Influential horror movies that changed cinema
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Five influential horror movies that changed cinema
Sat 28 September 2024 19:15, UK
Do you like scary horror movies? Me too.
Horror is a distinctive genre with a guaranteed audience—people love the thrill of being scared. This enduring appeal gives filmmakers a lot of creative freedom. However, horror often draws influence from within the genre itself. Films from different eras tend to share common traits, whether in style, theme, or both, making each era’s contributions feel interconnected.
Horror can take us on a thrill ride, just getting our adrenaline pumping. It can reveal the creatures that lurk within our darkest nightmares—sometimes, it can haunt those nightmares, especially when you stay up late to watch them on TV when you’re probably too young to. Horror can tell us about ourselves, the world we live in, and our collective fears and anxieties. Throughout the existence of cinema, it’s been doing these things on a near-constant basis.
With this list, I want to highlight five different films from different eras that exemplify the individual aspects that make horror such an interesting, versatile genre. I’ve selected a handful of movies that I feel were specifically influential, kicking off specific filmmaking movements within the genre.
Five horror movies that changed cinema:
The Invisible Man (1933) – Horror as box office gold
With 1933’s The Invisible Man, director James Whale perfected the Universal monster movie formula. While Dracula, the film that kicked off the first-ever cinematic universe, is a fine effort, it leaves a little to be desired. The moody black and white gothic drama is home to some stunning photography and set design, as well as Bela Lugosi’s iconic performance. However, there’s far too much downtime and not enough Lugosi. The film also has a hilariously poor understanding of the United Kingdom’s geography – the characters travel from Newcastle to London on a whim. Frankenstein, while much better, is privy to some of the same problems.
The Invisible Man is really as good as these films get. Whale’s film embraces its cheesiness in ways that Dracula and Frankenstein simply couldn’t and is all the better for it. Claude Raines, with whom we spend the majority of our time, gives a hilarious and utterly mad performance as Dr Jack Griffin, a scientist who goes so invisible that all he wants to do is commit atrocious – sometimes hilarious – crimes for no real reason.
"We’ll begin with a reign of terror," he laughs with contagious glee in one of the film’s funniest moments. "A few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men – well, just to show we make no distinction". This science experiment gone wrong film provides the blueprint for almost two decades of horror films. Warner Bros’ Them, Fox’s The Fly and Toho’s Godzilla. Not to mention B-movies like Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman or Little Shop of Horrors.
Rosemary’s Baby (1969) – Horror as arthouse cinema
Rosemary’s Baby wasn’t the first horror film to take itself seriously by any stretch – but for a mainstream horror project, it was a particularly ambitious film and one that fully utilised the 1960s cinematic freedom and countercultural values to use horror as a lens through which to view social relations. Specifically, Rosemary’s Baby was a damning critique of societal norms and misogynistic expectations for women in a gripping portrayal of paranoia.
In the film, Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes play Rosemary and Guy, a married couple who find their new lives encroached upon by the overly friendly neighbours in their New York apartment. When Rosemary falls pregnant after an instance of marital rape, the people around her, including her husband and neighbours, begin to exert control over her and her surroundings to ensure that the baby is born under specific circumstances – why? Because they’re ushering in the birth of the antichrist.
Rosemary’s Baby ushered in a wave of dour, domestic horror in direct conversation with the world around it: films like The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, The Shining, and Don’t Look Now wouldn’t exist without Rosemary’s Baby.
Suspiria (1977) – Horror as surrealist
The innovative cinematography of Italian cinema in the mid-20th century did not just stop with dramas like The Conformist. The giallo genre is emblematic of the deft cinematic innovation happening in Italy throughout the mid 20th century. Suspiria is considered its peak. A gorgeous, phantasmagorical experience, every shot of Suspiria is drenched in colour and movement. Visually striking and unrelenting, the plot is silly, the kills are uniquely cruel, the aesthetic is singularly unique.
It’s widely established that the visual aesthetic and brutality of giallo served as inspiration for films like John Carpenter’s Halloween. However, I would say the maximalism of Suspiria was equally influential — it proved that Horror was a genre that could do absolutely anything and it would still have an audience. It could be as bold, experimental and dreamy as it wanted. Suspiria paved the way for the utter insanity of Evil Dead 2, the hypnagogic nature of Obayashi’s House, the sickening theatrics of Fire Walk With Me.
Scream (1996) – Horror as metafiction
Scream is for the fans. Witty, spooky and self referential in the best way, it started a wave of horror films that continued to innovate, based on their knowledge of the horror formula. Scream understands slasher movies are schlocky and silly, and doesn’t stop at simply pointing that out. It goes above and beyond to elevate the tropes of the slasher movie formula with great performances, a distinctive style and a clever script.
The meta humour is fun in how it’s built into the story and the world in which these characters reside – one where pretty much everyone is obsessed with horror movies. This builds up to some genuinely fun moments, the best of which explains the ‘rules’ of a horror movie during a death scene. Director Wes Craven, however, doesn’t stop at making fun of the tropes but elevates them to create a heightened sort of murder mystery that delves deep into its characters and its subject matter.
Scream wasn’t just an influence on Final Destination or I Know What You Did Last Summer. It was a groundbreaking event for the horror genre, to acknowledge that there were rules and that audiences might be getting tired of formula. Different was what they got – a film like American Psycho would deconstruct horror tropes for a character study of the quintessential yuppie. Shaun of the Dead was a hypothetical reimagining of Dawn of the Dead that considered what an average British person’s reaction to a zombie apocalypse might be. Funny Games was a horror movie that hated horror movies – Michael Haneke creates a perfect home invasion movie with a participatory camera and then dares to turn its victims into real, suffering individuals with one kill and a long, unbroken take.
Get Out (2017) – Horror is the zeitgeist
Some might say this film is too recent to include on this list. They’re wrong. Get Out is an excellent movie, that has defined the last eight years of the horror genre.
Horror was in dire straits in the early 2010s. The deft experimentation that had taken the genre to new heights had dried up, replaced by formula. For a while there, studios seem to have taken advantage of the fact that it would always have an audience – they saw it as free money. If there was a reinvention of the genre along the way, the lesson became to just repeat the same formula – Paranormal Activity was successful? More found footage films. People are still seeing Saw movies? Must mean they want more gore. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is still one of the most iconic films of all time? Lets just… make more of those.
Get Out was not the only good horror movie of the 2010s. It was not the first film to use social commentary and horror in tandem. But it was still deeply important. Inspired by Rosemary’s Baby, Jordan Peele’s portrait of racial politics, culturally entrenched white supremacy and neoliberal high society seemed to understand a universal truth. We live in a really scary time, for which there is no better mouthpiece to voice or anxieties and fears about a deeply sick present and an uncertain future than horror.
The success of Get Out launched Peele’s career and made him one of the most interesting filmmakers working today. Us was a dense but brilliant work that changes every time I see it. Nope is… the best film of the 2020s. But it didn’t just do that. Get Out shone a huge spotlight back on the horror genre. Suddenly we’re consistently getting clever, unique, scary and popular horror films that are often the most socially conscious films in the mainstream. Barbarian, Hereditary, Midsommar, I Saw The TV Glow, Longlegs—right now is a great time to be scared.
Related Topics
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/five-influential-horror-movies/