Whispered Screams
Early horror media spanned diverse subgenres, from Gothic supernatural horror, e.g., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and A Page of Madness, to “Mad Scientist” tropes like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They shared a common constraint: they were completely silent. The technology to synchronize audio with motion pictures was experimental at best. Instead, horror was crafted through distorting visuals, creepy character design, and harrowing physical performances.
At the pinnacle of this era stood F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror(1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Instead of relying on cheap scares, Murnau set out to create a haunting, surreal atmosphere, using lighting and shadows to create dread and terror. To achieve this goal amidst technological limitations, Murnau used ingenious filmmaking techniques to convey his story. Since film stock couldn’t capture night scenes, Murnau manually tinted frames using amber for daylight, deep blue for night, and magenta for sunrise. Dialogue and context were delivered through text screens, while optical tricks like step printing and negative exposures gave the vampire an unnatural and mechanical rhythm.
Max Schreck delivers an iconic performance as Count Orlok (The renamed Dracula). He is terrifying in the role, and yet so captivating it is difficult to move your eyes away. The physical performance is so imposing, you do not notice that Count Orlok only has screentime for about 9 minutes of the film. Aside from the performances, there is another uncredited actor that arguably adds more to the horror than any other element, Count Orlok’s shadow. Light and shadow are not just background elements, they act as physical characters in the film. The most famous shot in the film features Orlok’s skeletal shadow creeping up a staircase long before the actual vampire enters the shot. Murnau used low angle lighting to stretch and distort Orlok’s already jagged figure into inhuman shapes that builds anxiety through what is there but isn’t seen. This concept is expanded upon in Robbert Eggar’s Nosferatu(2024) where Orlok can physically manifest to loom over his victims through shadows.
Nosferatu has been examined and critiqued through the lens of Post WWI German anxieties, noting several anti-semetic tropes present in Orlok’s portrayal. Orlok was created with a hooked nose, a hunchback, claws for hands and a bald head, which were very similar to anti-semetic Jewish caricatures prominent in 1920s Germany. Furthermore Orlok travels from the eastern part of Europe to Germany to buy property in Wisborg and bringing with him disease, this reflected the xenophobic fears of outsiders settling and corrupting Western society. While still praised for its artistic storytelling, it is important to understand how this film played into the social prejudices that would take over Germany in the 1930’s.
Despite its achievements, Nosferatu was almost wiped out forever. Prana Film, the producers behind Nosferatu never secured rights to Dracula; Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence Stoker, sued for copyright infringement, which was ruled in her favour. Since the movie was a financial failure, Prana Film had gone bankrupt and dissolved after their first film and did not have funds to settle the suit. Eventually, the parties reached an agreement that every copy of the movie be burnt. Thankfully, a few prints were smuggled overseas, which preserved one of horror’s foundational films, inspiring vampire lore and cinema for over a century.
(Fun fact: Count Orlok makes a cameo in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode titled “Graveyard Shift”.)
The Monster-Verse
Universal Pictures ruled the 1930s and 1940s with Universal Classic Monsters. Universal made films adapted from books like Frankenstein, Count Dracula, Invisible Man and others. Universal began the series with The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Finished with The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Universal intended each film to be a stand‑alone story. The success of these films led to sequels, comedic crossovers like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and mashups like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
At that time Universal was not the studio it is today. It was a studio fighting to keep its doors open during the Great Depression. During the Depression, the studio went through an administrative change as Carl Laemmle Jr. took over the role of “Head of Production” at Universal. At his insistence, Carl Laemmle Sr. bought executive rights to Dracula for $40,000, a massive investment considering the financial climate. A commercial failure would have put another foot in the grave for Universal, but when Dracula came out, audiences flocked to theatres, out of curiosity for the new, terrifying film that was making audiences faint from fear. But a massive reason for its success was its timing. In the depths of the Depression, film was a great escape for the masses, to visit the theatre and forget about their problems even if just for an hour and half. The success of Dracula motivated Universal to pour money into more monster flicks, Frankenstein in the same year, The Mummy in 1932, The Invisible Man in 1933, and more.
