[...]...INTRODUCTION: T H E ROUGH GUIDE TO HORROR MOVIES Acknowledgements Thanks to Keith Williams, Geoff Simm, Kjell Wirum, Frances Lynn, David Cox, Mark Kermode, Nigel Floyd, Rel Pinto, Fernando Dos Reis Prazeres, Mark Ashworth, Dez Skinn, Alan McKenzie, Stephen Payne, Jonathan Rutter, Anthony Timpone, Sharon Kent, Julia Wrigley, Stefan... (1927) and The House Of Horror (1929), and Browning's Chaney vehicle London After Midnight (1927), these horrors rationalized their denouements, underlining the American practice of debunking real fears with laughter and deception This vogue for tiresome spoof shockers would smother the gentle flowering of a darker and broader-based horror genre until the start of the Thirties The movies that took their... in the Depression, and through horror films audiences could draw slight comfort in fates worse than their own THE HISTORY: OVER A HUNDRED YEARS A key moment from The Black Cat (1934), starring Bela Lugosi, a classic Universal horror from the Thirties But new stories were needed for this newfound voracious mass audience Universal had made a name for themselves in the silent horror tradition with groundbreakers... sharp sudden jolt into longer pieces that horror really took a hold; adult audiences started paying attention to the circus sideshow elements of early cinema only when the wealth of horror literature and the often more lurid and melodramatic stage adaptations started making their way onto the screen via the studios — worldwide dream factories The freak shows that horror films in many respects resembled... symptomatic of horror cinema's beginnings Starring as the Monster, made like Shelley's in "a cauldron of blazing chemicals" rather than through the electrical birth of later versions, Charles Ogle created his own make-up for the role of the untidily misshapen man who eventually looks in the mirror and flees in shock The Avenging Conscience dir D W, Griffith, 1914, US, 78m, b/w Widely regarded as horror cinema's... Gregory, Asia Argento, Guillermo del Toro, Don Mancini, Neil Marshall, Brian Yuzna, Christophe Gans, Chris Smith, Nicolas Winding-Refn and my tireless Rough Guides editor Daniel Crewe Frontispiece from an Shelley's Frankenstein 1831 edition of Mary The Origins: horror literature Fear of death and the unknown, and a sense of awe at the uncontrollable power of nature are common to almost all cultures One of... crucial impact on horror writers including Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker and Stephen King Two further Lovecraft disciples were responsible for reshaping the horror genre in modern times By attempting to get inside the mind of a psychopath - in novels like The Will To Kill An engraving, published in Illustrated Police News in 1889, imagines Jack the Ripper being caught 9 THE ORIGINS: HORROR LITERATURE... Kong (1933), starring Fay Wray,Willis 22 O'Brien's stop-motion model created the world's most famous ape, thanks to skilful mixing of exotic adventure and horror- tinged fantasy by Ernest B Schoedsack and Merian C Cooper In the rest of the world, horror movies almost failed to develop at all, with other countries' film industries affected by civil wars, political turmoil and stricter censorship But from... Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, Carl Theodor Dreyer's pale and hazy impressionism — initially the result of a lighting fault but then adopted throughout - formed one of horror' s most powerful evocations of a nightmare world that was logically skewed It was the first horror to find cryptic chills in the recesses of the unconscious mind, but like Arthur Robison's remake Der student von Prag (The Student Of... night by George Melford and starring Carlos Villarfas, the native horror tradition flourished La llorona (The Crying Woman, 1933) was the first Mexican horror to feature the legendary wailing ghost mourning her dead child that would last into the Sixties; it was scripted by Fernando de Fuentes, who directed the country's best-known horror of the period, El fantasma del convento (The Phantom Of The .