'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,' the first great horror movie, was resolutely original, modernist, even avant-garde.

That wondrous invention, the motion picture, has always been equipped better than any other medium to fulfill one of mankind’s most basic if perverse desires: To face our worst fears, albeit while comfortably secure no actual harm will befall us. Early nickelodeon audiences actually ducked when a bad guy at the end of The Great Train Robbery fired a pistol blank at “us,” terrified then thrilled to experience that all-American fate of being shot dead by an outlaw varmint without actually dying.

Soon even little children understood that these flickering images were simply illusion, however, and having stuff aimed or thrown at the camera ceased to be an automatic thrill. (Not that that stopped the first great wave of 3-D cinema, or its current vogue.) Movies would have to plumb deeper to pleasurably tweak that exposed nerve of fear, moving past everyday, real-world perils toward the actual stuff of nightmares—those private terrors that haunt our sleeping hours from childhood, defying simple explanation but begging interpretation with their funhouse distortions of violence, sex, anything disturbing and/or shameful. The trickery implicit in and available to this new medium made it an ideal vehicle to conjure superstitions, summon monsters of the id, invent its own mythologies of hellish torment, suffocating dread and unnatural enemies.

Thus the horror film was born—though there were plenty of precedents for it in other art forms, none so exhaustively feasted on ghastly fantasy’s potential before or ever since. As a genre, horror continues to get disrespected, taken less seriously in some quarters both popular and critical. Yet what was once a rare exercise in slumming for major Hollywood studios is now a staple production, not infrequently involving front-rank directors and stars. A taste considered anything but universal, causing very few horror films to be made outside a handful of countries, these films are now so widespread that you’d be hard-pressed finding a nation that hasn’t produced its own slasher or zombie flick in recent years.

Early Cinema’s Haunted Screens

Cinema’s earliest flirtations with the macabre were as vaudevillian yet gentlemanly as their depiction in Scorsese’s recent Hugo: The delightful parlor tricks of Georges Méliès, that French pioneer whose mini-spectaculars were terrorizing humanity with ghastly phenomena as early as 1896. That year’s The Haunted Castle alone afflicted its protagonist with vampire bats, skeletons, witches’ cauldrons, white-sheet ghosts and more in under four minutes. It was all in good fun, though, meant to be taken no more seriously than a carnival spookhouse.

'Häxan' is a 1922 quasi-nonfiction with myriad staged sequences documenting the history of the occult so vividly that for many years the film was most often seen in drastically cut form.

Attempts to bring the uncanny to celluloid life in earnest didn’t commence until the 1910s, duly kicked off by the first of umpteen attempts to film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (With Boris Karloff’s 1930s incarnation still our dominating imagination, this Edison Company vision of the Monster looks more like a cross between the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Bigfoot.) The decades also saw early depictions of Dr. Jekyll, the Golem, and other classic literary menaces.

But the first great horror movie was resolutely original, modernist, even avant-garde: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the 1919 film that was revolutionary in form and content. Attempting to place us in the mindset of the insane, it used distorted settings, costumes, and makeup to hypnotic, dislocative effect, introducing German Expressionism—a post-World War I artistic movement encompassing several visual media—as a singular cinematic style influential throughout the Western world. (It was largely responsible for European directors being considered more “artistic” than their U.S. equivalents during the silent era. As a result many were lured to Hollywood studios, then promptly robbed of the imaginative license that had made their talent coveted in the first place.)

The use of German Expressionism in films such as ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ was largely responsible for European directors being considered more ‘artistic’ than their U.S. equivalents during the silent era. As a result many were lured to Hollywood studios, then promptly robbed of the imaginative license that had made their talent coveted in the first place.

Some of the next decade’s great achievements—in horror films or in films, period—followed in those same boldly stylized footsteps. (Aspects of the Expressionist aesthetic would strongly resurface years later with the post-WWII crime melodramas we now call film noir.) Enduring German classics of the period include Paul Wegener’s 1920 The Golem, the most famous version of that tale about a vengeful giant clay statue; Nosferatu (1922), F.W. Murnau‘s haunting, unauthorized (and thus legally suppressed for a time) version of Dracula; Arthur Robison’s 1923 psychosexual nightmare Warning Shadows; Caligari director Robert Wiene‘s possession thriller The Hands of Orlac (1924); and from the same year, Paul Leni’s baroque horror omnibus Waxworks (1924). Elsewhere in Europe, Swede Benjamin Christensen contributed the extraordinary Häxan or Witchcraft Through the Ages, a quasi-documentary with myriad staged sequences documenting the history of the occult so vividly that for many years the film was most often seen in drastically cut form. Danish director Carl Dreyer belatedly ended horror’s silent era—forced to use sound, he nonetheless kept dialogue to a bare minimum—with 1932′s dreamlike Vampyr, a flop that later generations would pronounce a hypnotic masterpiece.

