by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Blog
When I was about 13 or 14, I developed a intense fascination for horror and gore. I read the Goosebumps books – which were FUCKING terrifying – and I started writing short horror stories too, most of which consisted predominantly of gore and slasher iconography in general, but also a few which were a little more ‘slow burn’, and perhaps erring on psychological thriller territory. They still ended with blood and guts, though.
I distinctly remember giving my mother a story to read while she was washing up in the kitchen. I must have been about 13 years old. She looked at me for a moment, then, tiredly, said:
“Is this another horrible one?”
Indeed, it was.
During that time, I also had an obsession with watching horror trailers. I hadn’t seen that many horror films, but when I got back from school and had finished messaging my friends on MSN (on the family computer), I would go onto YouTube and type in ‘horror trailers’, then watch them one after the other, freaking myself out in the process.
I have come to learn that many people go through similar experiences around this age. I think it must be something to do with the beginning of a realisation about mortality and the terrible things that go on in the world, but approached through a more digestible form – fiction.
So, in case you hadn’t guessed, this essay is about horror, and specifically the possibility that we are encountering a renaissance of horror film in popular culture. If this is the case – why?
PART 1: A (BRIEF) HISTORY OF HORROR
Horror has consistently intrigued me throughout my life because it’s one of the only genres that can readily broach like all social and cultural taboos and fears in relative ‘freedom’. Incest, possession, exorcism, cannibalism, rape, torture, dismemberment, sex, tradition, witches, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, night, religion, evil children, the afterlife, the demonic, death, ageing, aliens, monsters, things under the bed – it’s all free game in the horror genre.
We’ve been terrifying ourselves with terrible stories of the night since the dawn of time. Something in us is drawn to the terrifying, the horrible, the unimaginable. Even my sister, who has a distinct aversion to horror films, had a morbid obsession with death and illness when she was younger.
Just like I began my horror obsession with literature, it is literature that first broached tales of bumps in the dark. They began around candlelight, bringing to mind Ragnar of Hylnur Palmasson’s ‘Godland’, played by Ingvar Sigurdsson, who, sat beside the fire, recounts a terrible tale of a man awoken in the night by the shrieks of eels.
Around the year 1000, Pliny the Younger wrote the story of Athenodorus Cananites, a man who purchased a haunted house in Athens then was visited by a ghost. Some time later, Dante’s Divine Comedy (1310) was published, where we encountered the nine circles of the pit of hell with all its demons and monsters.
Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’, published in 1764, has long been cited as the first abject ‘horror’ novel (erring on the Gothic), a story about haunted castles, ghosts, and murder.
In Japan, ghost stories prevailed throughout the Edo and Meiji Periods (early 1600s to the early 1900s), stories known as Kaidan (or ‘strange story’). These included works by Asai Ryoi, a Shin Buddhist Priest, notably Otogi Boko, a series of 68 short scary stories.
During the Edo period, we also saw Katsushika Hokusai (who you will know from his painting ‘The Great Wave Off Kanagawa’) produce horror paintings based on folk tales that later influenced horror films, notably a painting of the ghost of Okiku, a servant girl who is killed and thrown in a well, only to re-emerge to torment her killer. This story was immortalised in a novel by Koji Suzuki, ‘Ring’, published in 1991, which became the cult classic film ‘The Ring’ or ‘Ringu’ by Hideo Nakata in 1998.
Just over a hundred years later, and hundreds of horror stories later, we saw the first ever horror film come to our screens.
NYFA cites ‘Le Manoir du Diable’ (1896) as the first horror movie, stating:
“Just a few years after the first filmmakers emerged in the mid-1890s, Mellies created “Le Manoir du Diable,” sometimes known in English as “The Haunted Castle” or “The House of the Devil,” in 1896, and it is widely believed to be the first horror movie. The three-minute film is complete with cauldrons, animated skeletons, ghosts, transforming bats, and, ultimately, an incarnation of the Devil.”
In Japan, two anonymously directed horror films were created two years later – Bake Jizo (Jizo the Spook) and Shinin no sosei (Ressurection of a Corpse) (1898).
In 1910, the first version of Mary Shelley’s novel ‘Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus’ (1818) came to our screens in Thomas Edison’s ‘Frankenstein’, starring Charles Ogle as ‘The Monster’.
