From Silent Screams to Modern Terror: A History of Horror Films
Updated: 5 days ago
Explore how horror evolved from ancient ghost stories and Gothic literature into the global, genre-bending films that still scare us today.
Happy Spooky Season!
It's no secret—Halloween is my favorite time of year! It shouldn't surprise anyone who casually lurks on this blog that I love Halloween. Like, a lot. Maybe a little too much? But I can't help it! Give me a weird old house, a creepy soundtrack, something lurking just outside the frame, and a perfectly timed jump scare, and I'm probably having a great time, even if my eyes are closed.
But one of the things I love most about horror isn't just being scared. It's wondering why we get scared in the first place.
Why do certain monsters keep coming back? Why are we fascinated by ghosts, vampires, zombies, and serial killers? Why does one generation's terrifying movie become another generation's campy classic? And just how did we get from watching flickering images of a devil seemingly appearing out of thin air on a cinema screen to watching horror films about everything from A.I. to pandemics, social media, and the internet?
Well, the short answer is that horror has always evolved alongside us.
What frightens us has changed over time, but some genuine fears remain surprisingly persistent. Death. The unknown. Losing control. Being watched. Being trapped. The possibility that something we assumed was safe might not be so safe after all.
As someone passionate about film and history, I've always been fascinated by the ways movies and pop culture reflect, influence, and connect with the world around us. So, with Halloween right around the corner, let's take a trip through the history of horror films—from ancient ghost stories and Gothic literature to the earliest days of cinema, Hollywood's monster movies, slashers and zombies, international horror, streaming, and the wonderfully strange and intersectional era we're experiencing today.
Quick disclaimer before we begin: this isn't intended to be a definitive history of horror cinema. Horror is way too big, too weird, and too wonderfully complex for one blog post to cover everything. Think of this as a quick guided tour of some of the major movements, films, filmmakers, and ideas that have shaped the genre. And, if you’re interested in doing a deep dive on your own, I've linked additional resources below.
Now, because I'm a history nerd, I couldn't resist going back before Hollywood—or, honestly, even the twentieth century—even existed. So let's take a closer look at this popular genre's ancient origins.
Before the Movies: Ancient Ghost Stories & Gothic Fears
Long before audiences could collectively scream together in a movie theater, people huddled around fires, gathered in sacred places, or convened in a theatron to tell stories meant to scare and delight one another. Throughout human history, we've used storytelling to entertain, educate, and explain the unknown. Every civilization has passed down oral histories to explain everything from weather phenomena and the creation of landmasses to the human body and the unknown beyond death. However, the most popular campfire stories were about the dark and mysterious.
Ghost stories, monster legends, accounts of the dead returning to haunt the living, and tales of supernatural forces have appeared across cultures and throughout recorded history. Some of the earliest known examples of ghost stories date back to ancient Rome. One of the oldest surviving accounts comes from Pliny the Younger, a Roman author and statesman. In his letters, Pliny recounted how the specter of an elderly man with a long beard and rattling chains haunted his house in Athens. The apparition's presence was said to disturb the entire household, giving the story many of the elements that have continued to define ghost stories across the ages.
Scholars believe recounted "visitations" from the deceased helped instill respect for the dead, almost like a ghost-story fable. The tradition of ghost stories also helps explain the different death rites and funeral rituals across cultures and societies. Despite attempts to rationalize our greatest mystery—death—ghost stories grew darker and more wicked. Oral histories inspired folklore, which in turn gave rise to urban legends.
But whether or not anyone actually believed these ghostly tales is kind of beside the point. Their importance lies in the elements they brought together: an unexplained event, an unnatural force, and a protagonist driven by a desperate need to understand what is happening. Those ingredients were already laying the groundwork for horror as we know it today.
Centuries later, Gothic literature would give many of those fears a new home.
Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, is often credited with helping establish the Gothic novel as a literary genre. Set in a brooding castle haunted by supernatural forces, the story weaves together family secrets, ominous events, and mounting dread. Its blend of mystery, fear, and the uncanny helped shape a distinctive storytelling tradition that influenced generations of writers—and eventually filmmakers.
Then came a parade of literary monsters and troubled outsiders who are still familiar to movie audiences today.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, raised questions about scientific ambition, creation, responsibility, and the consequences of human beings attempting to play God. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) explored vanity, corruption, and the frightening consequences of getting exactly what you want. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) transformed the vampire into one of pop culture's most enduring monsters.
And Gothic storytelling wasn’t confined to works that were overtly supernatural. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), for example, isn’t usually shelved alongside horror novels in libraries or bookstores. Yet its ghosts, consuming obsession, isolation, violence, and desolate atmosphere give the novel a distinctly Gothic character. These elements also show how difficult it can actually be to separate Gothic fiction, romance, and horror. A work may belong to more than one tradition, even if it is traditionally classified as something else.
That blurriness matters because horror has never been confined to a neatly defined genre.
Its boundaries have always shifted, overlapping with other forms of storytelling and evolving with each work and interpretation. Wuthering Heights is a clear example; Brontë’s novel has fascinated readers for generations and inspired many adaptations and retellings. Each version can highlight a different side of Heathcliff and Catherine’s story: one may focus on romance, another on desperation, and another on how truly frightening obsession can be.
Wuthering Heights (1920) Wuthering Heights (1939) Wuthering Heights (1970) Wuthering Heights (1992) Wuthering Heights (2026)
A story doesn't necessarily need a monster to frighten us. Sometimes, the source of fear is another person; sometimes, it is grief, obsession, illness, isolation, technology, or social pressure. It may even be the unsettling possibility that we understand the world far less than we think we do.
Cinema would eventually give storytellers an entirely new way to play with those fears, bringing them to life through images, sound, and movement.
The Devil Gets His Close-Up: The Birth of Horror Cinema
If you've ever wondered what the first horror movie was, look no further than Georges Méliès's Le Manoir du Diable, or The House of the Devil, released in 1896.
And yes, you read that right: 1896.
Film history sometimes feels like it begins with Hollywood, but Hollywood wasn't even a film-industry powerhouse yet. Motion pictures themselves were still an astonishingly new invention. The Lumière brothers had presented their pioneering motion-picture screenings in 1895, and early filmmakers like Alice Guy-Blaché, William K.L. Dickson, and Tsunekichi Shibata were still discovering what this new medium could actually do.
Enter Georges Méliès.
A French magician and stage performer, Méliès quickly realized a film camera could do what a stage magician could only dream of: make the impossible appear to happen right before an audience. He experimented with substitution tricks, multiple exposures, forced perspective, elaborate sets, and other visual effects that transformed filmmaking into a kind of cinematic magic.
And in The House of the Devil, he put those tricks to spooky use.
The short film features a devilish figure, skeletons, ghosts, bats, and supernatural transformations, all in just a few minutes of screen time. It's theatrical, mischievous, and, by modern standards, a bit more whimsical and wackier than terrifying.