After the decade’s midpoint nearly all these directors found themselves answering the siren call of Hollywood, most for relatively brief stays that nonetheless resulted in striking features like Paul Leni‘s The Cat and the Canary and Benjamin Christensen’s Seven Footprints to Satan—two in the “haunted house” genre that was already usually done tongue-in-cheek, with rational rather than extra-normal explanations at their close.

American audiences of the time more or less demanded such denouements. One thing that separated audiences of the 1920s from those before them was their proud, insistent belief in progress, and skeptical dismissal of any old “hogwash”—like superstitions and folktales. (Draw what conclusions you may from our own era’s renewed, unironic appetite for filmic monsters, fantasy worlds, and superheroics, coinciding as it does with increased religious fundamentalism and scientific apocalypticism.) The visual intoxications of those above-named European productions may have allowed suspension of disbelief, but in general Yank viewers wanted their thrills at least marginally real-world credible.

It was the unprecedented mass horrors of World War I, in a way, that paved the way for the first great U.S. horror star. The child of deaf parents forced into film from theater after a grotesque scandal (his first wife failed at suicide but succeeded in ending her singing career by ingesting mercury chloride), Lon Chaney was a master of pantomime and makeup who achieved fame portraying characters suffering under some grotesque physical disability (or ability): A contortionist in The Miracle Man, legless gangster in The Penalty, razor-toothed faux vampire London After Midnight, armless circus knife thrower (!) in The Unknown, and so forth—to say nothing of his most famous roles as The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Bela Lugosi's Dracula was one of the first great horror performances.

A fine actor, Chaney (who died of lung cancer in 1930 at age 47, after making his sole “talkie”) almost always lent his ostracized figures a deep strain of pathos. It’s been speculated that the mixed pity and repulsion they engendered was somehow cathartic for audiences working through their own issues: The war had sent home a great deal of maimed and disabled soldiers who had trouble fitting back into a rapidly changing modern society.

Sound, which in very short order reshaped the whole industry after the success of 1927′s The Jazz Singer, initially seemed to leave little room for horror. Underdog studio Universal was considered by many to be taking a stupid risk filming the literary chestnuts Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931. Unexpectedly, both became sensations, making respective stars of Bela Lugosi (who’d played the Count on stage) and hitherto little-known Boris Karloff. Their directors, erstwhile Lon Chaney collaborator Tod Browning and British expat James Whale, also benefited from the spectacular success—though like the actors, they grew frustrated by being “typed” as horror/fantasy specialists. (For that and other reasons, each found their careers pretty well over by the decade’s end.)

Underdog studio Universal was considered by many to be taking a stupid risk filming the literary chestnuts ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’ in 1931. Unexpectedly, both became sensations, making respective stars of Bela Lugosi (who’d played the Count on stage) and hitherto little-known Boris Karloff.

Though the resulting horror vogue spread to all major studios, Universal continued leading the pack, sticking with a good thing through such subsequent classics as The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), The Black Cat (1934), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), and The Wolf Man (1940, with Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role).

Drive-ins, Teenagers, and the Atom Bomb

The arrival of the Production Code in 1934 made it more difficult to get macabre subjects past the censors—some of the “pre-Code” horror films had already been banned outright as too grisly in other countries, notably Great Britain. That factor, plus changing audience tastes, contributed to a gradual juvenilization of the form. The 1940s were a low point for the genre: Monsters and fantastical themes were relegated to kiddie serials and Poverty Row “B’s,” when not simply milked for comedy. Universal’s biggest “horror” hit of the decade was 1948′s strictly-for-laughs Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which kickstarted a whole series of spoofs starring that lowbrow duo.