One of the most defining films of the Monster-Verse was James Whale’s Frankenstein(1931) based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. Although this is not the first appearance of Frankenstein on the big screen, that honour belongs to the 1910 silent short film aptly titled “Frankenstein”, it is the most culturally prominent adaptation of the IP.
Whereas Mary Shelley’s novel was an intellectual, dialogue-heavy novel about the dangers of scientific ambition and revenge. Universal chose to narratively follow Peggy Webling’s streamlined 1927 play titled Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre to better fit a 70-min movie experience.
The movie invented tropes absent from the original book like Frankenstein’s lab assistant Fritz, and a more cinematic awakening of the Monster for the big screen. While Shelley’s Monster was a well-read and articulate being, Whale and actor Boris Karkoff believed characterizing the Monster as a mute and child-like figure would force audiences to feel sympathy for it instead of fearing it.
Much of this sympathy and terror can be attributed to the work of makeup artist Jack Pierce. Shelley’s book had very little detail about the Monsters appearance, letting Pierce go wild with his imagination, spending months experimenting with the Monster’s look. Pierce settled on green greasepaint which gave a gloomy pale look on black and white film, paired with the flattened skull, neck electrodes and cotton and gum paste eyelids. This combination of paint and DIY prosthetics took about 4 hours to apply and 2 hours to remove daily, but well worth the effort.
The film was subject to heavy censorship, being considered extremely unsettling and controversial. A scene in which the Monster throws Maria, a little girl into a lake and drowning her was cut in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York. These states also objected to a dialogue they considered blasphemous that occurred after the birth of the Monster, when Henry exclaims “In the name of God? Now I know what it feels like to BE God”.
More extremely, Kansas requested the cutting of 32 scenes which would have dwindled the screentime by half, eventually through negotiations a less dramatically cut version was released in Kansas. Multiple cuts were made to the original film by Universal, the scene of the girl drowning was recovered in the 1980s and restored to modern copies, this means the movie originally intended to be released may be lost to the media forever.
While future sequels devolved into crossovers and comedies, 1931’s Frankenstein proved that dread and horror can be blended with genuine human empathy, cementing it as a horror history classic.
No One to Hear You Scream
What’s scarier than something hunting you out of malice or revenge? Something that hunts you because that is its instinct to do so. That is the essence of cosmic horror: the existential dread of humanity being so miniscule and insignificant in the face of an apex predator we can’t escape, let alone defeat.
John Carpenter’s The Thing(1982) and Ridley Scott’s Alien(1979) are pillars of cosmic horror cinema whose dread modern cinema struggles to replicate. Both take place in isolated spaces and play with themes of trust, survival and fragility of human life, where against the threat presented, you are not a fighter or warrior, you are prey and maybe a survivor if you are lucky.
Alien takes place in the commercial spacecraft, The Nostromo, the crew decides to investigate a distress signal on a desolate moon, bringing aboard a parasitic species called the Facehugger. The birth of the Xenomorph is a masterclass of practical special effects and body horror as the alien pops out of a crewmate’s chest. To execute this scene, the film crew used sheep intestines inside an animatronic body to replicate the insides of a human body, terrifying the audience and actors alike. Other instances of the practical effects in the movie is the decapitated android body which was a mix of milk, pasta, caviar, fiber optics and medical tubing to create android innards. Beside the body horror and gore, the Nostromo interiors were brought to life by physical scale models, hand-made miniatures and atmospheric set design ahead of its time.