But that doesn't make The House of the Devil any less historically significant. If anything, its importance is even greater: the film shows just how quickly filmmakers recognized cinema's potential for telling supernatural stories. Motion pictures had existed for less than ten years at this point, yet filmmakers were already experimenting with visual effects to conjure ghosts, demons, and other nightmarish figures on screen. The Library of Congress recognizes Georges Méliès'Le Manoir du Diable as the world's first horror film. That recognition marks it as a landmark in the genre's history and an early example of how cinematic illusion could turn the impossible into reality.
And I think there's something delightfully poetic about horror being represented almost from the beginning of cinema, both as an art form and as an industry.
At the time, moving pictures were a technological novelty that allowed audiences to see things that couldn't exist in ordinary life. A filmmaker could make someone disappear, bring a skeleton to life, transform a person into a monster, or summon a devil from thin air.
In other words, the cinema itself was a magic trick, and horror was a natural fit.
Méliès may be best known for his film A Trip to the Moon (1902), but his influence extends far beyond that famous rocket-to-the-Moon image. His experiments helped establish visual effects and cinematic illusion as fundamental parts of filmmaking.
Horror filmmakers would spend the next century asking a question Méliès understood surprisingly quickly: How can we show the audience something they know isn't real—and still make them believe it, even if only for a moment?
From Ghost Stories to Monsters
And Méliès wasn't the only filmmaker experimenting with frightening stories during cinema's early years.
As filmmaking developed during the first decades of the twentieth century, filmmakers began adapting familiar Gothic stories for the screen. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908), Frankenstein (1910), The Werewolf (1913), and other tales of monsters, transformations, and the supernatural appeared in countless early film adaptations. Unfortunately, only Frankenstein survived this era, highlighting the fragile and fleeting nature of early cinematic works.
Because many of these early films have been lost to time, it's difficult to accurately pinpoint the earliest examples of horror cinema. Film preservation is a huge part of film history, and nitrate film stock, the highly flammable material used in early filmmaking, was vulnerable to deterioration, fire, and simple neglect. Even Méliès' The House of the Devil—a film so crucial to horror's history—was believed lost for nearly 100 years before the New Zealand Film Archive rediscovered it in 1985.
That means our understanding of early horror isn't a perfect timeline. Some films survived. Others survive only in fragments, still photographs, reviews, production records, or descriptions written by the very people who saw them more than a century ago.
That missing history matters.
When we talk about "the firsts" of horror film, we usually mean the earliest surviving or documented films that fit our modern understanding of the genre, not necessarily the first frightening story ever captured on film. This distinction matters because many early films have been lost, making it difficult to know exactly when horror first emerged on screen. Even in those earliest years, horror was already developing as an international language, with filmmakers in different countries exploring ways to create fear and unease. Some of those pioneering films have since disappeared, leaving only records, descriptions, or references behind.
However, what is clear from surviving documentation is that audiences' insatiable appetite for shocking stories, combined with the exciting new technology of the big screen, played a significant role in fueling the film industry as we know it today.
Shadows and Screams: Silent Cinema and the International Horror Tradition
As cinema developed in the 1910s and 1920s, filmmakers discovered they didn't need dialogue to make audiences uncomfortable. Shadows could do a lot of the heavy lifting. So could distorted sets, exaggerated performances, unsettling camera angles, strange costumes, and lighting tricks that could make faces disappear into darkness. As filmmakers became more sophisticated, horror developed its own visual language.
One of the most influential movements of this early period was German Expressionism. It used stylized imagery, exaggerated forms, and dramatic contrasts to convey distorted psychological states and create unsettling worlds. Rather than showing reality as it appeared, its films often presented environments shaped by fear, anxiety, and inner turmoil.
Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is one of the movement's defining films. Its crooked buildings, painted shadows, and dreamlike environments created a world that felt fundamentally wrong.
Two years later, German filmmaker F. W. Murnau released Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Max Schreck's Count Orlok remains one of cinema's most recognizable monsters: elongated fingers, pointed ears, a bald head, and a creeping shadow created an instantly recognizable vampire that endures more than a century later.
These films mattered not only because they frightened audiences, but because they showed how horror could use cinematic style itself to create fear. The camera, lighting, architecture, editing, and shadows could become part of the monster.
That idea would eventually become one of horror's greatest strengths.
And Hollywood filmmakers took notice.
Gilded Fangs: Universal Monsters and Hollywood's Golden Age of Horror
By the late 1920s, horror was becoming too big for Hollywood to ignore, and it was developing its own recognizable tradition.
The silent era had already given audiences terrifying imagery and Gothic monsters, but the transition to synchronized sound opened an entirely new toolbox. Suddenly, filmmakers could use creaking doors, howling winds, deafening footsteps, sinister music, and a damsel in distress' perfectly timed screams to unsettle audiences.
Universal Pictures was ready and willing to take advantage of the genre.
While several studios and independent filmmakers of the age dabbled in the horror genre, no one played a more pivotal role in shaping the genre and its popularity with audiences than Universal.
Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin in Rupert Julian's The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931). Boris Karloff as the Creature in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931).
The studio's horror history actually began before the sound era. Lon Chaney had become one of the biggest stars of the silent screen through films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both films demonstrated that audiences would turn out in large numbers for Gothic stories and spectacularly frightening characters.
By the time Universal released Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, the studio had spent years learning that audiences craved monsters.
Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, became one of the defining horror films of the early sound era. Lugosi's performance helped establish the image of Dracula that would become embedded in popular culture. Unlike Schreck's Count Orlok, Lugosi’s Dracula was elegant, sensual, hypnotic, theatrical, and just a little strange. Lugosi is also widely recognized as one of the first actors to capitalize on the success of his role as Dracula and to specialize exclusively in horror.
Later that same year, James Whale's Frankenstein gave audiences another monster who would become inseparable from the actor who portrayed him. Boris Karloff brought the Creature to life as a lumbering, tragic figure, while Jack Pierce's iconic makeup gave him an instantly recognizable appearance. Together, Karloff's performance and Pierce's design helped transform Mary Shelley's nineteenth-century creation into a twentieth-century cinematic icon.
And suddenly, Hollywood had a monster problem on its hands.
A very profitable monster problem.
Throughout the 1930s, Universal Studios established itself as the premier horror studio based on its legacy of monster films. Universal followed with The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), The Wolf Man (1941), and eventually Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), among many others. The studio's horror cycle would span several decades, moving from Gothic monsters to increasingly science-fictional creatures as audience tastes changed.
But calling this simply the "Golden Age of Horror" doesn't quite capture what made these movies so enduring.
For one thing, Universal's monsters weren't always fully monstrous.