Among precious few exceptions, the most significant were producer Val Lewton’s innovatively suggestive, atmospheric, psychologically complex thrillers for RKO—some overtly supernatural (like Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie), some less so (Bedlam, Isle of the Dead). But despite their unusual finesse and consistent profitability, at the time they were regarded as little more than ghoulishly effective potboilers. When a supportive studio executive died in 1946, Lewton’s services were no longer desired; he suffered a string of further career disappointments before dying himself just five years later.

Three things can be safely said to have come to horror’s rescue in the 1950s: Drive-ins, teenagers, and the atom bomb. The first two were linked, in that the postwar era’s boom in prosperity, car culture, and babies made it logical that the movie industry should start catering to young adults in need of an entertainment (and snogging) space away from prying parental eyes. Drive-in theatres, which began surfacing as early as 1933, provided a madly popular solution.

'Godzilla' (1954) offered serious commentary on Japan's nuclear trauma.

Young patrons didn’t want heavy drama, or anything else that would require their whole attention. Better that the films be formulaic genre items allowing plenty of viewer makeout time between periodic jolts of action, scares, rock music, and sex appeal. New studios like American International Pictures emerged explicitly to fill that demand, cranking out umpteen low-budget exploitation flicks that sometimes launched whole mini-genres (the “beach blanket” musical, biker flicks, etc.).

The A-bomb—along with the Cold War and its U.S.-vs.-U.S.S.R. space race—changed the content of horror films, which now often incorporated sci-fi elements. Monsters were no longer created  by occult forces or mad scientists, but by the imagined mutating aftereffects of radiation exposure, or by malevolent aliens bent on conquering Earth. (The latter were often Martians standing in for the Communist Threat.) Thus arrived The Thing (from Another World), memorably remade decades later by John Carpenter; The Creature from the Black Lagoon; giant ants, tarantulas, crabs, shrews, blobs, and so forth. (This latter trend would arguably reach its lunatic apex with 1972′s Night of the Lepus—yup, giant killer bunnies.) Adding a foreign counterpoint in 1954 was Godzilla, a serious commentary on Japan’s nuclear trauma that proved so popular (both at home and in much-edited versions abroad) that it launched a still-active series too silly and child-targeted to be taken as horror.

Godzilla cast a long shadow in other ways, too: It was one of the first films since the silent era (which naturally suffered little from language barriers) to be widely, popularly exported. Soon several other nations’ movie industries were creating product with a particular eye toward breaking into the lucrative American market, movies whose basic appeal—i.e., sex and violence—translated as easily as their dubbed dialogue. Horror was a natural fit, since little star power or production expense was required—audiences didn’t expect spectacle, just some cheap thrills.  On the other hand, Hollywood did strain some muscles trying to keep viewers away from that damned new domestic usurper, television, deploying everything from CinemaScope and 3-D to the goofy gimmicks of horror specialist William Castle in order to create the “you-can’t-get-this-free-at-home” experiences. The era’s most famous original 3-D film House of Wax as well as several Castle thrillers made suave yet campy Vincent Price the decade’s only notable new U.S. horror star.

The A-bomb—along with the Cold War and its U.S.-vs.-U.S.S.R. space race—changed the content of horror films, which now often incorporated sci-fi elements. Monsters were no longer created by occult forces or mad scientists, but by the imagined mutating aftereffects of radiation exposure, or by malevolent aliens bent on conquering Earth.

An early but aggressive player in realizing the horror genre’s border-crossing appeal was Mexico, whose horror contributions ranged from the atmospheric to the strange and outright silly, not least because they so frequently featured masked wrestling hero Santo. Revival of traditional supernatural suspense (and its brand-name villains) was spearheaded by hitherto horror-skittish England and an upstart studio named Hammer. It was 1931 all over again, albeit in color with a lot more blood, as 1957′s The Curse of Frankenstein and the next year’s Horror of Dracula did for Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Hammer what those stories had once done for Lugosi, Karloff and Universal. (Naturally enough, the latter studio handled  U.S. distribution.) Like their predecessors, those actors too would eventually feel suffocated by their identification with the genre—but they undeniably brought it more skill and nuance than it had seen before.

