- The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by the film pioneer

Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the best known being Le Manoir du diable, which is sometimes credited as

being the first horror film

- The second monster appeared in a horror film: Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame, who had appeared in

Victor Hugo's novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Films featuring Quasimodo included Alice Guy's Esmeralda

(1905), The Hunchback (1909), The Love of a Hunchback (1910) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1911).

- German Expressionist film makers, during the Weimar Republic era and slightly earlier, would significantly

influence later films, not only those in the horror genre. Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920) and Robert Wiene's

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (also 1920) had a particular impact.

- Hollywood dramas used horror themes, including versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The

Monster (1925) both starring Lon Chaney, the first American horror movie star.

- During the early period of talking pictures, the American Movie studio Universal Pictures began a successful

Gothic horror film series. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi, was quickly followed by James

Whale's Frankenstein

- Some of these films blended science fiction with Gothic horror, such as Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) and,

mirroring the earlier German films, featured a mad scientist. These films, while designed to thrill, also

incorporated more serious elements. Frankenstein was the first in a series which lasted for many years, although

Karloff only returned as the monster in Bride of Frankenstein.

- Other studios followed Universal's lead. Tod Browning made the once controversial Freaks (1932) for MGM,

based on "Spurs", a short story by Cintia Gomez, about a band of circus freaks. The studio disowned the

completed film after cutting about 30 minutes; it remained unreleased in the United Kingdom for thirty years.

- With advances in technology, the tone of horror films shifted from the Gothic towards contemporary concerns. Two

sub-genres began to emerge: the horror-of-armageddon film and the horror-of-the-demonic film.

- A stream of (usually low-budget) productions featured humanity overcoming threats from "outside": alien invasions

and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects. In the case of some horror films from Japan, such as Godzilla

(1954) and its sequels, mutation from the effects of nuclear radiation were featured.

- Filmmakers continued to merge elements of science fiction and horror over the following decades. Considered a

"pulp masterpiece"[11] of the era was The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), from Richard Matheson's existentialist

novel. While more of a science-fiction story, the film conveyed the fears of living in the Atomic Age and the terror of

social alienation.

- During the later 1950s, Great Britain emerged as a producer of horror films. The Hammer company focused on the

genre for the first time, enjoying huge international success from films involving classic horror characters which

were shown in color for the first time.

- The end of the Production Code of America in 1964, the financial successes of the low-budget gore films of the

ensuing years, and the critical and popular success of Rosemary's Baby, led to the release of more films with occult

themes during the 1970s. The Exorcist (1973), the first of these movies, was a significant commercial success, and

was followed by scores of horror films in which the Devil represented the supernatural evil, often by impregnating

women or possessing children. The genre also included gory horror movies with sexual overtones, made as "A-

movies“.

- The ideas of the 1960s began to influence horror films, as the youth involved in the counterculture began exploring

the medium. Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

- Also in the 1970s, the works of the horror author Stephen King began to be adapted for the screen, beginning with

Brian De Palma's adaptation of Carrie (1976), King's first published novel, for which the two female leads (Sissy

Spacek and Piper Laurie) gained Oscar nominations.

- In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued many of the themes from the 1980s. The slasher films A

Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween and Child's Play all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which

met with varied amounts of success at the box office, but all were panned by fans and critics, with the exception of

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) and the hugely successful Silence of the Lambs (1991).

- Two main problems pushed horror backward during this period: firstly, the horror genre wore itself out with the

proliferation of nonstop slasher and gore films in the eighties. Secondly, the adolescent audience which feasted on

the blood and morbidity of the previous decade grew up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative

nature were being captured instead by the explosion of science-fiction and fantasy films, courtesy of the special

effects possibilities with advances made in computer-generated imagery.

- To re-connect with its audience, horror became more self-mockingly ironic and outright parodic, especially in the

latter half of the 1990s.

- The start of the 2000s saw a quiet period for the genre. The release of an extended version of The Exorcist in

September 2000 was successful despite the film having been available on home video for years.

- There has been a major return to the zombie genre in horror movies made after 2000. The Resident Evil video game

franchise was adapted into a film released in March 2002. Six sequels have followed. The film I Am Legend

(2007), Quarantine (2008), Zombieland (2009), and the British film 28 Days Later (2002) featured an update on the

genre with The Return of the Living Dead (1985) style of aggressive zombie.

- A larger trend is a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-

budget, exploitation horror from the post-Vietnam years. Films such as Audition (1999), Wrong Turn (2003), and the

Australian film Wolf Creek (2005), took their cues from The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chain Saw

Massacre (1974), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

- An extension of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with emphasis on depictions of torture, suffering

and violent deaths, (variously referred to as "horror porn", "torture porn", "splatterporn", and "gore-nography") with

films such as Ghost Ship (2002), Eight Legged Freaks (2002), The Collector, The Tortured, Saw, Hostel, and their

respective sequels, frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this sub-genre.