In their purest sense, horror movies are movies based on the sinister supernatural or on events that occur when "man meddles in things better left untouched." Therefore, scary science fiction movies, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, movies about creatures from a prehistoric past such as King Kong, and psychological suspense movies such as Psycho, are not classified here as horror films. But horror does include just about everything else capable of raising goose bumps. The horror film is not a distinctly American genre in the way the western and gangster films are. While the German Expressionists, for example, were making sophisticated horror films such as The Golem (1914), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), and Nosferatu (1921), filmmakers in the United States made only the rare horror movie, such as John Barrymore's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).
Nonetheless, when the horror film was suddenly revived in 1931 with the presentation of Tod Browning's Dracula starring BELA LUGOSI, Hollywood took notice. The movie was a sensation, assuring a spate of sequels that have conferred a certain cinematic immortality that not even a celluloid spike could end. Lugosi often reprised his role as the vampire, and he was not the only actor to do so.
The acknowledged masters of the horror film in the 1990s were the veterans Wes Craven and JOHN CARPENTER. Craven did two Scream films back to back (1996 and 1997) and also made Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), The People under the Stairs (1991), and Wes Craven Presents: Dracula (2000); Scream 3 was also released that year. John Carpenter's horror films during the 1990s included Body Bags (1993), In the Mouth of Madness (1995), Village of the Damned (1995), and John Carpenter Vampires (1997). Notice that publicists included both Carpenter and Craven's names in the titles as a horrible inducement. The trend continued with Stephen King.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) was directed by Jim Gillespie, imitating the directors mentioned above, and the picture, however derivative, grossed $70 million. It was therefore followed by I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, directed by Danny Cannon in 1998, which made a more modest $40 million. Independent filmmakers scored with the low-budget Blair Witch Project in 1999, which grossed an impressive $141 million. Joe Dante inaugurated the Howling series of werewolf movies in 1981, and it continued through Howling 7 in 1995. A more sophisticated approach to the werewolf genre was Mike Nichols's Wolf (1994), starring JACK NICHOLSON.
It seemed inevitable that Stephen King, the master of the horror novel, would venture into filmmaking. In fact he wrote and directed his own version of The Shining for television in 2002 because he did not approve of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 version. The King version is hardly better. Other notable horror movies have included The House on Haunted Hill (1999), The Sixth Sense (1999), Final Destination (2000), Jeepers Creepers (2001), The Others (2001), The Ring (2002), 28 Days Later (2003).
There isn't another genre that has so fed upon itself as horror. Any creature, monster, or supernatural apparition that succeeds on screen is bound to return time and again. Yet there is something comforting about the recycled nature of the horror film. The images of Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein are part of our collective nightmares, and their continuing permutations in the movies let us know with a (dread) certainty that there is always something out there in the dark waiting to grab us and make us scream. Horror on film has been especially effective because movies are so similar to dreams; the best of them are nightmares that we experience with our eyes wide open in a dark theater.
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