when was the first scary movie made?
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The first horror movies
The first horror movies appear during the very earliest days of cinema, in the 1890s. Indeed, some of the very first moving pictures, simple street scenes, or a train pulling into a station, caused feelings of horror in audiences. There was something distinctly supernatural about the way people were captured on film, flickering through the same few seconds in time for all eternity.
Here’s how Maxim Gorky describes seeing the Lumière Brothers’ “A Street In Paris” 1896:
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.
If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there — the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air — is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre. Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s cinematograph — moving photography.
Gorky’s review of the Lumière program at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair
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Capturing Ghosts
These early horror films don’t simply appear out of nowhere. They blend many different art forms of the nineteenth century into the new medium of cinema. The visual aesthetic comes, in many cases, from Expressionist painters. The narrative style comes from the special effects laden-phantasmagoria horror theatre of the 18th and 19th centuries (which utilized sounds, smells and magic lantern projections) and the melodramatic plays of the Grand Guignol Theatre Company. These stage productions were, in turn, adapted from the dark imaginings of Gothic literature.
The first horror filmmakers also adopted some of the tricks used by spirit photographers in the 1860s. Spirit photography – the practice of using double exposures or superimpositions to depict ghosts within a frame of film – was discovered by accident by a Boston photographer, William Mumler in 1861. These photographs were valued by Spiritualists (who may have believed the images were real, vindicating their belief in the afterlife)
They were also popular with stage magicians and their audiences, who delighted in fakery as entertainment. Harry Houdini and P.T. Barnum both took delight in exposing(!) the fraudulent images created by their rivals.
The Very First Horror Movies (1890s)
The first horror movies were extremely short, a novelty sequence designed to impress an audience rather than tell a story. One of the very first is titled Le Squelette Joyeux. This fragment was created by the Lumière brothers in the mid 1890s.
The first horror narrative on record is Le Manoir du Diable (1896), created by the visionary Georges Méliès. Although it has a running time of a little over three minutes, this supernatural story still manages to pack in the genre paradigms. Bats, devils, witches, cauldrons, ghosts, trolls all appear and disappear in puffs of smoke.
Horror Movies of the 1900s
Georges Méliès continued to dominate as undisputed master of the spook tale through the 1900s. In his specially constructed glass studio in Paris, he invented many camera modifications and devices to help bring his fantastical visions to the screen. He’s believed to be responsible for many special effects firsts: split screen, double exposure, overlapping dissolves, fades in and out, and stop motion photography. He also used storyboards and color extensively.
The Monster (1903) mixes Egyptology with necromancy. An Egyptian prince hires a magician to bring his dead wife to life so he can gaze upon her one more time. Against an elaborately painted backdrop showing the Sphinx, her skeleton dances to life, turns into a ghoul, then a beautiful woman, before disintegrating into a pile of bones again.
A Timeline of the History of Hollywood Horror Movies
It didn’t take long after the advent of motion picture technology in the late 19th century for filmmakers to dabble in the horror genre, as witnessed by French director Georges Melies’ 1896 short “The House of the Devil,” often credited as being the first horror movie. Although America was home to the first Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde movie adaptations,
the most influential horror films through the 1920s came from Germany’s expressionist movement, with films like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Nosferatu” influencing the next generation of American cinema. Actor Lon Chaney, meanwhile, almost singlehandedly kept American horror afloat, with “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “The Monster,” which set the stage for the Universal dominance of the ’30s.
1896: “The House of the Devil”
1910: “Frankenstein”
1913: “The Student of Prague”
1920: “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”
1920: “The Golem: Or How He Came into the World”
1920: “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
1922: “Haxan”
1922: “Nosferatu”
1923: “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”
1924: “The Hands of Orlac”
1924: “Waxworks”
1925: “The Monster”
1925: “The Phantom of the Opera”
1926: “Faust”
1927: “The Cat and the Canary”
1931: ”Dracula”
1931: “Dracula” (Spanish version)
1931: “Frankenstein”
1931: “M”
1931: “Vampyr”
1932: “Freaks”
1932: “The Mask of Fu Manchu”
1932: “The Mummy”
1932: “The Old Dark House”
1932: “White Zombie”
1933: “The Invisible Man”
1933: “Island of Lost Souls”
1933: “King Kong”
1934: “The Black Cat”
1935: “The Bride of Frankenstein”
1935: “The Werewolf of London”
1941: “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
1941: “King of the Zombies”
1941: “The Wolf Man”
1942: “Cat People”
1943: “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man”
1943: “I Walked With a Zombie”
1944: “The Uninvited”
1945: “Dead of Night”
1945: “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
1948: “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”
1949: “Mahal”
1949: “Mighty Joe Young”
1951: ” The Thing From Another World”
1953: “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms”
1953: “House of Wax”
1953: “Ugetsu”
1954: “The Creature From the Black Lagoon”
1954: “Godzilla”
1954: “Them!”