Frankenstein's Creature is dangerous, but he's also incredibly lonely. The Phantom of the Opera is frightening, but he's also an isolated human being whose deformity and rejection contribute to his rage. Even the Creature from the Black Lagoon would eventually join a long tradition of monsters whose stories prompt audiences to consider whether the "monster" is actually the most frightening character in the scene.
That tension between fear and sympathy would become one of horror's most enduring storytelling tools.
It also helped make these characters incredibly adaptable.
Universal eventually began bringing its monsters together in crossover films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945). By the time Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein arrived in 1948, the monsters had become recognizable enough to parody.
The success of Universal's monsters also demonstrated something that would become increasingly important to horror's history: A scary character can become a brand.
Universal did more than release monster movies. Over time, the studio expanded its characters into merchandise, books, toys, Halloween costumes, attractions, reboots, and crossover films. From the 1960s through the 1970s, Universal promoted its monsters with licensed costumes, model kits, novelizations, makeup guides, patches, posters, and trading cards.
In 1990, Universal Studios Florida opened Universal's Horror Make-Up Show, featuring characters from its franchises. The next year, Universal Parks & Resorts began Halloween Horror Nights, an annual event featuring the classic monsters.
Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932). Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser in The Mummy (1999). Sofia Boutella in The Mummy (2017).
In the late 1990s, in a bid to capitalize on nostalgia, Universal Studios attempted to reboot several of its classic franchises, including Stephen Sommers' The Mummy (1999), Sommers' Van Helsing (2004), Joe Johnston's The Wolfman (2010), Gary Shore's Dracula Untold (2014), and Alex Kurtzman's The Mummy (2017). Each new film sought to reintroduce these iconic characters to contemporary audiences, with varying degrees of critical and commercial success.
The monsters had escaped the movie theater and became part of popular culture.
But while Universal was building its monster empire, horror itself was changing.
When the Monsters Became Metaphors: Horror Meets Sci-Fi in the 1940s and 1950s
The 1940s brought World War II, and the horror genre responded to a world already filled with real-life horrors.
The old Gothic castle was still there, but audiences were increasingly confronted with fears that felt much closer to everyday life: nuclear weapons, scientific experimentation, radiation, disease, technological change, and the possibility that humanity could accidentally create something it couldn't control.
The monster didn't necessarily need to come from a crypt anymore. It could come from a laboratory. Or the ocean. Or outer space. Or a nuclear test site.
Instead of relying entirely on giant monsters and elaborate makeup, some filmmakers began creating fear through atmosphere, suggestion, and what the audience couldn't see. One of the most influential figures of this period was RKO Pictures producer Val Lewton.
Lewton's films—including Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Body Snatcher (1945)—often created horror without showing the monster outright. Instead, they built suspense through shadowy images, unsettling sounds, suggestive details, and psychological tension, allowing the audience’s imagination to fill in what wasn't shown.
His approach became so influential that people eventually coined the term "Lewton Bus" for a particular kind of scare: a tense, quiet build-up abruptly shattered by a loud, startling noise that turns out to be completely harmless.
The audience still jumps.
Then they laugh at themselves.
But then, because the filmmaker has successfully manipulated their expectations, they're probably even more on edge the next time they hear a noise. Lewton's films also demonstrated that horror could be melancholy, atmospheric, and emotionally complex.
Meanwhile, the atomic age introduced a completely different kind of monster.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the Cold War nuclear arms race that followed, reshaped popular culture in many ways. Science-fiction films of the 1950s frequently reflected anxieties about radiation, technological progress, invasion, and humanity's ability to survive the consequences of its own creations.
Horror and science fiction began to overlap more and more.
Japan's Godzilla (1954) is one of the clearest examples. Directed by Ishirō Honda, the film transformed the giant monster into something more than a creature feature. Godzilla was also a metaphor for nuclear destruction, emerging from a culture that had experienced the consequences of atomic warfare firsthand.
Back on the home front, Hollywood was producing its own wave of science-fiction horror and creature features. Universal's Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) introduced audiences to the Gill-man, while films such as The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) turned scientific change into a deeply personal nightmare.
And then there were the movies that were simply…weird.
The Blob (1958) featured an amorphous alien substance that grows by consuming everything in its path. It sounds almost silly now—and, honestly, that's part of the fun—but beneath the campy, colorful creature-feature premise was a very 1950s fear: something unfamiliar arrives, spreads rapidly, and no one knows how to stop it.
That formula should sound familiar because the genre would return to it again and again. These films reflected the era's societal fears and concerns, resonated with audiences, and left a lasting impact on pop culture.
Scaring the Audience Becomes Part of the Show
By the 1950s, filmmakers were also experimenting with something that had always been part of horror but was becoming increasingly sophisticated: the audience itself.
If movies could scare us, why not make the experience of watching them part of the entertainment?
Filmmaker William Castle would essentially turn this idea into his personal brand.
Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1959) famously came with "Emergo," a gimmick involving a glowing, inflatable skeleton that was supposed to fly over the audience during the movie. Other Castle films featured vibrating seats, promotional stunts, audience participation, and elaborate marketing campaigns that made moviegoing itself part of the horror experience.
These scare tactics didn't last beyond the 1960s because they were so expensive, but studios tried just about everything to keep the scares going. American audiences, however, didn't necessarily need the extra theatrics. The appetite for horror, especially among teens with newly expendable income, was so strong that studios could easily produce slashers for under $1 million and spawn dozens of B-movie sequels and crossovers to meet the ever-growing demand.
Now, it might be tempting to dismiss these gimmicks as cheap tricks to get butts in seats. But I don't think that we should.
Horror has long explored the relationship between a film and its audience, making it one of the few genres that viewers can actively experience. A racing heart, sweaty palms, and a mounting sense of dread are all physical responses that unfold as we watch. Horror doesn’t just ask us to passively watch fear on screen; it draws us into the experience, making our reactions part of it. William Castle understood this dynamic and made it a defining feature of his work, making the relationship between film and viewer impossible to ignore.
And filmmakers were experimenting with the technology of the screen itself, too. Three-dimensional movies, widescreen presentations, elaborate makeup effects, and increasingly sophisticated sound design all offered new ways to make audiences feel like the horror was happening to them.
This is one of the things I find so fascinating about horror history: the genre has never been afraid of being theatrical.
Sometimes horror wants you to think. Sometimes it wants to make you scream. Sometimes it wants you to jump out of your seat because a skeleton just flew over your head. And sometimes it wants to do all three at once.
From Gothic Monsters to the Malicious Men: Horror Gets Psychological
By the end of the 1950s, horror was beginning to move away from the idea that terror had to come from an ancient castle or supernatural creature. The frightening thing could be much closer to home.
That shift would become especially important in 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho.
Based on Robert Bloch's novel, Psycho combined suspense, Gothic horror, psychological drama, dark humor, and shocking violence into something that felt radically different from the monster movies that had dominated earlier decades. BFI describes the film as a watershed for mainstream horror, and its influence on the modern slasher film is difficult to overstate.
