8 Decades of Horror Movies: A Personal View

-I want to thank Alex Naylor, "A Review of Reynold Humphries' The American Horror Film: An Introduction," (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, November 2004--for this personal perspective.​

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A CURIOUS COINCIDENCE​

The American Horror Film is now eight decades old. The genre had its origins in the 1930s just as the Bahá’í community was about to launch its first teaching Plan in the mid-1930s. While it is not my intention to try and survey the broad range of critical and cinematic material that belongs to the horror genre I will make some general remarks of a sketchy and superficial nature and draw some comparisons and contrasts with the evolution of the Bahá’í community in those eight decades. One can examine these eight decades of horror films using a number of fruitful and explanatory paradigms used by film critics and analysts. A study of horror and of Gothic, for example, can easily intersect. An engagement of horror with Gothic scholarship would seem a more or less necessary part of any introductory work on horror. -Ron Price with thanks to Alex Naylor, "A Review of Reynold Humphries' The American Horror Film: An Introduction," (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, November 2004.



As humanity was about to enter

the most perilous stage of its

existence seemingly coincidentally

the horror film arrived on the scene.



As if to counter the world's horrors

a Plan was devised and systematically

pursued across an immense field,

part of a holy, a stupendous enterprise,

a historic, a sublime mission, lending

a fresh luster to the unfoldment of

‘Abdu’l-Bahá's vision of our destiny.



As those horror films succeeded one

another in decade after decade this

vision and destiny were slowly fulfilled

in a series of turning points, with their

joys and triumphs, their brilliant victories

and their crises which from time to time

threatened to arrest the unfoldment and

blast all hopes the progress had engendered.



Ron Price
30 November 2006

 

Horror movies have been around since the existence of film, Lon Chaney should be thanked for that, and what horror the world was going through, drastically changed what horror movies were. the 1930s, you are probobly talking about universal monster movies, those lost their fame because of WWII when people realized there were other horrors out there, then when it tried to make a comeback, people saw it as a joke. Horror films either act as an escape from the outside, or they reproduce the fears and paranoia of the current state of human existance. The former can be represented by movies that go 'boo' and leave no lasting effect and are quickly forgotten, the latter can be represented by the movies that get under your skin, that dont rely on supernatural elements, and if they do, they are often underlined by current events, for example the works of David Cronenberg.

 

Belated Apologies Jesus the Jedi for not responding for nearly 5 years!-Ron