Horror film timeline

1890s-1920s Horror Movies• The 1896 short The House of the Devil is credited as

being the first horror movie. Although America was home to the first Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde movie adaptations, the most influential horror films through the 1920s came from Germany's Expressionist movement, with films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligariand Nosferatu influencing the next generation of American cinema.

• Actor Lon Chaney kept American horror afloat, with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera and The Monster, which set the stage for the Universal dominance of the '30s.

1930s• Building upon the success of The Hunchback of Notre

Dame and The Phantom of the Opera , Universal Studios entered a Golden Age of monster movies in the '30s, releasing a string of hit horror movies beginning with Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931 and including the controversial Freaks and a Spanish version of Dracula.

• The '30s also witnessed the first American werewolf film ( The Werewolf of London ), the first zombie movie ( White Zombie ) and the landmark special effects blockbuster King Kong

1940s• By the 1940s, Universal's monster movie formula was

growing stale. Eventually the studio even resorted to comedy-horror pairings, like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein , which met with some success. Other studios stepped in to fill the horror void with more serious-minded fare, including RKO's brooding Val Lewton productions, most notably Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie .

1950s• Various cultural forces helped shape horror movies in

the '50s. The Cold War fed fears of invasion (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, The Blob), nuclear proliferation fed visions of rampaging mutants (Them!, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla) and scientific breakthroughs led to mad scientist plots (The Fly).

• Filmmakers resorted to either gimmicks like 3-D (House of Wax, The Creature from the Black Lagoon) and the various stunts of William Castle productions (House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler) or, in the case of Great Britain's Hammer Films, explicit, vividly coloredviolence.

1960s• Horror films in this decade reflected the social

revolution of the era. The movies were more edgy, featuring controversial levels of violence (Blood Feast, Witchfinder General) and sexuality (Repulsion). Films like Peeping Tom and Psycho were precursors to the slasher movies of the coming decades, while George Romero's Night of the Living Dead changed the face of zombie movies forever.

1970s• Social issues of the day were tackled in 70s horror

films, from sexism (The Stepford Wives) to consumerism (Dawn of the Dead) to religion (The Wicker Man) and war (Deathdream). Exploitation movies hit their stride in the decade, boldly flouting moral conventions with graphic violence (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes).

• The latter reflected particularly in a spate of zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead) and cannibal films (The Man from Deep River). The shock factor even pushed films like The Exorcist and Jaws to blockbuster success.

1980s• Horror in the the first half of the '80s was defined by

slashers like Friday the 13th, Prom Night and A Nightmare on Elm Street, while the other half tended to take a more lighthearted look at the genre, mixing in comic elements in films like The Return of the Living Dead, Evil Dead 2, Re-Animator and House.

• Fatal Attraction spawned a series of "stalker thrillers," but despite the efforts of newcomers like Sam Raimi(The Evil Dead), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator), Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins) and Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child's Play), horror's box office might had subsided by the end of the '80s.

1990s• studios were funding large-scale horror-themed

projects, such as Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Wolf. In 1996, Scream's runaway success reignited the slasher flame, spawning similar films, such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend.

• At the end of the decade, Blade foreshadowed the coming flood of comic book adaptations, meanwhile, 1999 witnessed two of the biggest surprise hits of the decade, regardless of genre, in The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project.

2000s• Twenty-first century horror in the US has been

identified with remakes of both American (Friday the 13th, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead) and foreign films (The Ring, The Grudge).

• Outside of the US, there is as great a variety of edgy and innovative material as there has ever been in the genre, from Canada (Ginger Snaps) to France (High Tension) to Spain (The Orphanage) to the UK (28 Days Later) and, of course, Asia, from Hong Kong (The Eye) to Japan (Ichi the Killer) to Korea (A Tale of Two Sisters) to Thailand (Shutter).