Horror is one of the most interesting genres of film. It dares to push the limits of societal conventions, and serves to shock and scare the audience. Horror has been around as long as film itself. It began with short films from the US, Europe, and Japan, usually clocking in at 10-60 minutes, including, The House of the Devil (1896), The Haunted Castle (1897), Frankenstein (1910), The Golem (1915) and others. The next four decades saw waves of adaptations of classic horror literature and mythology entering the mainstream and are widely considered the best horror movies ever made, like Dracula, The Wolf Man, Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Mummy, The Blob, Creature From The Black Lagoon, Night Of The Living Dead, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and Frankenstein.

The later half of the 1950’s and 1960’s was the most dramatic turning point in horror films. It saw a significant shift from monster movies and supernatural science fiction films to more realistic, suspenseful movies. Now considered mystery/suspense films, Alfred Hitchcock dominated horror movies during this time, with classics like Psycho, The Birds, Dial M For Murder, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Strangers On A Train, and Vertigo.

Mainstream horror films of the late 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s that are hailed as classics today have unfortunately been exploited into an endless spawn of sequels and remakes. Friday The 13th, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Halloween, Suspiria, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist, Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, The Shining, Carrie, Misery, Alien, and countless others were strange and mind bending in their own right, and are luckily still recognized as classics by most people today, with the sequels being seen as little more than cynical cash grabs.

After the 1980s, horror drifted away from the mainstream pop culture. In the early 2000s, it resurged from a multitude of factors including the popularity of a new zombie film 28 Days Later (2002), Shawn Of The Dead (2004), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Saw (2004), and the massively popular TV series The Walking Dead. Horror seems to now focus mostly on zombies, and has drifted away from the icons and recognizable characters that inhabited most classic horror films.

While horror has always had sides to it that were cheesy, tongue-in-cheek, or just plain terrible, it has been especially difficult to sift through all the trash that has been made recently. A simple glance at the Instant Netflix list of horror films available to watch shows just how true this is: Wolf Town, Zombie Nation, Cheerleader Massacre, Bloody Birthday, Pinnocchio’s Revenge, and my personal favorite, Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver. It’s clear the vast majority of these movies will never see the light of day. Contemporary horror films of the last twenty years consist of a mish-mash of all the elements of previous decades. Some have monsters, some are realistic, some genre bend, some are spoofs or tributes to horror films, and some are even wholly original, The Sixth Sense, Scream, The Cabin In The Woods, House of The Devil, The Blair Witch Project, The Ring, Let The Right One In, Zombieland, and Prometheus.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) is one of the most original and interesting films ever made. It directly addresses the issue of horror films in a creative and interesting way, using elements of satire, fantasy, and eventually all-out mayhem to get across its message. It is everything a modern horror movie should be, albeit with a little too much self-awareness.

Prometheus (2012), the Alien companion film was another genre bending sci-fi/horror movie that was unlike anything else. It combined a complicated and interesting science fiction storyline with a truly horrifying concept regarding the alien race in the plot, and an unconventional, sometimes muddled storyline that unfortunately runs out of steam by the time it is over, ending in a cliffhanger. A sequel is currently being made, and will hopefully continue the amazing science fiction/horror crossover the Alien franchise helped begin.

The point of horror has always been to elicit fear and horror in the viewer at any cost. The people who actually like watching these kinds of movies are not looking for a compelling and complicated story or character development, they want to be shocked and entertained. This unfortunately gives the genre as a whole a bad reputation as little more than fodder for sick freaks who love violence. The endless sequels to Saw did not help.

What they do not know is that horror can be extremely complex and visually engrossing. Before they became marketable to the dumb masses, plenty of horror movies were surreal, unconventional, and mind bending. Fortunately, plenty of these types of movies are still being made, and take it even farther by genre bending and incorporating Science Fiction and sometimes Comedy (Donnie Darko, Antichrist, Cube, Evil Dead).

One of the most interesting things about horror is the amount of cultural icons it has spawned. The chucky doll, the Scream and Saw masks, Alien and Predator, and countless others have become toys for children and are now household names. While most people do not see the movies these characters are in, everyone seems to know the monsters themselves. Most of them are relentless killing machines, so their popularity cannot be attributed to their personalities in their movies. They almost seem to become mascots for their movies in popular culture, the way a mascot supports its sports team.

Most horror movies in the last twenty years have been unable to create the number of cultural icons the way they did in the 70’s and 80’s. Like with most movies nowadays, the film industry seems to have run out of new ideas or is unwilling to take risks with them. Some might think that horror has been played out given its limiting qualities, but there are always new ways to scare people, and no matter how many pointless sequels and remakes are churned out, there will always be surrealism, comedy, and creativity in the genre. The new found popularity with zombie fiction and satirizing the genre seems to be taking horror in a new direction, and will hopefully bring the genre to its full potential.