History of horror films

Horror films are made in order to target the part of the brain that creates a less logical sequence of events. They can tell dark stories about the unimaginable or target the realistic anxieties that we have in life.

The first known horror film is a film called 'Le Manoir du Diable'- which was produced in the late 1890's. Japanese horror is one of the first sub genre of the horror genre to be created. The earliest films date back to 'Bake Jizo' and 'Shinin no Soseis'.

Many books turn into horror films such as the first adaptation of Mary Shelley's book 'Frankenstein' was made in 1910 which followed in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson's book 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' made in 1908.

During the period of 1930-1940 Gothic horror took off with films such as Tod Browning's Dracula and another adaptation of Frankenstein this time by James Whale in 1931. During this period Gothic horror films were sometimes infused with the science-fiction genre to create films such as: 'The Invisible Man' which featured a mad scientist.

During the 1950's-60's the Gothic horror was surpassed by sub genres such as the Demonic film. The film production company 'Hammer' was created during this era. Also the events of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan led to the creation of 'Godzilla'. Peeping Tom made in 1960 was the first of the slasher genre which cemented place as a horror sub-genre with the film 'Psycho'
The 1970's-1980's was the development of the low budget gore films. The 1990's was very similar to the previous years and followed the same genre. Many of the films created during the 70's to 80's got their sequels in the 90's.

During the modern day period of the genre a lot of film companies focus on producing remakes of popular horror films and the production of horror T.V. series such as 'The Walking Dead' and 'American Horror Story' have become ever prominent.

From this research we decided that we would create a horror film which focused on the psychological sub genre as we could scare the audience watching it purely through the use of sound and would not have to focus on the actual killing of anyone. Also horror films predominantly focus on the fears of society at the specific time they are made. Therefore, we decided that we believed this would be a good idea to focus our film on the killer clown craze as it would have still been fresh in the minds of the people and would have meant that they were more scared by the narrative as it was something that had recently happened.