History of The Horror Film Genre

• The horror genre is one of the most popular and profitable film genres for cinemas today. However for much of the twentieth century it wasn't and the horror genre has moved in and out of cinematic vogue over the last one hundred years. It is only really in the last forty years that this genre has been established as being one of the main genres in cinemas.

• In the early years of the film industry, pioneering directors began to experiment with supernatural events and creatures and in the 1910s and 1920s, many famous literary monsters cross over to the movie world, for example, Frankenstein, vampires and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

• It wasn't until the early 1930s that horror began to be seem by a mainstream audience, with the release of Universal Pictures' famous versions of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931. 

• After the Second World War, the horror genre became less popular with mainstream cinema audiences and as technology advanced, low budget monster movies increasingly became unsophisticated. Even though several remarkable films were made during the 1950s, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956, it wasn't until the end of the 1950s that the horror genre really began to re-emerge as a popular genre again. 

• The British company Hammer Film Productions were largely responsible for making monster movies popular again by making films like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and more up to the early 1970s.

• During the late 1960s, horror once again entered a slump, even though remarkable movies were produced around this time, like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby in 1968. 

• The mid-1970s marked the start of an era of blockbuster horror as films with large budgets and very high productions values, like The Exorcist in 1973 and The Omen in 1976. 

• In the twenty-first century the horror film genre has been introduced to a new generation by the new DVD releases of older movies. This has allowed the horror genre to blossom even more now with things like merchandise and zombie walks.

Information from: http://laurenthomas.hubpages.com/hub/A-Brief-History-of-Horror-Movies