There is no vampire castle in Psycho. No creatures. No reanimated corpses. The Bates Motel looks perfectly ordinary. And that's exactly the problem. The horror isn't somewhere far away. It's hiding in plain sight, behind a seemingly normal person.
That idea would become one of the defining characteristics of modern horror.
Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, released that same year, went further by forcing the audience to confront the act of watching itself. Its murderous protagonist records his victims with a camera, creating an uncomfortable relationship between voyeurism, filmmaking, and spectatorship.
Suddenly, the camera wasn't merely showing us the horror. The camera—and by extension, the audience—could become part of it.
International filmmakers were pushing boundaries, too.
Italian filmmaker Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960), British filmmaker Terence Fisher's The Brides of Dracula (1960), Japanese filmmaker Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku (1960), and South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960) each approached horror through distinct cultural and stylistic traditions. Together, these films reveal the genre's diversity, drawing on different visual languages, narrative conventions, and cultural sensibilities to create distinct kinds of unease.
Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960). Terence Fisher's Brides of Dracula (1960). Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku (1960) Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960).
If Psycho helped move horror away from castles and evil laboratories and into the everyday world, the 1960s took that idea and ran with it.
The new horror wasn't necessarily about a creature lurking in the shadows. Sometimes, the person sitting next to you was the problem. Sometimes, the problem was your own mind. And sometimes, the most frightening possibility was that the seemingly ordinary life you had built could collapse without warning.
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was an important part of that transition, but it wasn't the only one. Films such as Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) and Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) pushed horror toward psychological unease, unreliable narration, isolation, and the possibility that we might not be able to trust what we're seeing. That would become one of the genre's most important innovations.
After all, it's a lot easier to be scared by a haunted house when the house looks just like yours.
The Horror Next Door: Domestic and Social Horror
The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent decades in the United States.
The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, changing gender roles, the counterculture movement, and growing distrust of institutions all shaped American popular culture.
Horror filmmakers responded by bringing terror closer to home.
George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a perfect example.
Made on a tiny independent budget rather than inside the Hollywood studio system, Romero's black-and-white zombie movie helped redefine what a horror film could look like. BFI describes it as a major transition from classic horror into modern horror, replacing the old Gothic world with a contemporary landscape of social and political anxiety.
And its zombies weren't exactly the zombies we would come to know from later films. They were slow. They were relentless. And, perhaps most importantly, they were everywhere.
The film's rural Pennsylvania farmhouse becomes a pressure cooker as a group of strangers attempts to survive the night. But the real horror isn't simply the undead outside. It's the growing conflict among the people trapped inside.
That distinction matters.
Romero understood that a monster could be frightening, but people under pressure could be even more frightening.
Released in 1968 amid enormous racial and political upheaval in the United States, Night of the Living Dead has been interpreted as a reflection of its moment in history. Its social commentary wasn't necessarily delivered with the subtlety of a prestige drama, but horror didn't need to be subtle to make audiences uncomfortable.
The genre was learning that monsters could represent something. The vampire could represent desire. The zombie could represent consumerism or social collapse. The haunted house could represent trauma. And the horror movie could hold up a mirror to the culture watching it. That idea would become increasingly important over the next several decades.
The Devil in the Details: Mysticism and the Rise of Occult Horror
The 1970s brought another major shift.
Supernatural horror returned to the mainstream with films centered on demonic possession, Satanism, haunted houses, and the occult. But instead of sprawling estates and ancient castles, what if evil lived in your apartment building?
Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) placed occult horror in a swanky New York apartment building, following a young woman who becomes increasingly convinced that the people around her are involved in something sinister. BFI describes it as a landmark of late-1960s horror and notes its influence on the occult films that followed.
The movie's greatest trick is that almost everything looks normal. The neighbors are friendly, the apartment is beautiful, and Rosemary's life appears to be improving. And yet something is very, very wrong.
This became a defining feature of 1970s supernatural horror: the unsettling invasion of the seemingly impossible into everyday life.
Then came The Exorcist (1973).
William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's bestselling novel brought demonic possession into contemporary Washington, D.C. Rather than treating possession as the stuff of distant folklore, the film presented it with a startlingly realistic visual style, grounding supernatural horror in medical examinations, family conflict, religion, and a mother's desperate attempt to save her daughter.
It became a massive commercial and cultural phenomenon. It was also deeply controversial. But beneath the headlines and shock value lay a surprisingly human story: What happens when something terrible happens to your child and none of the normal explanations make sense? That question helped make The Exorcist so effective. It wasn't simply about demons; it was about helplessness. And modern horror would return to that feeling again and again.
Demon-possessed Regan MacNeil, played by Linda Blair, in The Exorcist. A horrified Katherine and Damien Thorn, played by Lee Remick and Harvey Spencer Stephens in The Omen Carol Anne Freeling, played by Heather O'Rourke, communicating with the television in Poltergeist.
Richard Donner's The Omen (1976) kept the fascination with evil children alive, while films such as Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979) and Peter Medak’s The Changeling (1980) kept haunted houses firmly in the cultural conversation. Tobe Hooper's haunting Poltergeist (1982) brought supernatural terror into suburban America, turning familiar family life into a setting for fear and suspense. The film was both a major critical and commercial success, finishing as the eighth-highest-grossing release of 1982 and earning three Academy Award nominations.
The popularity of these films also marked another important development in horror: Hollywood increasingly looked to contemporary popular literature for inspiration.
As in the early 1900s through the 1930s, filmmakers often turned to literature for adaptations. However, directors and screenwriters consulted the contemporary best-seller list instead of looking to the past for inspiration.
Stephen King became particularly influential, with adaptations including Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), and Pet Sematary (1989). Other notable examples include Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987), Dean Koontz's Demon Seed (1977), and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983).
And speaking of The Shining...
From Books to the Big Screen
The 1970s horror boom also showed what had been true since cinema's earliest days: Hollywood loves adapting a scary story that already has an audience.
The success of contemporary horror novels provided filmmakers with a steady supply of material to adapt. Stephen King's Carrie became the basis for Brian De Palma's 1976 film of the same name, launching a long series of adaptations of King's work. Novels by Peter Straub, Ira Levin, Thomas Tryon, Peter Benchley, and other authors also made their way to the screen.
And then, in 1980, Stanley Kubrick brought King's The Shining to the screen.
Now, I have to admit something here: The Shining is one of my favorite horror films. So naturally, I couldn't leave it out.
I honestly didn’t grow up watching much horror, and I didn’t see The Shining until a film class in my sophomore year of college. Other students told me it wasn’t scary and that I had nothing to worry about. I spent most of the screening barely taking notes, covering my face like a weenie. My professor asked what I thought, and I said I hated it. Then I went back to my dorm room and watched a bootleg version online to see if I’d missed anything the first time. The heightened drama and impending doom were something I’d never really experienced before, and it stuck with me the whole semester.