The 1920s to 30s have long been stated as ‘The Golden Age of Horror’, and included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (directed by Robert Wiene, 1920), a silent German horror of a somnambulist who makes terrifyingly accurate predictions, and the inimitable Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), a silent German expressionist film directed by F. W. Murnau, which I recently saw on the big screen at The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, accompanied by a live score. Nosferatu was the beginning of our insatiable obsession with vampires on screen, and it is of no surprise to me that a remake is coming to our screens later this year.
PART 2: HORROR MIRRORING LIFE
After the end of WWII, and after the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, Japanese horror reflected on the horrors of warfare, notably in the film ‘Onibaba’ (1964), a horror directed by Kaneto Shindo which follows a woman and her mother-in-law as they try to survive a civil war.
Horror often represents current sentiments about the world at large, about societal fears and current events. In ‘A History of Horror’, Wheeler W Dixon mentions Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 horror, ‘Le salaire de la peur’ (the wages of fear), writing:
“Clouzot’s tale of four desperate men struggling to truck two loads of unstable nitroglycerine over treacherous mountain roads in a South American jungle [] is a film of almost unbearable tension and unremitting humanist despair, a real-life horror story with capitalism as the film’s clearly defined villain.” (page 71).
Silviya Y for Indigo Music writes that “In the 1970s and 80s, the [horror] genre took a turn towards more visceral and psychological fears. Films like ‘The Exorcist’ (1973), ‘Halloween’ (1978), and ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ (1984) tapped into fears of societal breakdown, the loss of innocence, and the dangers lurking within the suburban ideal. These movies reflected growing concerns about crime, mental illness and the breakdown of the nuclear family. […] The post-9/11 era has seen a surge in films that deal with themes of terrorism, existential threats, and the erosion of trust in institutions. For instance, movies like ‘The Purge’ (2013) and ‘Get Out’ (2017) explore themes of societal collapse, racial tension and class warfare, highlighting the underlying fears and divisions within contemporary society.”
In an increasingly capitalistic and individualistic world, I think that it is no coincidence that we are seeing increasing number of horror films delve into more personal fears, such as fears about the future and an increased distrust of ‘strangers’ and technology, such as AI and the rise of 24/7 surveillance in our streets and our homes.
PART 3: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HORROR
This year at Cannes, we saw the success of Coralie Fargeat’s body horror feature, “The Substance”, which was nominated for the Palme D’Or and which won best screenplay. The story follows the star of an aerobics show (Lizzie, played by Demi Moore) who gets fired on her 50th birthday due to her being too old. When she goes home, devastated, she receives a proposal from a mysterious laboratory which offers her a ‘substance’. If she injects it, she will turn into the ‘best’ version of herself – “younger, beautiful, more perfect”.
To my mind, this film is the perfect analogy for our times. Over on TikTok, we are seeing girls younger than 12 using anti-ageing creams and conducting 10-step beauty routines, and women as young as 20 having baby-Botox to avoid getting wrinkles later down the line. The message is: if we do not look young, then we are not beautiful.
Here is a film, ‘The Substance’, satirising our societal obsession with the visual, with young women and young bodies. And it’s written by a woman, which cannot be said for most contemporary horror films.
On ‘Stephen Follows: Decoding The World Through Data’, Stephen writes that, of all feature films which opened in US Cinemas from 1988 to 2017 (a total of 11,848 films), only 9.9% of directors were women. Only 5.9% of all horror films released during this time had female directors.
One of the reasons why this is particularly crazy to me (aside from the obvious – there is a massive inequality gap between men and women in cinema) is because of the massive percentage of horror films that centre on a female protagonist.
Rebecca Sun for The Hollywood Reporter writes that:
“Male-speaking characters outnumbered their female counterparts 63 percent to 37 percent in the 100 highest-grossing domestic films of 2022”
But also that “Interestingly, horror movies were much more likely to have female leads (43 percent of female protagonists appeared in scary films) than male (just 4 percent of male leads did).”
I believe that the reason for this is because of the fact that the protagonists in horror are victims against a terrible force – be it a monster, serial killer, ghost, vampire, etcetera – but, most often, it is a man, or a creature that tends to be widely recognised as a male entity. So it’s women, against men. It seems only logical, then, that horror would be a particularly popular genre amongst women. And it is. CiviService reported in 2017 that 62% of horror fans are women.
