The unrelenting snowfall factors into the third act in a major way, making you feel the cold from the comfort of your couch. Six young actresses are spending their weekend at a remote mansion enduring what may be the most eccentric audition for a movie role. Sickles and ice skating equal bad news. Sometimes winter set horror is too bleak. Enter Blood Glacier , an Austrian horror comedy about the discovery of a strange liquid leaking from a melting glacier in the Alps, and its bizarre affect on local wildlife.
As in, that red liquid is turning everything into deadly mutated creatures. The residents of Little Tall Island are trapped without outside access thanks to a dangerous blizzard that only continues to worsen. Trapped with them is an ominous stranger, who quickly makes a statement by murdering a long-time neighbor. Penned by Stephen King, Storm of the Century builds suspense as the stranger continues to dangle his motivations out of reach while exploiting the darkest secrets of the residents.
The outside world may be dangerous thanks to harsh weather conditions, but sometimes inside is even more dangerous. The snowy New England winter setting is perfect for this tale of the supernatural; it chills inside and out. Often in winter set horror, the setting keeps the characters trapped in place with the killer or supernatural entity closing in around them. Adam Green refreshingly makes the weather the thing to fear in his survival thriller Frozen.
An incoming storm has the resort shut down, with no one aware that anyone was left behind. It is now considered a lost film.
Wegener would make a third golem film three years later to round up his Der Golem trilogy. In the film, a bookshop closes and the portraits of the Strumpet , Death , and the Devil come to life and amuse themselves by reading stories--about themselves, of course, in various guises and eras. The film is split into five stories: The film is described as the "critical link between the more conventional German mystery and detective films of the mid s and the groundbreaking fantastic cinema of the early s.
Robert Wiene 's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari became a worldwide success and had a lasting impact on the film world, particularly for horror. It was not so much the story but the style that made it distinguishable from other films, "Caligari's settings, some simply painted on canvas backdrops, are weirdly distorted, with caricatures of narrow streets, misshapen walls, odd rhomboid windows, and leaning doorframes. Effects of light and shadow were rendered by painting black lines and patterns directly on the floors and walls of sets.
Considered a classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari helped draw worldwide attention to the artistic merit of German cinema and had a major influence on American films, particularly in the genres of horror and film noir , introducing techniques such as the twist ending and the unreliable narrator to the language of narrative film. How He Came into the World. The final film in the Der Golem trilogy , The Golem: In this film, Wegener stars as the golem who frightens a young lady with whom he is infatuated. The film is the best known of the series, as it is the only film that is completely preserved.
It is also a leading example of early German Expressionism. Murnau arguably made The first vampire-themed movie, Nosferatu It was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker 's gothic horror novel Dracula. In Nosferatu , Murmau created some of cinema's most lasting and haunting imagery which famously involve shadows of the creeping Count Orlok.
This helped popularized the expressionism style in filmmaking. Many expressionist works of this era emphasize a distorted reality, stimulating the human psyche and have influenced the horror film genre. For most of the s, German filmmakers like Wegener, Murmau, and Wiene would significantly influence later productions not only in horror films but in filmmaking in general. They would become the leading innovators of the German Expressionist movement.
9. The Little Stranger
The plots and stories of the German Expressionist films often dealt with madness and insanity. It tells the story of house guests inside a manor given visions of what might happen if the manor's host, the count played by Fritz Kortner , stays jealous and the guests do not reduce their advances towards his beautiful wife. Kortner's bulging eyes and twisted features are facets of a classic Expressionist performance style, as his unnatural feelings contort his face and body into something that appears other than human.
In , German filmmaker Paul Leni made another representative German Expressionist film with Das Wachsfigurenkabinett , or Waxworks as it is commonly known. The horror film tells a story of a writer who accepts a job from a wax museum to write a series of stories about the exhibits on Harun al-Rashid , the Caliph of Baghdad, Ivan the Terrible , the Tsar of All Rus' and Jack the Ripper , the unknown serial killer of London in order to boost business.
Although Waxworks is often credited as a horror film, it is an anthology film that goes through several genres including a fantasy adventure, a historical film, and a horror film through its various episodes. Waxworks contain many elements present in a German Expressionist movie. The film features deep shadows, moving shapes, and warped staircases. The director said of the film, "I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evidence no idea of reality.