Alien succeeds as it fosters a genuine bond between the audience and crew, this chemistry and attachment makes the deaths of the crew and the betrayal of Ash, a crew member revealed to be an android sent to retrieve the Xenomorph and deeming the crew to be expendable, this twist brings up an interesting question, The Xenomorph kills out of pure biological instinct and survival, just as it is a human’s instinct to breath but the corporate overlords had no issue sacrificing their employees over financial incentives, so while the Xenomorph plays the part of the antagonist of the film, who really is the true villain? A question that I will leave for the reader to ponder for themselves. In the end the only remaining survivor Ellen Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver,in a performance as iconic as the Xenomorph, escapes in a shuttle and takes down the Alien for good.
Ridley Scott feared a weak monster design would ruin the film, these worries were put to rest once Ridley Scott was introduced to H. R. Giger and his artwork, who became his first pick for art designer on the film. Alien speaks about sexual violence, bodily invasion and childbirth through its design. The Face Huggers method of forced conception along with the chestburster scene subvert traditional gender roles, forcing the male audience to confront the fear of non-consensual violation and forced pregnancy, experienced by their female counterparts on a regular basis. Coupled with the phallic geometry of the Xenomorph’s skull, the creature’s design plays into the metaphor of sexual violence.
Combined with the imposing Xenomorph and isolating setting, Alien has cemented itself as a horror classic, winning the Academy award for Best Visual Effects, 3 Saturn awards and a Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation. Alien was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. The success of Alien spawned a media franchise of films, books, video games, toys, and even a 2 part Alien vs Predator franchise. Ultimately Alien isn’t your average monster flick, it is a thought provoking and eerily beautiful film that is capable of scaring and aweing you at the same time.
Domestic Paranoia
It can be difficult to scare audiences with ghosts and monsters, since no matter the horror presented, audiences can reassure themselves knowing Pennywise or Freddy Krueger are nothing more than good stories. But is it that far-fetched to believe that someone in our own lives has some secrets? This fear is the premise of domestic horror.
By establishing a threat that lives, eats, sleeps and interacts with you on a daily basis, the security of what had once been a safe space is now ripped away from us. It would be impossible to talk about domestic paranoia or horror history without mentioning Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining(1980), a film with a cultural impact on horror as significant as the impact of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The Shining elevates the subgenre by taking a familial tragedy and intertwining it with commentary on domestic abuse, patriarchy and masculinity through cryptic storytelling and ambiguous supernatural elements.
The story follows Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic who takes a job as the winter caretaker of the snowbound Overlook Hotel, bringing along his wife, Wendy, and young son, Danny. From the beginning, the story establishes Jack’s resentment toward his family, viewing them as hindrances to his career. Shown through a scene where Wendy speaks about an incident where Jack breaks Danny’s arm in an alcohol fueled rage.
The Overlook Hotel, heavily indicated to be a supernatural entity, targets men burdened by insecurity, addiction and inadequacy. Historically the Overlook was a hangout for celebrities, business moguls and politicians, all archetypes of the traditional American patriarch, the league Jack desperately wants to join. The Overlook weaponizes this insecurity along with Jack’s resentment to turn him into a hateful, maniacal madman convinced he needs to murder his family to achieve what he desires.
If the Overlook was the architect of Jack’s descent into madness, it was necessary for its architecture and design to be equally maddening. Artist Juli Kearns created maps of the inconsistencies of the Overlook analysing the film frame by frame multiple times, tracing camera movements, room connections and spatial geometry of the hotel. The spatial inconsistencies of the Overlook include windows leading outdoors when previously established shots indicated a hallway behind the window, doors that lead to nowhere, whole rooms and furniture moving from one place to another or entirely disappearing. This discontinuity was deliberate to show that something was very wrong about this hotel to keen eyed viewers. Other than the confusing architecture, the set was also designed with bright, flat lights, using harsh primary colors making the hotel feel unnaturally sterile and uncanny.
The Shining makes use of the newly developed Steadicam. In the iconic scene of Danny tricycling his way through the Overlook, while the camera follows behind Danny through an impossible layout, where doors open into walls. The physical confusion gives the Overlook more character as a catalyst for the events of the film than just a setting, giving attentive viewers the same sense of mental confusion that Jack experiences. Furthermore, using a smooth Steadicam shot rather than traditional hand-held shaky camera fits the Overlook’s unnatural cleanliness; a messy, shaky shot which are traditionally used to signify disarray would have undercut the perfection of the hotel’s interior.
