With the dramatic advances in technology that occurred in the 1950s, the tone of horror films shifted away from the gothic towards concerns more relevant to the late-Century audience. The horror film was seen to sever into three sub-genres: the horror-of-personality film, the horror-of-the-demonic film.[8] A stream of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside": alien invasions and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects, most notably in films imported from Japan, where society had had a first taste of nuclear power. In some cases, when Hollywood co-opted the popularity of the horror film, the directors and producers found 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). The more sensitive directors of 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. [9] One of the most notable films of the era was 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man, from Richard Matheson's existentialist novel. While more of a "science-fiction" story, the film conveyed the fears of living in the "Atomic Age" and the terror of social alienation.
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of production companies focused on producing horror films, including the British company Hammer Film Productions. Hammer enjoyed huge international success from full-blooded technicolor films involving classic horror characters, often starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), and The Mummy (1959) and many sequels. Hammer, and director Terence Fisher, are widely acknowledged as pioneers of the modern horror movie. Other companies contributed to a boom in horror film production in Britain in the 1960s and '70s, including Tigon-British and Amicus, the latter best known for their anthology films like Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965).
American International Pictures (AIP) also made a series of Edgar Allan Poe–themed films produced by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. These sometimes controversial productions paved the way for more explicit violence in both horror and mainstream films. Teaming with Tigon British Film Productions, AIP would make what is perhaps the most brutal horror film of the late 1960s: Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (film). Released in 1968, it was oddly retitled for American audiences as The Conqueror Worm, most likely in an attempt to capitalize upon the success of AIP's earlier Poe-themed offerings. But the tale of witch hunter Matthew Hopkins (played by an uncharacteristically humorless Vincent Price) was more sadistic than supernatural — a reflection of a decade defined by changing tastes in horror.
In Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), for example, the object of horror certainly doesn't appear as monstrous or a supernatural other, but rather as a normal human being.[8] The horror has a human explanation, steeped in Freudian psychology and repressed sexual desires. Other seminal examples include Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Homicidal (William Castle, 1961), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, 1962), Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), Pretty Poison (Noel Black, 1968), and The Collector (William Wyler, 1965). Films of the horror-of-personality sub-genre continue to appear through the turn of the century, with 1991's The Silence of the Lambs a noteworthy example. Some of these films further blur the distinction between horror film and crime or thriller genre.
Ghosts and monsters still remained popular, but many films that still relied on supernatural monsters expressed a horror of the demonic. The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) and The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) were two such horror-of-the-demonic films from the early 1960s, with high production values and gothic atmosphere. Perhaps the most recognizable milestone of the sub-genre remains Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), in which the devil is made flesh.
Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) had a more modern backdrop; it was a prime example of a menace stemming from nature gone mad and one of the first American examples of the horror-of-Armageddon sub-genre. One of the most influential horror films of the late 1960s was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Produced and directed by Romero, on a budget of $114,000, it grossed $12 million domestically and $30 million internationally. And on top of all that grossed out audiences. This horror-of-Armageddon film about zombies was later deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" enough to be preserved by the United States National Film Registry. Blending psychological insights with gore, it moved the genre even further away from the gothic horror trends of earlier eras and brought horror into everyday life. [10]
Low-budget gore-shock films from the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis also appeared. Examples included 1963's Blood Feast (a devil-cult story) and 1964's Two Thousand Maniacs (a ghost town run by the shades of Southerners), which featured splattering blood and bodily dismemberment.
