Tuesday 4/9/24
Here is what happened with horror films in the United States over the course of their first four decades:
In the 1930s, horror films like Dracula and Frankenstein--the first official supernatural forays in American cinema--were seen as shocking and even too much for some people. The fright was real.
In the 1940s, accustomed to these kinds of movies, Americans built up a kind of fright tolerance. This is what we do. What may shock us in one era is quaint in another. (Charlie Parker's molten bebop was shocking in the mid-1940s; the average teen of 2024 is likely to think of it as old-fashioned in the extreme, and so forth.) Horror movies then became kiddie fare, the stuff of the Saturday matinee. We get many monster rallies--films such as House of Dracula and House of Frankenstein--with monster on monster action, and lots of movies made on a lower budget than had been the norm with horror movies--which could be prestige pictures--of the decade before.
In the 1950s, Americans put their backs to Gothic and supernatural horror. There could be horror still, but it required the sci-fi wrinkle (Creature from the Black Lagoon, Them!, The Thing from Another World, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and this brand of take on the likes of low-budget affairs I've mentioned recently in The Werewolf and The Vampire), the evidence of the Atomic Age or the Cold War. Gothic horror gets relaunched in England, with Hammer Films and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). This is color-saturated horror with conspicuous blood and cleavage but high-quality filmmaking all the same. Americans, in turn, like it.
In the 1960s comes a splintering. There were always exceptions--for instance, in 1944, The Uninvited stepped clear of the monster mash field with a haunted house story that was taken seriously, and that same year's The Scarlet Claw crossed the horror genre with a Sherlock Holmes story--but now everything starts to go in different directions and there's a greater emphasis on individuality.
An important, influential picture was 1959's House on Haunted Hill; it was smart, spooky, balanced the old Gothic with a brand of self-referential postmodernism (the vibe is that of the James Whale-sian watchtower, the architecture itself the province of Frank Lloyd Wright), just the right distance from camp and kitsch, and witty. It signified that horror could readily be a blend. Old stars came back, pictures were made with the drive-in experience in mind, risks were taken in the low-budge indie realm. There was less concern about propriety.
The Gothic was transposed in setting and style, but still in evidence in places where one didn't expect to find it, as with 1962's Carnival of Souls and the salt pans of Utah. 1963's The Haunting changed rules up some more, and eventually 1968's Night of the Living Dead served to remove the last vestiges of perceived rules.
