What is horror?

A horror film is something that is created to scare people, they have different purposes, they are able to deliver thrills as well as telling stories about the dark side of life, regularly relating to death.

The codes and conventions of horror are many of the obvious thoughts, for example: blood, death, murder, evil, ghosts, torture, violence, vampires, werewolves, gore, zombies, disease, demons.

Nosferatu (1922) is a typical horror film, not only does it tell the story of a vampire, it has the ability to scare the audience through the random deaths.

As the decades go on, horror films change. In the early 1940s, during Hitler’s power, many beasts appeared part wolf, part man which was known as the ‘boogeyman’.

However as time went on, the 1990’s created more realistic style horror films such as se7en in 1994 and silence of the lambs in 1991. The style of deaths in these films were more realistic, showing more of the horror factor as the audiences realise things like this have the possibility to happen to them and it is not just fictional.

Most recently however, many film makers of horror films have reverted back to ‘ghost’ and ‘zombie’ style films as audiences supposedly want more evilness.