Horror has been a staple of cinema since it first began. This collection of horror films, culled from the last 20 years, shows just how resilient and diverse the genre has become.
Visionary fantasist Georges Méliès started the trend for horror movies in 1896 with his short ‘The Haunted Castle’. But it was the German Expressionist films ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1920) and ‘Nosferatu’ (1922), and the Universal Studios horror and monster movies in the 1920s and early 1930s, which cemented the genre’s popularity with audiences. There have been landmarks along the way, from ‘Psycho’ and ‘Eyes Without a Face’ (both 1960) to ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968) and ‘The Exorcist’ (1973), and the genre has run the gamut at the box office. But the last 25 years has seen the form go from strength to strength. Not just in English-language cinema. Asian horror has enjoyed spectacular success around the world, with Japanese, Korean and Thai chillers proving equally popular with audiences in the East and West. And if the Internet threatened the future of cinemas generally, for horror filmmakers it has provided a new lease of life, with films like the recent ‘Host!’ not only showing what can be done via Zoom, but also highlighting that even during lockdown things still go bump in the night!