[edit] 1970s
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With the demise of the Production Code of America in 1964, and the financial successes of the low-budget gore films churned out in the ensuing years, plus an increasing public fascination with the occult, the genre was able to be reshaped by a series of intense, often gory horror movies with sexual overtones, made as "A-movies" (as opposed to "B-movies").[citation needed] Some of these films were made by respected auteurs. [11] [12] The critical and popular success of Rosemary's Baby (1968) prompted the 1970s occult explosion, which included the box office smash The Exorcist (1973) (directed by William Friedkin and written by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the novel), and scores of other horror films in which the Devil became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. "Evil children" and reincarnation became popular subjects (as in Robert Wise's 1977 film Audrey Rose, which dealt with a man who claims his daughter is the reincarnation of another dead person). Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), is another Catholic themed horror slasher about a little girl's murder and her sister being the prime suspect. Another popular Satanic horror movie was The Omen (1976), where a man realizes his five year old adopted son is the Antichrist. Being by doctrine invincible to solely human intervention, Satan-villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film, postmodern style and a dystopian worldview. Another notable example is The Sentinel, which is not to be confused with the Michael Douglas/Kiefer Sutherland film of the same name, as a fashion model discovers her new brownstone residence may actually be a portal to Hell. The movie is most notable for having a mix of seasoned actors like Ava Gardner, Burgess Meredith and Eli Wallach alongside future stars Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum.
The ideas of the 1960s began to influence horror films, as the youth involved in the counterculture began exploring the medium. Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) both recalled the horrors of the Vietnam war and pushed boundaries to the edge; George Romero satirised the consumer society in his 1978 zombie sequel, Dawn of the Dead; Canadian director David Cronenberg updated the "mad scientist" movie subgenre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society, and reinventing "body horror", starting with Shivers (1975). [13]
Also in the 1970s, horror author Stephen King, a child of the 1960s, first arrived on the film scene. Many of his books were adapted for the screen, beginning with Brian DePalma's adaptation of King's first published novel, Carrie (1976), which went on to be nominated for Academy Awards—although it has often been noted that its appeal was more for its psychological exploration as for its capacity to scare. John Carpenter, who had previously directed the sci-fi comedy Dark Star (1974) and the Howard Hawks-inspired action film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), created the hit Halloween (1978),just about the same time that Sean Cunningham made Friday the 13th , kick-starting the modern "slasher film". This subgenre would be mined by dozens of increasingly violent movies throughout the subsequent decades, and Halloween has also become one of the most successful independent films ever made. Other notable '70s slasher films include Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974), which was released before Halloween, and was another start of the sub-genre.
In 1975, Steven Spielberg began his ascension to fame with Jaws, a film notable for not only its expertly crafted horror elements but also for its success at the box office. The film kicked off a wave of killer animal stories such as Orca, and Up From The Depths. The 1978 comedy film Piranha, directed by Joe Dante, is a spoof of such films. Jaws is often credited as being one of the first films to use traditionally B-movie elements such as horror and mild gore in a big-budget Hollywood film.
1979's Alien combined the naturalistic acting and graphic violence of the 1970s with the monster movie plots of earlier decades, and re-acquainted horror with science fiction. It spawned a long-lasting franchise, and countless imitators.
At the same time, there was an explosion of horror films in Europe, particularly from the hands of Italian filmmakers like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and Spanish filmmakers like Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy) and Jess Franco, which were dubbed into English and filled drive-in theaters that could not necessarily afford the expensive rental contracts of the major producers. These films were influenced by the success of Hammer in the 1960s and early '70s, and generally featured traditional horror subjects - e.g. vampires, werewolves, psycho-killers, demons, zombies - but treated them with a distinctive European style that included copious gore and sexuality (of which mainstream American producers overall were still a little skittish). Notable national outputs were the "giallo" films from Italy and the Jean Rollin romantic/erotic films from France. [14]
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, filmmakers were starting to be inspired by Hammer and Euro-horror to produce exploitation horror with a uniquely Asian twist. Shaw Studios produced Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1973) in collaboration with Hammer, and went on to create their own original films. The genre boomed at the start of the 1980s, with Sammo Hung's Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1981) launching the sub-genre of "kung-fu comedy horror", a sub-genre prominently featuring hopping corpses and tempting ghostly females known as fox spirits (or kitsune), of which the best known examples were Mr. Vampire (1985) and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987). [15] But Hammer Film Productions would stop making movies in the 1970s as the demand for slasher films increased, following the success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween, among others.
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