‘Psycho’ Opens Floodgates

The early Hammer films were considered rather shockingly violent, and with all those Victorian maidens’ heaving, low-cut décolletage as Dracula caved to bloodlust, extremely sexy. But what kicked off the whole 1960s “violence in cinema” debate in earnest was a movie from a prestige director who’d always specialized in suspense but never lowered himself to vulgar horror. Psycho, which fittingly started off a new decade of bloody unrest both on and off-screen, looked like decidedly minor Hitchcock with its modest scale and by now almost incongruous B&W photography. Then Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane—the sympathetic protagonist we fully expected to stick with to the end—was abruptly, savagely, obscenely stabbed to death in her room shower at the Bates Motel, just 46 minutes into the nearly two-hour the film. A new era in horror had dawned.

Janet Leigh's murder in Hitchcock's 'Psycho' marked the dawning of a new horror era.

It was nastier, more brutal, more interested in abnormal psychology than the supernatural, and arguably more misogynist than horror had been before. Partly this was due to the gradual crumbling at last of the Production Code, which had required all films to adhere to one family-friendly standard for acceptable content. By the end of the 1960s it would be long gone, replaced by the current MPAA system of age-restrictive ratings.

The floodgates were opening, and there would be no turning back. It would take a while for extreme gore (pioneered by Herschell Gordon Lewis’ subterranean 1963 Southern drive-in cheapie Blood Feast) and graphic sexual content to penetrate, ahem, the mainstream. But the sexual undercurrents in so much horror would never again be as discreet as they had been, liberated by a “new frankness” reflecting modern audience sophistication, cynicism, and impatience with censorship.

The new horror of the ’60s was nastier, more brutal, more interested in abnormal psychology than the supernatural, and arguably more misogynist than horror had been before. Partly this was due to the gradual crumbling at last of the Production Code, which had required all films to adhere to one family-friendly standard for acceptable content. By the end of the 1960s it would be long gone, replaced by the current MPAA system of age-restrictive ratings.

In the short term, Psycho had the effect of triggering a bazillion “psychological thriller” imitations. Many centered around fragile young men with mother complexes—just like Norman Bates—who turned out to be killing attractive young women in sexual frustration, confusion or something. (Such was the movie psychology of the era: Repressed homosexuality was often taken for granted as a cause for murder—because gays want to be women, right? And the best way to become them is to kill them, right? This kind of thinking would surface in films as late as 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs.) Pretty girls spied upon, undressing, running, screaming, bleeding, dying…this entertainment staple really came into its own in the 1960s, and has been with us ever since. Just try to come up with a few serial-killer type movies in which all the victims are male. Bet you can’t count past the fingers of one hand.

A curious sidebar of the psycho craze didn’t involve comely youth at all, however: When 1962′s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? united veteran stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (who hated each other) as sisters in a grotesque Grand Guignol of madness and murder, its enormous success created a whole subgenre of once-glamorous Hollywood royalty playing crazy old hags or infirm victims. Lasting about a decade, this vogue’s campy highlights include Crawford solo blowout Straitjacket and Tallulah Bankhead as the mother-in-law from hell in Die! Die! My Darling.

These weren’t the only fairly respectable, bigger-budgeted horror titles of the era. Between West Side Story and The Sound of Music, A-list director Robert wise made upscale-spookhouse tale The Haunting (1963); another Academy Award winner, Deborah Kerr, starred in the classic ghost story The Innocents (1961), based on Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw. True-crime horror arrived in the form of major Hollywood productions In Cold Blood and The Boston Strangler. Even bottom-feeding American International let Roger Corman wax more ambitious on a series of stylish Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (usually with Vincent Price), while cut-rate indie productions occasionally surrendered up something special like Herk Harvey’s dreamlike original Carnival of Souls or Dementia 13, an unusually potent Psycho knockoff directed by an unknown named Francis Ford Coppola.

Universal Shock Appeal

Abroad, things got even more interesting. Horror was now perhaps the most widely exportable genre, encouraging the manufacture of myriad mostly cheap ‘n’ cheesy exercises from Mexico, now joined by the Philippines, Spain and Italy, among others. Hammer stuck to its Gothic formula, to eventually diminishing returns (by the late ’70s they’d stopped making features, re-starting the brand just recently with 2012′s The Woman in Black), but the Italians innovated. Mario Bava, now considered one of the great horror directors, created a rare female horror star in Brit Barbara Steele with 1960′s witchy Black Sunday. He then pioneered the “giallo” genre of gory murder mysteries in 1964′s gorgeously shot murder mystery Blood and Black Lace. (Along with the latter, one can view Bava’s 1963 The Whip and the Body, a perverse tale with Christopher Lee, was closer in feel to Corman’s Poe films.)