Kubrick's film follows Jack Torrance, a writer who takes a job as the winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel. As the hotel grows increasingly oppressive, Jack's frustrations and instability begin to merge with the supernatural forces around him.
On paper, it sounds like a pretty straightforward haunted-house story on a larger scale. But in Kubrick's hands, it became something much stranger.
BFI describes The Shining as both a haunted-house story and an interior journey into a disturbed mind, which gets at what makes the adaptation so fascinating. Kubrick took the basic premise of King's novel but made significant changes to its tone, characters, imagery, and ambiguity.
That makes The Shining particularly useful for thinking about the relationship between books and movies. An adaptation doesn't have to reproduce a novel scene by scene. Infamously, King hated Kubrick's adaptation, calling it a "big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it," and wrote and produced his own version in 1997. Sometimes, filmmakers take the source material and ask different questions.
King's novel focuses on Jack Torrance's gradual deterioration and the destructive forces within him, whereas Kubrick's film is more ambiguous about where the supernatural ends and psychological horror begins. That ambiguity is part of the film's enduring appeal. Is the Overlook haunted? Is Jack losing his mind? Is something supernatural manipulating him? Does it even matter? The film refuses to give us comfortable answers.
And then there's the filmmaking itself. The long tracking shots. The symmetrical compositions. The unsettling score. The endless corridors. The sense that something is wrong even when absolutely nothing is happening. It's that anxious, unnerving feeling I felt in my chest the first time I watched The Shining in college; I still feel it with every rewatch.
That's one of horror's greatest tricks: sometimes anticipation is scarier than a monster.
Kubrick's adaptation differs from King's novel in several ways, and fans and critics have debated the relationship between the two works for decades.
One of the most frequently repeated stories surrounding the film concerns the infamous scene in which Wendy confronts Jack with a baseball bat.
You've probably heard that Kubrick made Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson perform the scene 127 times.
That’s a little complicated. Some members of the production, such as the Steadicam operator and assistant editor, have disputed that claim, suggesting that the actual number of takes was considerably lower, around 35-45. Regardless of how many takes Kubrick filmed, in the final version used in the movie, Duvall was emotionally and physically exhausted; she was dehydrated, her voice had grown hoarse from hours of screaming, and her hands were raw from gripping the bat so tightly.
The exact number of takes matters less than the larger point: Kubrick was famously demanding, and the production has continued to generate discussion about filmmaking, performance, and working conditions.
That last conversation is worth having—but I think it deserves more space than a sidebar in a history of horror (I'll save that rabbit hole for another day).
Slashers, Giallo, and the Fear of the Human Monster
While supernatural horror was dominating theaters, another subgenre was taking shape.
The slasher film.
But the slasher didn't appear out of nowhere. The slasher subgenre has complicated roots, with influences stretching across genres like mystery, crime, Italian giallo, psychological thrillers—including Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho—and earlier American horror.
Giallo and proto-slasher filmmakers such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento helped establish visual and narrative conventions that later slashers would adopt: mysterious killers, elaborate murders, masked or gloved antagonists, stylized violence, and protagonists seeking the truth. Notable examples from this period include Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Black Sabbath (1963), and A Bay of Blood (1971), as well as Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Deep Red (1975), and Suspiria (1977).
Back in the United States, moviegoers saw a surge of slasher horror films on the silver screen, reflecting the country's growing awareness of—and fascination with—"spree killers" during the 1970s and 1980s. Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is considered one of the earliest examples of the modern American slasher film. It introduced Leatherface, a notorious character portrayed as a mentally disabled member of a family of cannibals. The character was loosely inspired by real-life killers Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley, whose crimes contributed to the film’s unsettling premise.
However, the subgenre didn't gain significant traction in Hollywood until the 1980s. If Leatherface helped introduce American audiences to slashers, Michael Myers carried the blade even further. John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is often credited with solidifying the modern American slasher. Unlike Leatherface, Michael Myers has no elaborate psychological explanation or tragic supernatural backstory. He simply appears, watches, follows, and kills.
That simplicity was part of the terror, especially because Michael could be anywhere. He could be standing across the street. He could be behind a hedge. He could disappear into the darkness and reappear somewhere else entirely.
And Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, became one of horror's most enduring protagonists. Curtis has portrayed the character seven times in the Halloween franchise over nearly 50 years, appearing in at least one Halloween movie every decade since 1978. Laurie Strode is also credited as one of the earliest and most influential examples of the “final girl.”
Carol J. Clover later popularized the term "final girl" in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, which examined the recurring pattern of a young woman becoming the last survivor of a slasher narrative. Since then, critics have analyzed, criticized, subverted, and reinvented the trope hundreds of times.
That evolution matters because horror's history isn't just a history of monsters. It's also a history of who gets to survive them.
But by the late 1970s in the United States, the formula was becoming recognizable: A group of young people plus an isolated or vulnerable setting plus a mysterious killer that results in a series of increasingly elaborate deaths, and, finally, one lone survivor. The killer wasn't necessarily a demon. He wasn't necessarily a vampire. He might just be a guy with a knife.
Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and the Slasher Explosion
After Halloween, Hollywood discovered an enormous audience for slashers.
Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980) turned a summer camp into a killing ground and helped establish the franchise model that would dominate American horror throughout the decade. To date, the franchise has 12 movies, one of the highest totals of any horror franchise, trailing Halloween (13), The Ring (14), Puppet Master (15), and Witchcraft (16).
Then Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) introduced something even more unsettling: what if you can't escape the killer, even as you sleep? Freddy Krueger invaded his victims' dreams, making the boundary between waking life and nightmare increasingly difficult to trust. BFI notes that the film's dream logic and blurred reality gave it an unusual visual and psychological edge within the slasher cycle.
And Freddy was different from Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees in another important way. He talked. A lot. His wisecracks and theatrical personality eventually transformed him from a frightening figure into a pop-culture icon, demonstrating one of horror's oldest paradoxes: the more familiar a monster becomes, the harder it can be to keep that monster scary.
By the mid-1980s, the slasher had become a major commercial force. Sequels, imitators, knockoffs, merchandise, video releases, and an increasingly recognizable set of rules followed. The genre was beginning to eat itself.
But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
Once audiences understand horror's conventions, filmmakers can start subverting them. Familiar rules and expectations create a foundation that makes those rules easier to break—and audiences more vulnerable to surprise. Horror filmmakers soon discovered that one of the most effective ways to frighten viewers is to make them question not only what is happening on screen, but whether they're watching the movie as they're supposed to.
When Horror Became Self-Aware
By the late 1980s, the slasher had become a victim of its own success.
Halloween had inspired Friday the 13th. Friday the 13th inspired countless imitators. Freddy Krueger had gone from terrifying dream demon to wisecracking pop-culture celebrity. Sequels multiplied, formulas hardened, and audiences became increasingly familiar with the rules:
The killer appears.
