With Halloween having just crept by, this always feels like the best time of year to dig into the constantly mutating catalogue of horror films – not that I’m really needing an excuse, but it just feels right. Any frequent Letterboxd user will feel the pressure of seeing multiple reviews in a day, naturally expressing the eclectic range of what the genre has to offer. This got me interested in the way that horror has changed over the course of the past hundred years, with the first notable introduction being a film from 1896 that runs just over 3 minutes.

The House of the Devil or Le Manoir du Diable is the name of this film, and it’s directed by French Illusionist Georges Méliès (well-known for creating the most iconic image in cinema, from his film A Trip to the Moon). It’s a pantomimed sketch displaying transformation effects, centering around the character of the Devil and a series of phantoms. Its intention is not technically to scare but rather to amuse the audience and incite wonder, though its setting and characters give enough of a basis for it to be considered the first horror film by many.

It’s also worth adding that this was only a year after the famous incident of the Lumiere film, where the audience believed that the train on screen was really coming at them – so who’s to say that seeing a person transform into a bat was something a general audience wouldn’t find terrifying at the time. The next couple of decades saw Italy’s L’Inferno (1911) in alliance with German expressionist cinema continue to be the only hints at the future of horror. It wasn’t until 1921 that we would get the first big nail in the coffin of what we would call horror today, with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

A film that still holds up pretty well despite it only reaching the age of 100 a couple years ago – and from what I’ve experienced, it feels like the first thing to really tap into that horror formula we’ve come to expect, with the film starting off fairly peacefully and slowly unraveling sinister secrets before big revelations bleed us into the final act, where chaos inevitably ensues. It’s well shot, and there are a few really great effects and moments despite some of them naturally coming off a bit goofy through modern eyes.

Despite Nosferatu’s influence on the creepy films of the 20s, the term horror film still wasn’t codified as a genre until the next decade, following the 1931 release of Tod Browning’s Dracula. Although it was released after cinema’s shift over to talkies (films with recorded dialogue) – it still doesn’t hold up as well as its unofficial counterpart in 1921’s Nosferatu – but it does manage to build onto that growing sense of eerie atmosphere that would become a staple going forward – as well as being regarded as the film to birth the first horror “star” in Bela Lugosi (Dracula).

However, the next year saw Tod Browning’s reputation as a director dip drastically after the release of 1932’s Freaks – which seems to be horror’s first big controversy – in relation to the way the general audiences reacted and showed disgust toward having a cast of people with genuine disabilities portraying the films circus troupe. I personally think the movie holds up pretty well and the biggest issues mainly lie with how the audience reacted to the actors – and just the world in general, with it being banned across the pond for over 30 years in the UK.

Ironically during a period when the United Kingdom were starting to establish their own work in the genre with Hammer Film Productions – which only really took off in the late 50s with The Curse of Frankenstein – and finding success rehashing these classic monster movies was impressive at a time where general paranoia and fears had begun to shift in the wake of nuclear warfare – giving way to a newfound relationship between horror and science-fiction.

A big symbol of this shift would come in the form of the original 1954 Godzilla. A film that is still very poignant and raw in the way it expresses the cultural and mental turmoil that Japan experienced in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. With the film being released not even 10 years after the forever world-shifting event. The film is a good example of how horror can be a powerful outlet for an artist to express their fears, in a meaningful and culturally significant way – moulding a positive expression from unjust pain that gives back a form of control over their collective history.

I feel like this is something we see more so in the modern horror scene, with films like Get Out, It Follows, Titane, etc. – using symbolism in a way that’s able to create conversation around various collective fears, fears that lay far deeper beneath the surface of what is visually happening on screen – and if we were to move 10 years ahead of Godzilla to 1963, we would get some more of this rich interpretive horror with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. A film that I haven’t been able to shake from my mind since seeing that final shot – & where would horror be now without the slasher sub-genre in general, which Hitchcock is also majorly responsible for creating with 1960’s Psycho.

Although, it was only in the 70s that slasher films really found their legs with Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – helping to create a huge turning point in horror, by creating an atmosphere and mood that felt grounded and raw (words you could also use to describe 1973’s The Exorcist, just a year prior) – but the success of these slasher films would cause an eventual downfall for the genre as it limped into the 90s – with the audience getting fatigued by the many unoriginal Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, pressuring the average horror film-maker to give into their low-budget success and lack of creativity.

Fortunately true horror fans like Peter Jackson were on a creative high in the 90s, finding success incorporating comedy into horror with films like 1992’s Braindead (which is loads of fun if you can handle over-the-top gore for laughs) – as well as Wes Craven’s Scream, also incorporating meta-comedy and satire into the washed up slasher sub-genre, allowing new angles of approach to a genre that had become stale and one-dimensional. So as of now, we’re still finding new angles and approaches to tack onto the horror formula, as we collect new fears like Pokemon cards in our current times. With things like social media, virtual reality, presidents scraping together votes on podcasts for meatheads – it’s all quite scary.

At this point we’ve thankfully seen so much of what this genre has to offer, from Midsommar all the way to Scary Movie 5 – so you really have to do something quite special to get the full attention of the audience, and the current known directors that majorly work in horror, Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Yorgos Lanthimos, Julia Ducournau, Jane Schoenbrun (and I would personally also count Jonathon Glazer) – all make very separately unique and high quality work that really feels like they’re each spiraling off into their own unknown territories – so I guess what I’m trying to say after all of this, is that it’s really a privilege to be scared a quarter way through this constantly shifting century in the hands of these artists.