Horror

Horror is a theme on books and TV.

## film

### Creature Feature

The 1950s is also well known for creature feature or giant monster movies. These are usually disaster films that focuses on a group of characters struggling to survive attacks by one or more antagonistic monsters, often abnormally large ones. The monster is often created by a folly of mankind – an experiment gone wrong, the effects of radiation or the destruction of habitat. The monster can also be from outer space, or has been on Earth for a long time with no one ever seeing it, or released (or awakened) from a prison of some sort where it was being held. In monster movies, the monster is usually a villain, but can be a metaphor of humankind's continuous destruction. Warner Bros.' *The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms* (1953) is considered to be the film which kick-started the 1950s wave of monster movies and the concept of combining nuclear paranoia with the genre. In the film, a beast was awakened from its hibernating state in the frozen ice of the Arctic Circle by an atomic bomb test. It then begins to wreak a path of destruction as it travels southward, eventually arriving at its ancient spawning grounds, which includes New York City. *The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms* was the first ever live-action film to feature a giant monster awakened/brought about by an atomic bomb detonation, preceding *Godzilla* by 16 months. The film is also remembered for its influential stop motion model animation created by visual effects creator Ray Harryhausen. One of the best movies during these years was *Night of the Demon* (1957).

Ray Harryhausen created his own form of stop motion model animation called *Dynamation*. It involved photographing a miniature against a rear-projection screen through a partly masked pane of glass. The masked portion would then be re-exposed to insert foreground elements from the live footage. The effect was to make the creature appear to move in the midst of live action. It could now be seen walking behind a live tree, or be viewed in the middle distance over the shoulder of a live actor – effects difficult to achieve before. Harryhausen's innovative style of special effects in films inspired numerous filmmakers including future fantasy and horror directors Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, and Guillermo del Toro. In the 1963 fantasy film *Jason and the Argonauts*, there is an iconic fight scene that involves skeleton warriors. That scene spurred on numerous homages in many horror films in subsequent years including 1987's *A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors*, 1992's *Army of Darkness* and 2014's *Game of Thrones'* Season 4 episode entitled *The Children*.

#### Giant Monster and Kaiju Horror

Other notable creature films include *It Came from Beneath the Sea* (1955), *Tarantula* (1955), and *The Giant Behemoth* (1959). Japan's experience with Hiroshima and Nagasaki bore the well-known *Godzilla* (1954) and its many sequels, featuring mutation from the effects of nuclear radiation. This kickstarted the tokusatsu trend known as Kaiju films, a Japanese film genre that features giant monsters, usually attacking major cities and engaging the military and other monsters in battle. Other films in this genre that isn't about Godzilla include *Rodan* (1956) and *The Mysterians* (1957). Besides Kaiju films, Japan was also into ghost cat/feline ghost movies in the 1950s. These include *Ghost-Cat of Gojusan-Tsugi* (1956), and *Black Cat Mansion* (1958), which tells a story of a samurai tormented by a cat possessed by the spirits of the people she killed.

### Science Fiction and Horror in the 1950s

Filmmakers continued to merge elements of science fiction and horror over the following decades. *The Fly* is a 1958 American science fiction-horror film starring Vincent Price. The film tells the story of a scientist who is transformed into a grotesque creature after a common house fly enters unseen into a molecular transporter he is experimenting with, resulting in his atoms being combined with those of the insect, which produces a human-fly hybrid. The film was released in CinemaScope with Color by Deluxe by 20th Century Fox. It was followed by two black-and-white sequels, *Return of the Fly* (1959) and *Curse of the Fly* (1965). The original film was remade in 1986 by director David Cronenberg.

Considered a "pulp masterpiece" of the 1950s was *The Incredible Shrinking Man* (1957), based on Richard Matheson's existentialist novel. The film tells the story of a man, who after getting exposed to a radioactive cloud, gets shrunk in height by several inches. The film conveyed the fears of living in the Atomic Age and the terror of social alienation. It won the first Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and was named in 2009 to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant.

The independently produced sci-fi film *Attack of the 50 Foot Woman* was made in 1958. The storyline concerns the plight of a wealthy heiress whose close encounter with an enormous alien causes her to grow into a giantess, complicating her marriage already troubled by a philandering husband. The film has become a cult classic and is often referenced in popular culture.[*citation needed*] *Attack of the 50 Foot Woman* is a variation on other 1950s science fiction films that featured size-changing humans: *The Amazing Colossal Man* (1957), its sequel *War of the Colossal Beast* (1958), and *The Incredible Shrinking Man* (1957).

### Hammer Films

Christopher Lee starred in numerous British horror films of the era, produced by Hammer Films. Shown here is the 1958 color remake of *Dracula*. It was Lee who fixed the image of the fanged vampire in popular culture.

The United Kingdom began to emerge as a major producer of horror films around this time. The Hammer company focused on the genre for the first time, enjoying huge international success from films involving classic horror characters which were shown in color for the first time. Drawing on Universal's precedent, many films produced were *Frankenstein* and *Dracula* remakes, followed by many sequels. Christopher Lee starred in a number of Hammer Horror films, including *The Curse of Frankenstein* (1957), which Professor Patricia MacCormac called the "first really gory horror film, showing blood and guts in colour". His most influential role was as Count Dracula, with Lee's portrayal becoming the archetypal vampire in popular culture. The academic Christopher Frayling writes of Lee's 1958 film, "*Dracula* introduced fangs, red contact lenses, décolletage, ready-prepared wooden stakes and – in the celebrated credits sequence – blood being spattered from off-screen over the Count's coffin." Lee also introduced a dark, brooding sexuality to the character, with Tim Stanley stating, "Lee’s sensuality was subversive in that it hinted that women might quite like having their neck chewed on by a stud". Other British companies contributed to a boom in horror film production in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s.