Mario Bava pioneered the 'giallo' genre of gory murder mysteries in 1964′s gorgeously shot murder mystery 'Blood and Black Lace.'

Prestigious European “art house” directors occasionally dipped into horror, notably with the 1968 omnibus Spirits of the Dead, which consisted of three Poe-derived stories directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini, involving such major international names as Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Alain Delon, and Terence Stamp. After making a splash with his Polish-language films, Roman Polanski went international with the exceptional psychosexual horror Repulsion (1965), then a few years later gave Hollywood its biggest mainstream horror success yet in Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

From Japan, which had started exporting prestige productions in the 1950s, there started to issue a series of visually impressive ghost stories like Kwaidan and Onibaba, though arguably such macabre whatsits as Jikogu (Hell) and Blind Beast proved more interesting. The freewheeling marketplace of the era allowed just about any quasi-horror weirdness to be profitable so long as it didn’t cost much, leading to the emergence of such enduring cult figures as Brazil’s José Mojica Marins aka “Coffin Joe,” Spain’s Jess Franco and Paul Naschy, France’s Jean Rollin, and many more.

By the dawn of the 1970s movies had undergone changes more drastic than any since the switch from silents to sound. Widely accessible hardcore porn was still a couple years away, but otherwise most of the barricades had fallen in terms of depicting graphic violence, nudity, and “mature themes.”

Needless to say, filmmakers serving the exploitation markets took their new freedom and ran with it. Much has been made of the bitter Vietnam War era disillusionment as a political undercurrent running through the most influential independent U.S. horror films of that period, all by youngish directors identifying with the counterculture: George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead—wellspring of a zombie craze that’s stronger than ever—Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and other less famous  but equally distinctive titles. Offering his own weird parallel series of horror films queasily obsessed with the mutating body as symptom of a sick society was the Canadian David Cronenberg (They Came from Within, Rabid, The Brood).

The freewheeling marketplace of the post-Vietnam era allowed just about any quasi-horror weirdness to be profitable so long as it didn’t cost much, leading to the emergence of such enduring cult figures as Brazil’s José Mojica Marins aka ‘Coffin Joe,’ Spain’s Jess Franco and Paul Naschy, France’s Jean Rollin, and many more.

Meanwhile the same-old was still being churned out, from the ebbing Hammer horrors to a new wave of nature-gone-wild thrillers that replaced 1950s radiation-giganticism with creatures created or simply enraged by our pollutive mistreatment of Mother Earth (Frogs, Dogs, Day of the Animals, Lost Weekend, Prophecy, et al.) Italy continued to produce some of the more lurid as well as distinguished exercises in gory suspense, with Dario Argento taking over from Mario Bava as the most stylish auteur working in giallos (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and supernatural shockers (Suspiria), followed by Lucio Fulci and numerous others.

The Age of the Slasher

Despite all this activity, with rare exceptions horror had remained looked-down-upon as strictly “B” fodder by the major studios, despite occasional mainstream successes like the rat-attack-driven Willard (1971) or Brian DePalma’s 1976 Carrie, the latter the first of many, many Stephen King adaptations. But three films of the decade disturbed the wisdom of that attitude. William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist, a deadly serious tale of demonic possession from a bestselling novel, was a pop-culture phenomenon that earned ten Oscar nominations (winning two).

Two years later Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, of which nothing special had been expected, made more money than any movie had previously with a beautifully handled but very basic big-hungry-thing-eats-people premise. (Its unprecedented box-office takings, however, would be trumped all too soon by Star Wars.) Then Richard Donner’s critically dissed but enormously popular The Omen (1976) reinforced the notion that respectable folk could make (and attend) a high-end horror movie without disgracing themselves.

More 'Halloween' than 'Halloween, the 'Friday the 13th' franchise utilized a new horror prototype.

These films were all imitated to varying degrees of shamelessness for years. But the two films that would most influence horror going forward were, respectively, anything but prestigious, and not even “really” a horror movie (or so its makers claimed).