The cryptic nature of the film’s storytelling and its unwillingness to provide definitive answers to the audience has made The Shining one of the most theorized movies ever. A whole documentary film titled Room 237 directed by Rodney Ascher was made to cover different fan interpretations of The Shining. Room 237 is told through voice overs of people with theories about the film. A theorist believes the film covers American imperialism, as the Overlook is built upon a Native American burial mound. Another theorist believes The Shining is a confession of Kubrick to have been an accessory in the scheme to fake the Apollo 11 moon landing, pointing to the Apollo 11 sweater Danny wears, and the hexagonal carpet pattern resembles the Apollo 11 launch pad. While the creator of the documentary believes the film is not as visionary as suggested by the theorists, he wanted to give a platform to obsessive cinephiles to put their theories out into the world.
The Shining is a Goliath of the genre, still being dissected today into 100’s of iceberg youtube videos, documentaries and essays, it has left an undeniable mark in how horror is meant to be crafted.
To Appease The Gods
Horror thrives in discomfort- especially in shattering or subverting our worldview. Religion and faith are a source of comfort for billions of people during tough times, and when that comfort is twisted into something sinister, it creates a lingering discomfort that allows other elements of horror to shine. That is the reason films like The Exorcist(1973) faced severe backlash and allegations of blasphemy on release. Religious horror can go both ways, though; whereas some films portray religious rituals and authority as saviors against supernatural threats, other films critique religion through stories that speak of doubt, corruption, and loss of faith.
In the latter version of religious horror lies occult horror; instead of dealing with mainstream religious faith and authorities, occult horror is often a critique of religious hypocrisy, misogyny, and class exploitation, where cults are usually composed of wealthy, influential elites.
Occult horror often explores witchcraft, Satanism, spirituality, alchemy, and especially paganism. Paganism is a broad term for diverse non-Abrahamic ideologies, including polytheism and nature-based animism. Historically, there was no group that referred to themselves as Pagan; it was a term coined by Christian groups to lump people of different beliefs and worldviews into one category- non-Christians. The term Pagan originated from the latin word paganus, which meant “villager”, since Christian values travelled through urban centers first, the rural regions still valued traditional beliefs, hence Paganism became a tool of religious elitism for the church.
The history between Paganism and Christianity is why 1973’s The Wicker Man shines. The film directed by Robin Hardy follows Sergeant Neil Howie, a devout christian, who journeys to the remote island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison. Howie is disturbed to find the islanders practicing Celtic Neo-Paganism (Modern revivals of pre-Christian Paganism), with hyper-sexualized fertility rites, nature worship, and a disregard for Christian values. Howie’s research leads him to the ritualistic sacrifice performed by the villagers for crop growth, believing Rowan to be the next sacrifice. In his moral superiority, he becomes blind to the truth of the place, Rowan was never the sacrifice, but merely bait to lure Howie. According to Summerisle tradition, a sacrifice must fulfill four conditions: they must come of their own free will, possess the authority of a king, be a virgin, and act as a fool. Howie unknowingly fulfills all these criteria: he visits the island of his own free will, has the power of a king as a law enforcement officer, is a virgin due to his faith, and acts as a fool by falling for the islanders’ conspiracy, becoming the perfect sacrifice for their ritual. The film concludes in a disturbing sequence of Howie being locked in a giant wicker man and set ablaze as an offering. The film ends with a shot of the sun setting behind the burning wicker man.