Though the word horror to describe the film genre would not be used until the s when Universal Pictures began to release their initial monster films , earlier American productions often relied on horror themes. Many of these early films were considered dark melodramas because of their stock characters and emotion-heavy plots that focused on romance, violence, suspense, and sentimentality. In , Universal Pictures started producing films with horror elements. This would become the first phase of the studio's Universal Classic Monsters series that would continue for three more decades.
The film was adapted from the classic French gothic novel of the same name written by Victor Hugo in , about a horribly deformed bell ringer in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The film elevated Chaney, already a well-known character actor, to full star status in Hollywood, and also helped set a standard for many later horror films. The trend of inserting an element of macabre into American pre-horror melodramas continued into the s. Directors known for relying on macabre in their films during the s were Maurice Tourneur , Rex Ingram , and Tod Browning.
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Ingram's The Magician contains one of the first examples of a " mad doctor " and is said to have had a large influence on James Whale's version of Frankenstein. Other European countries also, contributed to the genre during this period. In the s Universal Pictures continued making movies with horror elements as they began to churn in a successful film series based on Gothic horror.
Bela Lugosi stars in Tod Browning's Dracula and then Boris Karloff stars in James Whale's Frankenstein , both films considered classic adaptations of the popular horror characters. The next year, Karloff would play the titular character in The Mummy Make-up artist Jack Pierce would be responsible for creating the make-up of many of the classic 's monsters for Universal Studios. He would also come to design the Satanic make-up for Lugosi in the independetly produced White Zombie Universal then began releasing sequels including Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula's Daughter They also made the first mainstream werewolf picture, Werewolf of London which wasn't a box office triumph during release despite being revered by audiences today.
Other studios followed Universal's lead. MGM 's controversial Freaks , which featured characters played by people who had real deformities, frightened audiences at the time. The studio even disowned the film, and it remained banned, in the United Kingdom, for 30 years. Hyde is remembered for its innovative use of photographic filters to create Jekyll's transformation before the camera. With the progression of the genre, actors like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were beginning to build entire careers in horror. Early in the decade also, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer created the horror fantasy film Vampyr based on elements from J.
The German-produced sound film tells the story of Allan Gray, a student of the occult who enters a village under the curse of a vampire. According to the book Movies You Must See Before You Die , Vampyr' s "greatness derives partly from Dreyer's handling of the vampire theme in terms of sexuality and eroticism, and partly from its highly distinctive, dreamy look. The decade also sees the continuation of Universal Pictures ' consistent releases of horror, suspense and science fiction films. This comes to be later known as the cult classic Universal Classic Monsters series which began in the s and would later dissipate in the s.
In this decade Lon Chaney Jr. Paramount Pictures also made horror films in the s, the most popular of which is The Uninvited. The film has been noted by contemporary film scholars as being the first film in history to portray ghosts as legitimate entities rather than illusions or misunderstandings played for comedy. It depicts various supernatural phenomena, including disembodied voices, apparitions, and possession. MGM 's best horror genre contribution of the s would be Albert Lewin 's The Picture of Dorian Gray , which was popularly known for its interesting use of color insert to show Dorian's haunting portrait.
In , Great Britain contributed the anthology horror film Dead of Night. In the film house guests tell at least five supernatural tales, the last of which being the most remembered. The film's last story, titled The Ventriloquist's Dummy features a ventriloquist tormented by a malevolent puppet. The popularity of movie genres of the s were mostly film noir , melodrama and mystery. It would then arguably be a stretch to point out that some mystery and thriller films can be considered horror genre contributions of the decade. Wes Anderson ranked it as the sixth best British film. With advances in technology, the tone of horror films shifted from the Gothic towards contemporary concerns.
A popular horror subgenre began to emerge: It is considered to be the most popular and most paranoid films from the golden age of American sci-fi cinema. Japan's experience with Hiroshima and Nagasaki bore the well-known Godzilla and its many sequels , featuring mutation from the effects of nuclear radiation. This kickstarted the tokusatsu trend known as Kaiju films , a Japanese film genre that features giant monsters, usually attacking major cities and engaging the military and other monsters in battle.