The “slasher” movie had more or less existed before enterprising B filmmaker John Carpenter made 1978′s Halloween, its essential parameters established by cult objects like the aforementioned Blood and Black Lace and the Canadian Black Christmas (by the future director of Porky’s!). But the ingeniously simple gist of youth (primarily female) being stalked and slain by an Unstoppable Killing Machine was Halloween’s own to set in stone. The 1980s were the Age of Slasher, inciting debates about misogyny and violence (as well as the feminist “Final Girl” theory). It saw the launch of long-lasting franchises like the more-Halloween-than-Halloween Friday the 13th franchise, and Nightmare on Elm Street (which commenced the annoying trend of having sadistic killers as wisecracking stand-up comedians), plus countless one-off imitations. It is a testament to Hollywood’s current horror-centricity and lack of new ideas that not only have all those franchises been re-started of late, but practically every 1970s and ’80s horror that might be considered a “classic” has been re-made.

The ingeniously simple gist of youth (primarily female) being stalked and slain by an Unstoppable Killing Machine was ‘Halloween’s’ own to set in stone.

The second, not-exactly-horror late ’70s title that never went away was officially science-fiction, and kept under such wraps that frantically intrigued fans had virtually no idea what they were getting. The poster suggested it would be something in space…with an egg? Once that egg cracked, it turned out Alien was just an old-fashioned hideous-killer-monster-on-the-loose thriller, albeit considerably gussied up by Ridley Scott’s direction and H.R. Giger’s creature design. The latter ensured that future cinematic space monsters would no longer be the silly men-in-rubber-suits of yore, but slimier, more tentacled, mutative, vaguely sexualized, and just plain unpleasant.

Those were the dominant blueprints for post-’70s horror, with occasional shouts from the “Please ancient evil spirit spare my family” formula established by mainstream successes Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror. The really big news of the 1980s wasn’t so much the films themselves as the ways in which they were seen. Drive-ins, sadly, were finally lumbering their way toward extinction, a fate considerably hastened by the arrival of cable TV and home video—two factors that meant the phrases “seeing a movie” and “going out” need no longer be inseparable.

Those new venues needed a lot of entertainment, fast, and for some time the novelty of seeing movies at home made just about anything you could slap in a VHS case marketable. Forgotten B movies were dusted off, and new ones made especially for the rental or cable market. Quality was an infrequent aim. But some wonderful little films that barely played theaters (if they did at all) emerged and gradually built a loyal fanbase to fill this niche, notably Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, Joe Ruben’s The Stepfather, Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher, John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, Bob Balaban’s Parents, James Bond III’s Def by Temptation, and many more.

Meanwhile big-budget films like RoboCop, The Terminator, Gremlins, Predator, and The Abyss brought the horror and sci-fi conventions farther into the mainstream, creating hybrid fantasy action movies aiming to (and often succeeding in) appealing to everybody. And horror crept as a strong influence into idiosyncratic yet hugely popular films no one would have strictly bracketed in that genre, from Tim Burton’s cheerfully macabre fantasies to David Lynch’s surreal mixes of the satirical and sinister. There was still room for ye olden psycho chiller, however: When Glenn Close turned an extramarital quickie into a violent stalker nightmare for poor Michael Douglas in 1987′s Fatal Attraction, she spawned a thousand equally friendly-then-fatal nannies, BFFs, teenage crushes, ad nauseum.

Upending the industry’s concept of her, Close’s performance was something the Academy could not ignore, though it was not until Kathy Bates as the overenthusiastic literary fan in 1990′s Stephen King-derived Misery that a horror film would actually win a leading-actor Oscar. (That was followed the very next year by several scores for Silence of the Lambs.)

Madmen of the Oughts

Whither horror since? It is safe to say that the genre has only grown more broadly popular, more permissible for first-rank talent to work in, more fully integrated into movies that aren’t exactly “horror” but couldn’t exist without its key ideas or even characters: Superhero cinema, for starters. (While it probably would have shocked filmgoers in the medium’s first half-century to know how far the lowly horror film would go in terms of future mass appeal, imagine their reaction if told that 21st-century audiences of voting age would be crazy for movies based on comic books.) Some significant newer directors have done nothing but projects at least tangentially horror related, from Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro to the less lofty likes of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth.

The satirically self-aware meta-horror school that surfaced memory in the first 'Screams'seemed fresh again in 2012 with 'The Cabin in the Woods.'

