From gothic novels to true crime and everything in between, humanity’s fascination with the dark and eerie is not new by any means. But when horror made its way to the silver screen, it opened up a whole new realm of terrifying—and even endless material for hilarious memes like these.
According to the New York Film Academy, the horror genre in cinema was born 127 years ago with Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle), directed by Georges Méliès in 1896. This three-minute film brought animated skeletons, ghosts, and transforming bats to life, even featuring an appearance by the Devil himself. Yet, despite all these spooky elements, it was meant to inspire wonder rather than fear.
Following the release of the first horror movie, many supernatural-themed films emerged between 1900 and 1920. Filmmakers, who were essentially building the horror genre from scratch, often turned to classic literature for inspiration. This period saw the first adaptations of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Werewolf.
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The 1920s and 1930s are often considered the golden age of horror films—though that may surprise fans of more recent favorites. This era brought classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922), some of the first films to truly aim at unsettling their audiences. Nosferatu, which ranks among Rotten Tomatoes’ top horror movies of all time, is even set for a modern remake scheduled for release later this year.
The 30s marked the first time the word “horror” was officially used to describe the genre. During this decade, classics like the second adaptation of Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and the first color version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) came out. Horror films were becoming so intense they ended up heavily censored to avoid shocking audiences too much. One extreme example is Freaks (1932), a film so unsettling that it was significantly edited—its original version now lost—and even banned in the UK for 30 years.
The 1940s and 1950s reflected the anxieties of a world dealing with the aftershocks of WWII. Many movies from this era explored fears of nuclear devastation and radioactive mutations, giving rise to films like The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and Godzilla (1954). There was also a looming fear of further invasion, inspiring films such as The War of the Worlds (1953) and When Worlds Collide (1951).
Meanwhile, in the years to come cinemas pulled out all the stops to make horror movies even more electrifying—literally. 3D glasses, theater seats rigged with buzzers, and even actors planted in audiences to scream and “faint” turned screenings into thrilling events.
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