Someone investigates.
Someone makes a terrible decision.
People die.
The final girl survives.
Roll credits.
Then came the 1990s, and horror started making fun of itself.
Wes Craven had already begun experimenting with this idea in Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), which blurred the boundaries between the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and the real world. The film essentially asked what would happen if the characters, actors, and filmmakers themselves became part of the horror story.
Two years later, Craven took the idea even further with Scream (1996).
Written by Kevin Williamson, Scream knew exactly what kind of movie it was. Its characters knew the rules of horror movies. They knew that virgins were supposedly safer. They knew that killers often came back for one last scare. They knew not to say, "I'll be right back." And, unfortunately for them, knowing the rules didn't necessarily help.
Scream made knowledge of horror films central to its story, using the characters’ awareness of slasher conventions to shape the plot and create humor. In doing so, it celebrated and poked fun at the genre’s familiar tropes, building on earlier films while questioning their rules. BFI describes it as a stylish, highly successful postmodern take on the slasher, filled with references to earlier horror classics. That self-awareness helped reinvigorate the genre.
It also showed something important about horror audiences: we learn the rules.
Once audiences understand how horror works, filmmakers face a choice: they can follow the genre’s established rules, ignore them, or deliberately break them. Of these options, the third is usually the most interesting. By disrupting familiar conventions, filmmakers can challenge audience expectations and create moments that feel surprising and unsettling.
Home Video Changes the Game
As filmmakers experimented with horror conventions, audiences' viewing habits changed, too.
The rise of home video had enormous implications for the genre. A horror film no longer had to disappear after its theatrical run. Audiences could rent, buy, rewatch, recommend it to friends, or discover it years after its original release. Horror was particularly well suited to this new environment.
A movie that might have struggled to draw a large theatrical audience could find a devoted following on VHS. Cult films could circulate beyond their original theatrical markets. Fans could build personal horror libraries. Video stores became treasure hunts for strange, obscure, foreign, or previously overlooked films.
Then, even the technology itself could become part of the horror.
Hideo Nakata's Ringu (Ring, 1998) centered its supernatural threat around a videotape. A character watches the recording and receives a terrifying warning: seven days later, she will die. The premise worked partly because VHS was so familiar. The television in your living room was no longer merely a way to watch a horror movie.
It could become the way the horror entered your home.
BFI has noted how Ringu and other films of the period transformed everyday video technology into a source of anxiety, particularly because videotapes physically brought recorded images into private domestic spaces.
The idea became even more important as digital technology began to replace physical media. Horror movies were no longer confined to theaters or other places people had to travel to. Instead, they could be delivered directly to viewers, letting them experience them at home and on demand.
Horror Goes Global
The growing circulation of films through home video, festivals, specialty distributors, and eventually the internet also made it easier for American audiences to experience horror outside of Hollywood.
Japanese horror became particularly influential during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Alongside Ringu, films such as Takashi Miike's Audition (1999), Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (2002), and Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) introduced American audiences to different approaches to supernatural and psychological horror.
Sadako Yamamura, played by Rie Inō, in Ringu [リング] (1998).. Samara Morgan, played by Daveigh Chase, in The Ring (2002).
And Hollywood noticed. The early 2000s brought a wave of American remakes of Asian horror films, including The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004), and Dark Water (2005). But this wasn't a one-way exchange.
International horror has influenced American cinema for decades, while filmmakers around the world have been reinterpreting American monsters and storytelling conventions. That exchange is one reason I don't think it's useful to draw a hard line between "Hollywood horror" and "international horror."
Fear is a universal language, and horror has always crossed borders. The monsters travel. The stories travel. And sometimes they come back looking completely different.
Found Footage and the Horror of the Camera
Another major development at the end of the 1990s came from an unlikely place: a shaky handheld camera.
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's The Blair Witch Project (1999) became a phenomenon by presenting its fictional story as recovered footage recorded by three missing student filmmakers.
The film's production was modest compared with Hollywood blockbusters, but its marketing campaign helped blur the boundary between fiction and reality. Audiences were encouraged to wonder whether the footage might actually be real.
The gimmick worked because it exploited something horror had been playing with for decades: the fear of seeing something you were never supposed to see. The camera becomes a witness, capturing events from the perspective of the person holding it. Then, when that person disappears, the recording may continue, leaving someone else to watch what unfolds.
This unsettling premise gives found-footage stories their distinctive immediacy. The approach also lets relatively inexpensive horror films feel incredibly tense and intimate, while offering filmmakers a convenient storytelling device: when characters have a camera, the audience has a reason to see what they see.
The format would eventually appear everywhere—from supernatural horror to science fiction, monster movies, zombie films, and even comedy, depending on your definition (looking at you, What We Do in the Shadows). Besides The Blair Witch Project, other great examples of the subgenre include Paranormal Activity (2007), which builds fear through home-video recordings; REC (2007), a Spanish horror film presented as a news crew’s footage; Cloverfield (2008), which frames a monster attack through a handheld camera; Searching (2017), told largely through screens and digital recordings; and Late Night with the Devil (2023), which incorporates archival television footage into its story.
Once again, horror had found a way to turn technology into part of the fear.
The Undead Come Back to Life. Again.
While slashers and other subgenres evolved, another classic horror monster was preparing for a comeback: the zombie.
George A. Romero had already established the modern zombie movie with Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985). But by the late 1990s, the undead were ready for another resurrection.
'Resident Evil' (1996) video game. Zombie scene in 'Resident Evil' (2002). Austin Abrams in 'Resident Evil' (2026).
The 1996 video game Resident Evil introduced a new generation of players to zombies and survival horror, helping establish both as compelling features of interactive entertainment. Its cinematic adaptation, Resident Evil (2002), carried that gaming influence back to the big screen, bringing the franchise’s atmosphere and themes to a broader audience. But the zombie revival that followed reached far beyond one game series or film: it became part of a much larger resurgence across popular culture.
Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) gave audiences something that felt very different from Romero's slow-moving undead. Its infected victims were fast, feral, and terrifying in their unrelenting aggression. Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004) then revisited Romero's classic for a new generation, proving the undead's enduring appeal in a post-millennial world.
By the mid-2000s, Romero himself returned with Land of the Dead (2005), but the genre had expanded far beyond his initial vision. Films like I Am Legend (2007) adapted Richard Matheson's novel into a post-apocalyptic narrative that blurred the line between zombies and other horror subgenres, demonstrating the zombie concept's versatility. Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland (2009) took a comedic approach, proving that even the undead could have a humorous edge without losing their inherent threat.
The undead were everywhere again, but the zombie story had changed.
Earlier zombie films often used the undead as metaphors for consumerism, social conformity, political violence, or societal collapse. Contemporary zombie movies continued those traditions while adding new anxieties: pandemics, globalization, environmental disaster, military intervention, and the breakdown of social infrastructure.