This pervasiveness hasn’t necessarily made horror cinema more adventuresome. Indeed, it sometimes seems no movie is too classic, obscure, or just plain bad to remake in triplicate. Computer-generated FX, which in theory can depict anything that the imagination conjures, have instead too often simply trapped horror (esp. fantasy horror) as well as other genres in derivative excesses of diminishing returns. Needless to say, that encompasses anything based on a videogame, like the unending Resident Evil and Underworld series. Will anyone ever make a horror film that uses 3-D as more than a gimmick, with the completeness of design in Hugo? (If anyone’s looking for a franchise ripe for that particular experiment, we’d suggest reviving the Clive Barker-derived twisted Hellraiser.)

Yet audiences at present seem almost insatiably tolerant of the familiar in horror, even more so when it’s bent to fit even hoarier dramatic conventions. Vampires have always had a certain sexual allure, but who could have guessed that a spoof (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie) would beget a semi-serious TV serial (BTVS, the series) that would midwife juvenile romance literature (Twilight—oh yeah, we’ve heard Stephanie Meyer claim her real inspirations as Jane Austen, Shakespeare, etc.), which would spawn a swooning movie franchise, that would in turn enable a slightly more mature, considerably sexed up cable soap (True Blood). Don’t even get us started on vampire porn—or on “torture porn,” either. That latter subgenre of horror films emphasizing sadism over anything else, which peaked with the Saw and Hostile franchises, mercifully seems to have run its course—though you have to give the out-there Human Centipede films credit for stubbornly dragging it onward where nobody really wanted to go.

Successive vogues for Japanese and Spanish horror brought an emphasis on atmospherics back to the genre. Just when the ‘found footage horror’ trend started by ‘The Blair Witch Project’ seemed completely tapped out, the ‘[Rec]‘ and ‘Paranormal Activity’ series put new spins on it, and neither has run out of ideas yet.

Then there’s the unexpected hugeness of zombie culture, which never really went away after Romero’s original Living Dead, but got a major shot in the arm a decade ago from the twin revisionist British assaults of satirical Shaun of the Dead and serious 28 Days Later (fast zombies—the horror!). There’s been no letup since, from myriad more feature takes both comic and sober around the globe to TV’s The Walking Dead. Next up: Improbable bestselling lit (World War Z, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) coming to a big screen near you, with and without the added terror of Tom Cruise.

If originality too often seems to run against the grain of the horror marketplace, there have thankfully been exceptions. Successive vogues for Japanese and Spanish horror brought an emphasis on atmospherics back to the genre. Just when the “found footage horror” trend started by The Blair Witch Project seemed completely tapped out, the [Rec] and Paranormal Activity series put new spins on it, and neither has run out of ideas yet. Interchangable-teens-in-peril slasher flicks got rejuiced with the Final Destination series, with its clever Rube Goldbergian means by which cruel fate finds its prey. The satirically self-aware meta-horror school that surfaced memory in the first Scream seemed fresh again in The Cabin in the Woods, with its multilayered collision between Evil Dead and The Hunger Games.

More horror films are produced each year today than probably ever before. From major studio releases to the most shoestring direct-to-download fan project, a majority are clock-punching exercises that recycle familiar ideas without much inspiration—and sometimes without much competence, either. Still, there have been encouraging signs, like the deployment of horror tropes in critically lauded, genre-defying films from around the world like del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and Chan-wook Park’s Thirst.

Then there are the number of talented rising directors who’ve emerged from indie roots and so far managed to avoid being homogenized by their variable degrees of commercial success. That would include Brits Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday), James Watkins (Eden Lake, Woman in Black) and Christopher Smith (Severance, Black Death). Yanks worth watching include Ti West (House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), Adam Wingard (Pop Skull, You’re Next) and the three writer-directors behind The Signal (David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry). Farther afield, Australia’s Sean Byrne and Mexico’s Jorge Michel Grau have made such promising first features—The Loved Ones and We Are What We Are, respectively)—that one can hardly wait to see what they do next.

Cinematic history has seen a few once-invincible genres fade from favor, like the musical and western. Yet it seems safe to say that horror will endure as long as the medium itself exists. At the very least, it offers the comfort of schadenfreude in bleak times: No matter how bad the environment, economy, political landscape and whatnot gets, there will always be celluloid monsters and madmen to reassure us that things could indeed be even worse.

Dennis Harvey writes for Variety, Film Comment, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, among other publications.

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