This film’s critique of social hierarchy is embodied by Lord Summerisle, the kingpin of the community, while the working-class population of the island believes in the ritualistic sacrifice; Lord Summerisle has a few secrets. The island’s culture was established by Lord Summerisle’s grandfather, a Victorian agronomist, who introduced exotic crops to the town folk and convinced them it was the magic of pagan rituals, allowing him societal control over the populace. While it is left ambiguous whether Lord Summerisle was indoctrinated by his family or a slimy con-man using the pagan tradition as a facade to preserve his family’s control and economic dominance, it is clear that regardless of the truth the outcome would be unchanged.
The film score and music, recorded and partly composed by Paul Giovanni makes the film a rare horror musical. The soundtrack contains 13 folk songs, including traditional folk music, original compositions, and even a nursery rhyme,”Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”. The sound design of the film is diegetic, meaning it is not exclusive to the audience but also present to the characters. The contrast of the islanders breaking into song and dance to joyous melodies as a precursor to ritualistic sacrifice adds to the unease and uncanny horror.
The Wicker Man pioneered a new subgenre of horror, nowadays referred to as “sunlight horror”. Contrary to general horror direction, where nighttime is used as a tension builder and daytime is used as a tension reliever, The Wicker Man almost exclusively takes place during daytime. In fact, Summerisle is a lush, verdant land with colorful flora and open fields. Sunlight horror can be difficult to pull off effectively, as you lose the fear of the unknown, the most traditional suspense mechanism in the genre. Culturally, people equate sunlight to warmth and safety, shifting that comfort requires extreme psychological and tonal work to make a bright day feel ominous.
Widely celebrated as the “Citizen Kane of horror movies,” The Wicker Man won the Grand Prize at the 1974 Paris Festival of Fantastic & Science Fiction Film, earned multiple Saturn Award nominations, and was named one of the greatest British films of all time by the British Film Institute. Its influence on “sunlight horror” and folk cinema lives on today through films like Ari Aster’s Midsommar(2019) and Robert Eggar’s The VVitch(2015).
I Must Sleep, But I Cannot Dream
The term slasher film is quite ill-defined; some believe any film involving murder or gore can be considered a slasher, whereas film analysts have a set of characteristics that categorize slashers separately from other subgenres of horror. A popular interpretation of the definition of a slasher given by Paste magazine is that slashers are or were human beings, whose actions are objectively evil since they are bound by human morality.
Slashers were generally formulaic in nature, usually taking place on or close to the anniversary of an important event related to the killer, built around stalk and murder horror sequences and ending with the final survivor being a girl seen as morally pure among her “delinquent” peer group who eventually overcomes the antagonist, left to process the death of all her peers. Often referred to as the “Final Girl” trope, it has been scrutinized as a patriarchal and puritanical concept majorly abandoned by modern slashers.
The Golden Age of Slashers (1978 – 1984) jumpstarted by John Carpenter’s Halloween(1978) is when slashers received mainstream attention, while most slashers opened to negative reviews, they developed cult followings. Many films reused Halloween’s template of a murderous figure stalking teens through schools, colleges, summer camps etc.
The final triumph of the Golden Age was Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street(1984), A film that follows the formula to the dot. Serial killer hunting teenagers, morality play where sexual promiscuity in teenagers leads to their deaths, leading to the film being classified as a slasher. The film follows teenager Nancy Thompson, and her friends in the town of Springwood, Ohio. Soon her friends are picked off one by one by the supernatural serial killer Freddy Krueger. Freddy attacks in the victims dreams, their deaths translating to reality if they fail to escape. Before he was a supervillain, Freddy was a child murderer who escaped sentencing due to a minor technicality, in anger the victim’s parents burnt him alive. Freddy, now returned as a dream entity, vows to use his powers to enact revenge on the surviving kids and younger siblings of the people who murdered him.
The film’s premise is inspired by the Hmong refugees, who after fleeing to the US after war and genocide in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, suffered disturbing nightmares, and died in their sleep soon after. Medical authorities named this the Asian Death Syndrome. Freddy was initially supposed to be a child molestor, but Craven decided to go with child murder to avoid being accused of exploiting a series of highly publicized child molestation cases that occurred in California at the time. In the director’s words, Freddy is a stand-in for the worst of parenthood and adulthood, the nasty, perverted father figure that would see children die rather than see them prosper, highlighted by his method of hunting, attacking the victim at their most vulnerable, when they are asleep.
