter’s Halloween paved the way for countless imitators, each of which tried to be a little grosser than the one before it. Several slasher film franchises were born in the eighties, most notably Friday the Thirteenth and A Nightmare on Elm Street; each of which has piled up multiple sequels. The eighties also saw sequels to Halloween and TCM among others.

Of course, not all scary movies of any era can be pigeonholed so easily. When the Universal monsters were scaring the bejeezus out of people we also were treated to Tod Browning’s Freaks, a morality play which used actual circus side show freaks as cast members, something that makes the movie unsettling to this day. Wes Craven made both Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes in the seventies, not long after William Friedkin’s The Exorcist had people lining up around theaters to get a glimpse of Satan himself, whom Reverend Billy Graham said actually appeared in the film. Stanley Kubrick treated us to an unsettling version of Stephen King’s The Shining in 1980, the same year that Sigourney Weaver first squared off against the H.R. Geiger designed Alien.

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