Other films in this genre that isn't about Godzilla include Rodan and The Mysterians These include Ghost-Cat of Gojusan-Tsugi , and Black Cat Mansion , which tells a story of a samurai tormented by a cat possessed by the spirits of the people she killed. The s is also well known for creature feature and Ray Harryhausen 's visual effects work in many of the genre's films. His work on The Beast from 20, Fathoms is considered to be the film which kick started the 50s wave of monster movies and the concept of combining nuclear paranoia with the genre.
The film was about a dinosaur that was awakened from frozen ice in the Arctic Circle by an atomic bomb test. Hollywood directors and producers found ample opportunity for audience exploitation through gimmicks. House of Wax used the advent of 3-D film to draw audiences, while The Tingler used electric buzzers to scare audiences in their theater seats.
Filmmakers continued to merge elements of science fiction and horror over the following decades. Considered a "pulp masterpiece" [36] of the era was The Incredible Shrinking Man , based on Richard Matheson 's existentialist novel. The film conveyed the fears of living in the Atomic Age and the terror of social alienation. Across the pond, the United Kingdom emerged as a major producer of horror films.
Christopher Lee starred in a number of Hammer Horror films, including The Curse of Frankenstein , which Professor Patricia MacCormac called the "first really gory horror film, showing blood and guts in colour". In television, the anthology series The Twilight Zone has become a staple in horror fiction.
Horror films
Although predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show towards fantasy and horror. Released in May , the British psychological thriller film, Peeping Tom by Michael Powell , is a progenitor of the contemporary " slasher film ", [43] though Alfred Hitchcock cemented the subgenre with Psycho released also in the same year. Instead, he helped pioneer the art of psychological suspense. As a result, he managed to frighten his viewers by getting to the root of their deepest fears. France continued the mad scientist theme with the film Eyes Without a Face , a must-watch for the lover of mad scientist stories.
The story follows Parisian police in search of the culprit responsible for the deaths of young women whose faces have been mutilated. Meanwhile, Italian horror films became internationally notable thanks to Mario Bava 's contributions. In this film, Bava turned a Russian folk legend into a beguilling fairly tale about a young doctor who finds himself stranded in a haunted community and falls for a woman whose body become possessed by a woman executed for witchcraft.
The American International Pictures AIP , in the early 60s, made a series of films based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe , most of which star Vincent Price , who became well known for his performances in subsequent horror films of the time. Robert Wise's The Haunting is considered by a great many critics, aficionados, and casual fans of the horror genre to be one of the scariest films of all time.
The film is best known for its brilliant use of canted frames, mirror reflections, fish-eye lenses and uncanny sound and image editing. Roman Polanski made his first film in English with Repulsion , which is considered to be his scariest and most disturbing work. Polanski's "evocations of sexual panic and masterful use of sound puts the audiences' imagination to work in numerous ways". Horror films of the s used the supernatural premise to express the horror of the demonic. Jack Clayton's The Innocents tell the story of a governess who fears that the children she is watching over are possessed by ghosts haunting the estate they are staying.
A few years later, Roman Polanski wrote and directed Rosemary's Baby , based on the bestselling horror novel by Ira Levin. The highly influential film tells the story of a pregnant woman who suspects that an evil cult wants to take her baby for use in their rituals. Meanwhile, ghosts were a dominant theme in Japanese horror , in such films as Kwaidan , Onibaba both and Kuroneko Another influential American horror film of the 60s was George A.
Romero 's Night of the Living Dead Considered to be the first true zombie movie, the film began to combine psychological insights with gore. Distancing the era from earlier gothic trends, late s films brought horror into everyday life. Low-budget splatter films from the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis also gained prominence in the s.
Some of Lewis' notorious works include Two Thousand Maniacs! The series centers on a group of teenagers and their dog who go to abandoned places to solve mysteries involving supposedly supernatural creatures through a series of antics and missteps. The animated series' simple formula had a major impact on future slasher films especially of its portrayal of villains in masks. The financial successes of the low-budget gore films of the ensuing years, and the critical and popular success of Rosemary's Baby , led to the release of more films with occult themes in the s.
The Exorcist , the first of these movies, was a significant commercial success and was followed by scores of horror films in which a demon entity is represented as the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children. Robert Wise 's film Audrey Rose for example, deals with a man who claims that his daughter is the reincarnation of another dead person.