The film was brought to life with a multitude of special effects. Special effects designer Jim Doyle designed a 360 degree revolving room set with the interiors bolted to the base, along with a camera to play with gravity during film sequences. Nancy’s friend Tina is killed by being dragged through the walls and ceiling, achieved without computer graphics, just through clever rotation of the set. A scene where Nancy is attacked in a bathtub was achieved by a special bottomless tub, created by putting a whole bathroom set on top of a swimming pool. Other instances of practical effects include using pancake mix to create melting stairs and spandex to make tearable walls for Freddy during the nightmare sequences. Such ingenious and creative methods to overcome subpar graphics technology at the time made the film feel visually stimulating and kept the budget under control.
Despite the controversial nature of slashers, it is evident that Nightmare on Elm Street is a very important film of the subgenre, being the last of the Golden Era of slashers and cementing Freddy Krueger as an iconic slasher villain.
New Rules of the Game
Once slasher films had run their course, audiences caught onto the formulaic storytelling towards the end of the 80’s. Studios and indie filmmakers started to think of slashers as cash grabs, which audiences would flock towards due to their cult followings. The love and care put into these films dwindled as time passed, with studios looking for quick cash interfering with creative crews to ensure lower budgets and development time for practical effects, and inclusion of gratuitous violence and nudity, usually involving teenagers. This escalation led to heavy pushback from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which forced studios to cut practical effects, resulting in low quality theatrical cuts.
In 1996, Kevin Williamson along with Wes Craven, who was a major player and beneficiary of the slasher era with Nightmare on Elm Street, created Scream(1996). They sought to satirize the cliches of the slasher genre. The Scream movies in general satirized the state of horror cinema they came out in. Scream 1 discusses slashers, Scream 2 talks about the rules of a sequel, Scream 3 continues by commenting on the blockbuster-ification of films in the third movie, and Scream 4 released a decade later speaks about relentless remakes of old IP’s years after their release. Wes Craven directed Scream 1 and stuck with the franchise till Scream 4 as his last directorial film.
What sets this movie apart is how instead of ignoring tropes of the genre, the movie builds around them. The characters are aware of the horror movies preceding them, namely Halloween, Wes Craven’s own Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Psycho and many more. Set in the town of Woodsboro, the film follows Sidney Prescott and her classmates, who are being targeted by a masked killer “Ghostface”. In Scream, the characters are not oblivious to the danger, they use their knowledge of genre tropes to create survival strategies and escape the killer.
The brilliance of Scream lies in its whodunnit mystery, which permeates through every character. Ghostface is not a supernatural entity, or a very powerful one. They wear a costume found in any local store, use landlines and have the physical prowess of the average human. The killer even trips on objects, gets hit with objects thrown on them, and bleeds, the story tells us that their threat is someone walking among them, throwing subtle hints at the characters and audience which put every character introduced in the film under suspicion. As this paranoia sets in, each interaction between characters starts to have more meaning than face value, each dialogue becoming a potential clue to the mystery. By giving the audience and characters the same clues, the film keeps viewers guessing the identity of the murder till its final reveal.
Central to the success of Scream is the treatment of its “Final Girl”, Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell. Rather than being a passive, puritanical “Final Girl” who survives purely by luck or moral purity, Sidney is skeptical, and emotionally grounded. She acknowledges her trauma, questions the adults around her, and actively turns the killer’s mind games back against them as the story unfolds.
Scream’s success lies in how it manages to satirize the genre it belongs too without killing the mystery or tension. By respecting its audience’s intelligence, it subverted predictable tropes into smart and engaging plotlines, completely revitalizing and reviving the subgenre and bringing horror back into the mainstream zeitgeist.
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