1955: “Diabolique”
1955: “The Night of the Hunter”
1956: “The Bad Seed”
1956: “I Vampiri”
1956: “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”
1957: “The Curse of Frankenstein”
1957: “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”
1957: “The Incredible Shrinking Man”
1958: “The Blob”
1958: “The Fly”
1958: “Horror of Dracula”
1959: “House on Haunted Hill”
1959: “Plan 9 From Outer Space”
1959: “The Tingler”
1960: “13 Ghosts”
1960: “Black Sunday”
1960: “Eyes Without a Face”
1960: “The Fall of the House of Usher”
1960: “The Little Shop of Horrors”
1960: “Peeping Tom”
1960: “Psycho”
1960: “Village of the Damned”
1961: “The Innocents”
1962: “Carnival of Souls”
1962: “Mondo Cane”
1962: “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”
1963: “The Birds”
1963: “Black Sabbath”
1963: “Blood Feast”
1963: “The Haunting”
1964: “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte”
1964: “Two Thousand Maniacs”
1965: “Repulsion”
1968: “Night of the Living Dead”
1968: “Rosemary’s Baby”
1968: “Witchfinder General”
1971: ” Vampyros Lesbos”
1972: “Blacula”
1973: “The Exorcist”
1972: “The Last House on the Left”
1972: “The Man From Deep River”
1973: “Sisters”
1973: “The Wicker Man”
1974: “Black Christmas”
1974: “Deathdream”
1974: “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”
1975: “Jaws”
1975: “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”
1975: “Shivers”
1975: “The Stepford Wives”
1976: ‘Carrie”
1976: ”The Omen”
1977: “The Hills Have Eyes”
1977: “Suspiria”
1978: “Dawn of the Dead”
1978: “The Fury”
1978: ”Halloween”
1978: “I Spit on Your Grave”
1979: “Alien”
1979: “The Amityville Horror”
1979: “Phantasm”
1979: “When a Stranger Calls”
1980: ”Prom Night”
1980: “The Shining”
1980: ”Friday the 13th”
1981: “An American Werewolf in London”
1981: “The Beyond”
1981: “My Bloody Valentine”
1981: “The Evil Dead”
1981: “The Howling”
1982: “Cat People”
1982: “Poltergeist”
1983: “The Hunger”
1984: “Ghostbusters”
1984: “Gremlins”
1984: ”A Nightmare on Elm Street”
1984: “Silent Night, Deadly Night”
1985: “Demons”
1985: “Fright Night”
1985: “Re-Animator”
1985: “The Return of the Living Dead”
1986: “Aliens”
1986: “House”
1987: “Evil Dead 2”
1987: “Fatal Attraction”
1987: “The Lost Boys”
1987: “Near Dark”
1987: “Predator”
1988: ”Child’s Play”
1988: “Night of the Demons”
1988: “The Vanishing”
1989: “Pet Sematary”
1990: ”Arachnophobia”
1990: “Ghost”
1990: “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”
1990: “Misery”
1991: “The Silence of the Lambs”
1992: “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
1992: “Candyman”
1992: “Dead Alive”
1993: “Cronos”
1993: “Jurassic Park”
1993: “Leprechaun”
1994: “Interview With the Vampire”
1994: “Wolf”
1995: “Se7en”
1996: “The Craft”
1997: ”I Know What You Did Last Summer”
1998: “Blade”
1999: “The Sixth Sense”
1999: “Sleepy Hollow”
2000: ”Final Destination”
2001: “The Others”
2002: “28 Days Later”
2003: “A Tale of Two Sisters”
2004: “Dawn of the Dead”
2005: “Hostel”
2006: “The Host”
2007: ”Halloween”
2008: ”Cloverfield”
2008: ”Let the Right One In”
2008: “Prom Night”
2008: “The Strangers”
2008: ”Twilight”
2009: ”Friday the 13th”
2010: “Black Swan”
2012: “The Cabin in the Woods”
2015: “The Gift”
2016: “10 Cloverfield Lane”