International filmmakers also brought their own perspectives to the revival. The success of films like Marc Forster's World War Z (2013) and Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan (부산행, 2016) showcased zombie films' global reach. Specifically, Train to Busan combined zombie horror with action, family drama, class tension, and social commentary. Its central train becomes a miniature society in crisis, forcing characters to decide who deserves protection when survival is no longer guaranteed.
That flexibility is one reason zombies refuse to die. You can make them terrifying. You can make them funny. You can use them to talk about capitalism. You can use them to talk about family. You can use them to talk about pandemics. Or you can simply have a bunch of people run away from them very, very quickly. Horror can do all of those things.
The undead weren't going anywhere. They were simply changing shape.
From the Cineplex to the Internet
By the 2000s, horror was becoming increasingly difficult to define by traditional Hollywood standards. DVDs expanded the home-video market. Specialty distributors helped international and independent horror reach wider audiences. Film festivals became important discovery spaces. Online communities and message boards enabled fans to recommend obscure films to people they would never meet in person.
And then streaming began changing the equation again.
Instead of asking audiences to find the movie, the movie could find the audience. That distinction would become increasingly important in the 2010s. Because once distribution became easier, the definition of who gets to make a horror movie began to change, too.
A New Generation of Horror
By the 2010s, horror was changing yet again. But this time, the biggest change wasn't necessarily a new monster, a new special effect, or even a new subgenre. It was who was telling the stories.
For much of Hollywood's history, horror provided filmmakers with a relatively inexpensive way to experiment and offered studios a relatively low-risk investment. But a fairly narrow set of perspectives had also shaped the genre, particularly in mainstream American filmmaking.
That was beginning to change.
More women, filmmakers of color, LGBTQ+ filmmakers, and international filmmakers were finding opportunities to tell horror stories rooted in their own experiences, cultures, histories, and anxieties. And audiences were more than ready for them.
Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) became one of the clearest examples of this shift. Peele used the conventions of psychological horror, science fiction, and the thriller to explore racism and the uneasy experience of navigating supposedly “progressive” spaces where prejudice has simply learned to disguise and rebrand itself.
Peele’s film was commercially successful, culturally significant, and critically acclaimed. At the 2018 Academy Awards, the writer-director won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, becoming the first Black screenwriter to win in this category. But Get Out wasn't simply proof that audiences would watch horror about racism.
It showed something horror has done since the beginning: take a fear that already exists in the real world and make us look at it differently.
Peele followed Get Out with Us (2019), a story about doubles, class, identity, and the things we try to bury beneath our comfortable lives. His films helped show how horror could function as entertainment, social commentary, comedy, and psychological thriller all at once.
And Peele was far from alone.
Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) used a supernatural monster to explore grief and parenthood. Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) blended Iranian imagery, Western genre conventions, and vampire mythology. Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021) revisited the mythology of Bernard Rose's 1992 film while examining gentrification, racism, and the legacy of racial violence.
Meanwhile, filmmakers such as Karyn Kusama, Rose Glass, Julia Ducournau, Natalie Erika James, and many others continued pushing horror into uncomfortable, intimate, and sometimes downright bizarre territory.
Karyn Kusama on the set of 'Jennifer's Body' (2009). Jennifer Kent and Aisling Franciosi on the set of 'The Nightingale' (2018). Nia DaCosta and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II on the set of 'Candyman' (2021).
The point isn't that every modern horror film suddenly became "deep." Some movies still just want to scare the pants off you, and that's perfectly fine. But the genre has become increasingly comfortable doing both.
Is “Elevated Horror” Really a New Thing?
Around the middle of the 2010s, a phrase began appearing more and more frequently in conversations about horror: "elevated horror."
The term was generally used to describe films that emphasized psychological tension, symbolism, atmosphere, character development, and thematic complexity alongside, or sometimes instead of, traditional scares. Films such as Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015), Ari Aster's Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), and Rose Glass's Saint Maud (2019) became frequent examples.
Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin in 'The Witch' (2015). Toni Collette as Annie Graham in 'Hereditary' (2018). Florence Pugh as Dani in 'Midsommar' (2019). Morfydd Clark as Katie in 'Saint Maud' (2019).
But there's a small problem with calling this approach "new."
Horror has always been capable of being thoughtful. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari wasn't exactly a mindless monster movie. Godzilla wasn't simply a giant lizard stomping through Tokyo. Night of the Living Dead had plenty to say about American society. The Exorcist wasn't successful merely because a little girl levitated and spat out split pea soup. Even The Shining—one of my personal favorites—uses horror to explore isolation, addiction, family violence, obsession, and the frightening consequences of losing control.
While "elevated horror" may be a useful marketing term, I think it's worth remembering that horror shouldn't be embarrassed about being horror in the first place. This "new wave" of elevated horror may feature stunning cinematography, sumptuous costumes, moody sets, and more cerebral storylines, but its heart remains the same. A movie can be frightening and thoughtful. It can be bloody and beautiful. It can make you scream and then make you think about what you just watched in your dorm room at 2:00 AM.
That's part of the genre's magic.
The Horror Movie Goes Online
Of course, the biggest transformation of the 2010s wasn't happening solely inside movie theaters. It was happening on our phones, tablets, and T.V.s—and sometimes directly in our web browsers.
YouTube, social media, digital filmmaking tools, online communities, and streaming services were changing both how horror was made and how audiences found it. Filmmakers didn't have to rely entirely on traditional studios and distributors to find an audience. A short film could go viral. A creepy story could become an online phenomenon. A filmmaker could build a following before making a feature-length movie.
The internet also created entirely new forms of horror.
For example, Slender Man originated as a creepypasta created by Eric Knudsen under the pseudonym Victor Surge in June 2009. Since then, the character has appeared in stories across many forms, including literature, art, videos, and video games. In the video series Marble Hornets (2009–2014), he is known as “The Operator.” He also appears in the games Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) and its sequel, Slender: The Arrival (2013). Doug Jones played Slender Man in the 2015 film adaptation Marble Hornets, while Javier Botet played him in the 2018 film Slender Man.
One of Eric Knudsen's original Slenderman creepypasta images from 2009. Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) video game. Javier Botet as the title character from Slenderman (2018).
Creepypastas, alternate reality games, analog horror, short-form videos, and "found" media invited audiences to do more than simply watch. Stories could unfold across websites, videos, fictional documents, social-media accounts, and comment sections.
Sometimes the audience wasn't just watching the horror.
They were investigating it.
Streaming expanded that accessibility even further. Suddenly, audiences could discover independent and international horror that might have never received a wide theatrical release in their local market. A movie made halfway around the world could become part of someone's Friday-night movie marathon simply because an algorithm, a friend, or an online community recommended it.
The result wasn't just more horror.
It was more kinds of horror reaching even bigger audiences.
