Horror movie

A scene from "King Kong Vs Godzilla"

A horror movie is a movie made to scare the viewer. The main stories of horror movies often involve supernatural forces or characters of evil origin. Horror movies are often confused with thrillers, which are similar.

Popular horror movie characters usually include monsters. Early horror movies often took ideas from classic literature, such as The Mummy, Dracula and The Wolf Man.

Slasher movies

Slasher movies are a subgenre of horror movies. They are often also a type of thriller movie. Slasher movies normally have a psychopathic killer killing a sequence of people. This is usually in a very violent way. The genre may have been inspired by giallo, a similar movie genre originating in Italy.

While movies made as early as 1932 had aspects of slasher movies in them, the genre was not really defined until the late 1970s. The 1974 movie Black Christmas is considered the first slasher movie.. Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980) and Scream (1996) did very well at the box office and showed that slasher movies could make lots of money.

Psychological horror movies

Psychological horror movies are a subgenre of traditional horror movies which focuses more on the mental instability of its characters than on graphic violence, serial killers or monsters, for example. Most of the time this genre deal with the character's phobias, psychological traumas, paranoia, and etc. The genre often overlaps with psychological thriller as well. Dead Silence (2007), The Shining and The Babadook (2014), are some examples of psychological horror movies.

Comedy horror movies

Those are movies which blends horror and comic elements in its plot. Unlike common, traditional horror movies, in this movie genre, the viewer may be scared and laugh at the same time. Most of time, the type of humour used in these movies is black comedy.

Some examples includes Zombieland (2009), The Raven (1963), Scary Movie (2000), Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Camping: A Christmas Horror (2024).

Horror Movie Media

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  Max Schreck as Count Orlok in the 1922 film Nosferatu. Critic and historian Kim Newman declared it as a film that set the template for the horror film.

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  Mirrors are often used to create a sense of tension in horror films.

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  Filmmaker and composer John Carpenter, who has directed and scored numerous horror films, performing in 2016

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  "Style B" teaser poster for the 1931 film Frankenstein.