Alice, Sweet Alice , is another Catholic-themed horror slasher about a little girl's murder and her sister being the prime suspect. Another popular occult horror movie was The Omen , where a man realizes that his five-year-old adopted son is the Antichrist. Invincible to human intervention, Demons became villains in many horror films with a postmodern style and a dystopian worldview.
Another example is The Sentinel , in which a fashion model discovers that her new brownstone residence may actually be a portal to Hell. Notable examples of this subject from the late s are Child's Play , Night of the Demons , and Pet Sematary Its focus on the psychology of grief was unusually strong for a film featuring a supernatural horror plot.
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Another notable film is The Wicker Man , a British mystery horror film dealing with the practice of ancient pagan rituals in the modern era. In the s, Italian filmmakers Mario Bava , Riccardo Freda , Antonio Margheriti , and Dario Argento developed giallo horror films that became classics and influenced the genre in other countries. The ideas of the s began to influence horror films in the 70s, as the youth involved in the counterculture began exploring the medium.
Romero satirized the consumer society in his zombie sequel, Dawn of the Dead Meanwhile, the subgenre of comedy horror re-emerged in the cinema with The Abominable Dr. Also in the s, the works of the horror author Stephen King began to be adapted for the screen, beginning with Brian De Palma 's adaptation of Carrie , King's first published novel, for which the two female leads Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie gained Oscar nominations. Next, was his third published novel, The Shining , directed by Stanley Kubrick , which was a sleeper at the box office. At first, many critics and viewers had negative feedback toward The Shining.
However, the film is now known as one of Hollywood's most classic horror films. This psychological horror film has a variety of themes; "evil children", alcoholism, telepathy , and insanity. This type of film is an example of how Hollywood's idea of horror started to evolve. Murder and violence were no longer the main themes of horror films. In the s and s, psychological and supernatural horror started to take over cinema.
Another classic Hollywood horror film is Tobe Hooper 's Poltergeist Poltergeist is ranked the 20th scariest movie ever made by the Chicago, Illinois Film Critics Association. Both The Shining and Poltergeist involve horror being based on real-estate values. The evil and horror throughout the films come from where the movies are taking place. The Amityville Horror is a supernatural horror film directed by Stuart Rosenberg , based on Jay Anson 's book of the same name.
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It stars James Brolin and Margot Kidder as a young couple who purchase a home they come to find haunted by combative supernatural forces. The Changeling is a Canadian psychological horror film directed by Peter Medak. Steven Spielberg 's shark horror film, Jaws , began a new wave of killer animal stories, such as Orca and Up from the Depths 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. In , Don Coscarelli 's Phantasm was the first of the Phantasm franchise.
A cycle of slasher films began in the s and s with the creation of Halloween by John Carpenter. Black Christmas is one of the original Christmas horror flicks. Directed by Bob Clark and written by A. Roy Moore, it's a slasher about a group of sorority sisters who are threatened, stalked, and hunted by a deranged individual over the Christmas season.
The film might've been released to mixed reviews, but it's gone on to become a classic that captures the suspenseful nature of that era of cinema. Even to this day, Black Christmas still holds up well and should be included in any plans for darker Christmas viewing. Anna and the Apocalypse is the newest film on this list, and whether it'll stand the test of time still needs to be seen. Yet, you cannot ignore the impact that this zombie musical has had, with rave reviews and high praise from all corners of the entertainment industry.
It's become the must-watch film for horror aficionados. Whereas the zombie genre feels tired and bloated, Anna and the Apocalypse brought something new.
It's hard to resist and you'll find yourself getting caught up in the catchy numbers and singing along with the characters. It truly is a Christmas miracle! There's something sinister about 's Better Watch Out and its Christmas setting. What it also successfully did was establish a different kind of antagonist that no one would've expected. We're not saying that Better Watch Out should be on your watch list this holiday season; we're saying it needs to be. Now, before any confusion seeps in here, there were two Jack Frost films released a year apart. The production stars Michael Keaton and is a wholesome family film.
The other was released in and is a full-blown horror comedy from the mind of Michael Cooney. In many ways, it slightly resembles the plot of Child's Play as serial killer Jack Frost becomes one with the snow and takes out his newfound snowman anger on everyone around him. Look, Jack Frost is extremely cheesy and as over the top as they come, but that's what makes it an unforgettable watch.