Then, in 2020, the world gave horror filmmakers a frighteningly fresh nightmare to work with.
Horror Meets the Pandemic
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed everyday life almost overnight. Movie theaters closed. Productions shut down. People isolated themselves at home. Suddenly, technologies that had once seemed mundane became essential for maintaining human connection. Horror, naturally, found a way to make them terrifying.
Rob Savage's Host (2020) is perhaps the perfect example. The British horror film follows a group of friends who conduct a séance over Zoom during lockdown. Shot remotely and released on Shudder while audiences faced many of the same restrictions shown onscreen, Host turned an everyday piece of pandemic technology into the source of its horror.
That's what makes the film such a fascinating moment in horror history.
The technology wasn't some futuristic invention. It was the thing sitting on your desk or stashed in your pocket—the thing you used to work, see your family, and stay connected when you couldn't physically be with your friends.
And now something terrifying was looking back at you through it.
Once again, horror had taken an ordinary piece of technology and asked a very old question: what if something we trust isn't safe?
Independent Horror Finds a Bigger Audience
The 2020s have also shown that horror doesn't necessarily need a massive budget—or a traditional Hollywood pedigree—to make a major cultural impact.
Zach Cregger's Barbarian (2022) was an original horror film made for a relatively modest budget that became a theatrical success. Meanwhile, Talk to Me (2022) came from Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou, who had already built an audience through their YouTube channel, RackaRacka.
The Philippous weren't simply using YouTube to advertise a movie.
YouTube was part of the path that got them there.
Their supernatural horror film also tapped into a distinctly contemporary fear: what happens when young people discover a horrifying new form of entertainment and can't stop using it?
Sound familiar? It should.
Horror has always been fascinated by the dangerous new toy—the séance table, the Ouija board, the cursed artifact, the television, the videotape, the camera, the internet.
In Talk to Me, the cursed object is a severed hand.
The technology changes.
The temptation doesn't.
From YouTube to Hollywood
And that brings us to something particularly interesting about horror in 2026. Some of today's filmmakers aren't simply using the internet to promote their movies. They started there.
Kane Parsons' Backrooms is perhaps one of the clearest examples.
Parsons first gained attention with his Backrooms found-footage videos on YouTube. The online series built a significant audience before expanding into a feature film. The original Backrooms concept emerged from internet culture: an unsettling image of seemingly endless yellow rooms that became the foundation for a much larger collaborative mythology. Years later, Parsons' feature adaptation brought that idea into mainstream cinema.
A24's Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve and was directed by Parsons, who was just 20 years old when the film hit theaters. And audiences showed up in a big way. The film opened to approximately $81.5 million in North America, giving A24 its biggest opening weekend at the time.
Curry Barker's Obsession offers another example of this changing pathway.
Barker had already built an online audience before transitioning to feature filmmaking, and Obsession became one of 2026's notable horror successes. Made for less than $1 million, the film became an unexpectedly enormous theatrical success before moving to streaming. Peacock reported that, by July 2026, the film had earned more than $250 million domestically on its $750,000 budget.
Critics have connected its success—and that of Backrooms—to a broader movement of young, Internet-trained creators entering traditional filmmaking.
And this is where horror's history gets particularly interesting.
Remember Georges Méliès?
In 1896, he used one of the newest technologies available to create supernatural images audiences had never seen before.
More than a century later, filmmakers are still doing essentially the same thing.
The technology has changed. The audience has changed. The path to the screen has changed. But the impulse hasn't: find a new way to scare people.
What Are We Afraid of Now?
Technology isn't the only thing changing, either. The people telling the stories are changing, too.
Contemporary horror gives audiences more opportunities to encounter stories rooted in different cultures, identities, histories, and experiences. That doesn't mean the industry has suddenly become perfectly representative—it hasn't—but the range of stories reaching audiences has expanded.
And horror is uniquely suited to that expansion because fear may be universal, but what we fear isn't.
What scares us depends on where we live. What we believe. What we've experienced. What our communities remember. What our families have taught us. What we're afraid might happen next.
There's room for all of it.
The Future of Horror? It’s Already Here
So where does horror go from here? Honestly, I don't think anyone knows. And that's part of the fun.
The genre has survived silent cinema, the introduction of sound, the studio system, television, censorship battles, home video, cable television, CGI, DVDs, the internet, streaming, and a global pandemic.
It has survived monster movies, slashers, supernatural horror, zombie outbreaks, found footage, remakes, reboots, franchises, and whatever exactly we were supposed to call “elevated horror.”
It keeps changing.
And if history is any indication, the next major horror movement probably won't look exactly like the one we expect. Maybe it will come from an independent filmmaker working with a tiny crew. Maybe it will come from another country. Maybe it will start as a YouTube series. Maybe it will be interactive. Maybe new technology or virtual reality will become part of the storytelling. Maybe someone will invent an entirely new way of scaring us that I haven't even considered yet.
That's the thing about horror. It doesn't just reflect what we're afraid of. It reflects how we tell stories about those fears.
From Georges Méliès conjuring ghosts and skeletons on a painted set in 1896 to filmmakers building entire fictional worlds online in 2026, horror has continually reinvented itself alongside the technology of the moment.
Yet no matter the decade or subgenre, the basic horror formula remains remarkably familiar: Give us something we don't understand. Make us wonder what hides in the dark. Then make us look—if we dare.
Maybe that's why horror has survived for so long. It refuses to stay in one box. A horror movie can be science fiction. A thriller can become a monster movie. A coming-of-age story can become supernatural horror. A comedy can become a zombie film. A romantic story can become a nightmare.
Horror borrows.
Horror adapts.
Horror mutates.
And every generation gets to decide what it fears.
Horror has come a long way since Georges Méliès summoned the Devil to a cinema screen in 1896. It has evolved into a diverse, multifaceted genre that still reflects our deepest fears and cultural anxieties. From the iconic monsters of Golden Age horror to the complexities of modern psychological thrillers, horror will always have a place in our hearts—and our nightmares.
What's your favorite horror film? Leave a comment below and let me know whether you're a fan of classic monster movies or modern thrillers! And don't forget to check out my (many) lists of must-watch Halloween TV and films for even more spooky fun! Just tap the images below to explore more.
Learn more about the history of horror here:
Horror Genre:
THE NIGHT HE CAME HOME: John Carpenter Interview with Mark Kermode (1999)
The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (2003) by Noël Carroll
The Horror Film (2004) edited by Stephen Prince
Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (2005) by Kendall R. Phillips
Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (2018) by Murray Leeder
History of Horror:
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (2001) by David J. Skal
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s (2006) by Kim Newman
Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21st Century (2009) by Charles Derry
Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror (2018) by Darryl Jones
Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (2021) by Darryl Jones
Horror, Gender & Sexuality:
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) by Carol J. Clover
Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997) by Harry M. Benshoff
The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (2015) edited by Barry Keith Grant
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