Mallory O’Meara, novel writer and women’s advocate, comments on the reasons for the popularity of the genre amongst women:
“Women are the most important part of horror because, by and large, women are the ones that horror happens to. Women have to endure it, fight it, survive it – in the movies and in real life. They are at risk of attack from real-life monsters. In America, a woman is assaulted every nine seconds.”
Horror films are quite often sexually charged, too – an obvious example would be “X”, a story about a group of fame-hungry actors who make an adult movie. Then we could mention ‘that’ shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Pyscho’ – the literal murder of a naked woman (Janet Leigh).
Listen – I’m not like saying these are bad films, or that it’s bad to make use of women’s sexuality in films. In fact, it would be my dream to play a ‘Scream Queen’ one day, so I’m not saying the trope is necessarily a bad thing either. But I certainly think it interesting that female fear is made use of so regularly by male directors in the horror film industry.
PART 4: IS THERE A HORROR REVIVAL OCCURRING?
I have sensed a big resurgence in horror, especially in recent years, perhaps due to horror’s seeming ability to adapt to current sentiment more easily than other genres, like action and romantic comedies. Jen Yamato for The Washington Post states:
“horror is now the fastest-rising film genre, having doubled its market share from 4.87 percent in 2013 to 10.08 percent in 2023”
She writes: “A decade ago, an audacious trio of convention-shirking horror films signalled a tectonic shift in genre storytelling…It started with Jennifer Kent’s “The Babadook” (2014), which personified grief as a storybook monster and ushered in an era of heavy psychological symbolism […] And […] “Get Out” (2017), nominated for four Academy Awards including best picture, kicked open Hollywood’s doors for Black horror narratives and overt social commentary while winning writer-director Jordan Peele the Oscar for best screenplay.”
She continues:
“Horror went majorly mainstream in the years that followed, flexing both commercial muscle and art house allure. […] Deliberately paced horror films with bursts of terror, such as David Robert Mitchell’s “It Follows” (2015), Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” (2018) and “Midsommar” (2019) […] edged the frontiers of art house horror outward, attracting cult followings in the process. Even the 2019 success of Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean thriller “Parasite,” winner of four Oscars including best picture, signaled that the awards elite had become increasingly receptive to darker genre narratives.”
I believe the renewed interest in horror by a wider audience has been aided in part by the popularity of ‘Stranger Things’ as a kind of gateway into ‘harder’ horror. During and after lockdown, people were wanting to watch things that deflected away from the horrors that they’d experienced in their own lives. Maybe that’s a stretch, but it’s kind of plausible. Horror has often been regarded as ‘escapism’, because, in the end, real life and its real horrors are what keep us up at night, not Freddie Kruger.
PART 5: LOW-BUDGET HORROR
Part of horror’s appeal for filmmakers is that it has historically rejected the need for star-studded casts and high-budgets. ‘Skinamarink’ by director Kyle Edward Ball, was released in 2022 and was made for a mere $15,000, and grossed $2.1 million at the box office. Compare that to 2023’s ‘The Marvels’ which was made for $455 million and grossed only $218 million at the box office. This is just one example, but the majority of major feature films are made for 10s to 100s of millions of dollars – it has become the norm.
‘Skinamarink’, ‘It Follows’ (David Robert Mitchell), and ‘Enys Men’ (Mark Jenkins) – are all films that have proven incredibly successful at the box office, and with audiences – ‘It Follows’ remains one of my favourite horror films – despite their lack of recognisable faces and their exceedingly low budgets. In horror, it seems, audiences want to watch a film that tells a compelling story, a story that scares us and gets under our skins in creative, innovative ways, rather than films that simply rely on celebrity faces to spearhead them and create ‘hype’. This makes horror an incredible medium for actors and filmmakers starting out in the film industry.
Horror is a place for experimental freedom, for creativity to prevail in the face of empty wallets and scant crews. That is why I love it.
IN CONCLUSION
I would like to leave you, dear reader, with a quote from Mike Muncer of ‘The Evolution of Horror’ podcast, who states:
“Horror will always be extremely popular with audiences, and one of the most commercially successful and lucrative genres in cinema, but it will always remain the black sheep, the weirdo little brother, of cinema as well.”
“It is having a moment right now, and it is getting a certain amount of prestige, but horror is punk, and punk can’t be mainstream.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
=========
The homepage for this Carl Kruse blog is at https://carlkruse.at
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Has Rave Culture Died, Dark Suburbia, and Grimes.
Also find Carl Kruse on Buzzfeed.
