What is Horror?

Alfred Hitchcock's  The Birds.

Horror films had some time comparatively  little seriously discussion, and only in the second half of the 70s was the genre put on the genre of film studies. From 1935 to the late 1940s account of local authority bannings of horror films and of reports on their harmful social effects, especially on children, proliferated in the British trade press.  The 1950s witnessed renewed panic around spectacular international success of a narrative development of the genre by the Hammer studio.


Anglo-Saxon journals in the mean time devoted space to 'special effects' and returned again to the question of social/psychological significance of the 1970s boom in horror with violence, frequently against women. In the late 1970s/early 80s feminists mounted public protest at the perpetuation of a widespread cultural misogyny by such films.


The horror film has consistently been one of the most popular and, at the same time, the most disreputable of Hollywood genres.

The chief route to cultural legitimation, therefore, has been thoroughly popular anthropological or Freudian/Jungian reference, which assumes ‘inside us a constant, ever-present yearning for the fantastic, for the darkly mysterious, for the choked terror of the dark’

Psycho-Sociological explanation,

The problem facing all such accounts is to explain the meaning of the monster, or of the threat that produces the horror. ‘Normality’ is our everyday common sense world- in more recent interpretations, the world of the dominant ideology sanctioned by the established authorities.

Horror/Science Fiction films of the 1950s are frequently understood as reflecting a ‘doom-centred, eschatological fear’ provoked by cold-war politics and the nuclear deterrent, which yet relied on the scientist and ‘co-operation with the military’ for protection.

Psychological thrillers, and film noir have all contributed to the genreric realisation of this popular obsession.  The second-sub genre, Charles Derry labels the horror of Armageddon, which in continuity with the 1950s science fiction mutant monster cycle.

Rather than political traumas, many writers focus on the American ‘way of life’ as symptomatic of the distortions and repressions consequent on the development of American capitalism.  Consumerism is identified as a prime symptom, which behind stands middle class life, or the family and patriarchal social relations as sources of horror. 






(Information from: The Cinema Book 2nd Edition. Editor: Pam Cook & Mieke Bernik.)