Horror Movies Online

Horror is one of the oldest and most popular of all film genres. From the monsters of the 1930s to the invading aliens of the 1950s to the psychopathic slashers of the 1980s and beyond, the horror film has evolved and adapted, but its focus on fright as entertainment has remained constant. As an emotion, horror is technically characterized by extreme fear, disgust and revulsion, but horror films might also try to bring about more subtle reactions in their viewers-dread, suspense and terror are also familiar territory for horror films.

Horror films appeared even during the silent-film era, with Lon Chaney portraying terrifying villains such as the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Max Schreck playing the evil Count Orlock in the German vampire film Nosferatu. The supernatural would play a large part in horror films for most the twentieth century; vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons and other paranormal creatures provided most of the scares. In the middle of the century, creatures from outer space and atomic-age mutants came on the scene, and flesh-eating zombies joined the party in the late 1960s.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is often credited for introducing a new horror-movie villain: the unhinged serial killer. The slasher films of the late 1970s and 1980s solidified the psychopath as the most common nightmare fuel in horror films, and those films set the stage for the ultra-violent serial-killer films-the ones that critics have dubbed "torture porn"-at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Another twist in the contemporary horror genre is the supernatural romance, a mixture of old-fashioned horror-movie characters-vampires and werewolves primarily-with the traditional Hollywood story of star-crossed love between two (or more) earnest young people. Although these films throw a few elements of horror into the mix, inducing fright is rarely their main concern.