So, as an ethnocentric American horror film fan, I'll stick to my Gene Autry guns with good old Bela and Dracula.
What are the best? While I have some personal favorites, I'll say that the best and most influential films are Lon Chaney's silent Phantom of the Opera, and other classic Universal Studios titles including Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolfman. Hammer Studios' films also revitalized the supernatural horror genre and gave us notable actors like Peter Cushing, Ingrid Pitt, and Christopher Lee.
Films like Night of the Living Dead moved horror in a new direction and gave us the "modern" flesh-eating zombies we all love. Carpenter's Halloween introduced the supernatural slasher that would not be stopped, and Reanimator, with Jeffrey Combs, brought us Lovecraft with a humorously nihilistic twist filled with over-the-top gore. A Nightmare on Elm Street gave us a truly frightening film serial-killing monster in Freddy Krueger, and converted him into the first memorable wisecracking one in the never-ending sequels.
I could go on and on, and there are many influential foreign films that can be added to this list, but Wikipedia is a good place to learn more.
Can you break down the different genres? What are the main differences (if any) between mainstream and B-horror flicks? Is horror global, so to speak?
How many years do you have? Really! Sub-genres equate to variations on a theme. And in horror, you have lots of variations on a theme. For simplicity, I look at it this way: you can break down horror films into supernatural horror, man-made horror, nature-made horror, slasher-psycho-killing-machine horror, creepy freaky aliens from space horror, and splatter-gore horror. Vampires, ghosts, demons, Lovecraftian alien-gods, etc, fit into the supernatural category, though with Lovecraft you can use creepy freaky aliens, too.
Man-made horror encompasses most of the 1950s mutant horrors like giant bugs, and even Frankenstein. You have your mad doctors, mad scientists in the man-made horror category, too. Right now, the slasher-psycho-killing-machine and splatter-gore horror films are in vogue. Unfortunately - I say unfortunately not because they aren't valid horror forms - mostly because the focus is on visually revolting and disgusting effects, not the story.
Zombies fall into the nature-made and supernatural horror categories, though many horror heads would label zombies as a sub-genre, too. I'm not saying you can't do that, but I like to be as broad as possible first, and then narrow down from there. Of course, many horror films overlap in their use of themes or sub-genres. The sky's the limit here. For a great tutorial on horror genres, I recommend reading Tim Dirks' article at Filmsite.org. He touches on the various genres that evolved at various times in the horror time-line, and mentions the associated movies for that genre and period. Very informative reading.
Article comments
1 - Rene
I enjoyed the read. Thanks!
2 - Brad Schader
Great interview with one of my favorite Blogcritics. Thank you for this scary look into the mind of someone who lost his long ago =P.
3 - Kaonashi
Great read! But I wanted to point out that the link to the filmsite.org article is a little messed up.