Hutchings, Peter. “Defining Horror.” The Horror Film. Harlow, England: Pearson-Longman, 2004. 1-33.

In other words, critics do not simply assume or rely upon a / pre-existing, well-established group of films when they write about horror but instead will often work to shape a group of films, including some and excluding others, in order to produce their own particular idea of what horror is. 2-3

In fact, the evidence suggests that the term ‘horror film’ itself did not become widespread until later on in the 1930s. 3

It is significant in this respect that when genre first became a major focus of interest in the study of film during the 1970s, it formed part of a more general turning away from what were perceived as the excesses of auteurism. Auteurism, looking at cinema in terms of directors, had been a controversial, cutting-edge development in film criticism during the 1950s and 1960s, especially in its insistence that artists of value and distinction were to be found working within the Hollywood studio system. But by the 1970s auteurism itself was increasingly perceived as old-fashioned and somewhat elitist in its outlook, with is focus on the uniquely talented individual film director often operating at the expense of an understating of other aspects of cinema, notably cinema’s existence as a medium of popular entertainment. Auteurism, which as Alan Lovell has / noted ‘used the common critical tool of traditional artistic criticism (the author expressing the personal vision)’, tended to put a distance between the way that auteurist critics saw film and the way that audiences saw them, with this being particularly the case for those mainstream entertainment films upon which so much auteurist activity had been concentrated (Lovell, 1975, p. 5). Even when directors’ names were used as part of a film’s marketing—with examples including Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille or, more recently, Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott—these seemed to operate more a ‘brand names’ than as promises of artistic or auteurist integrity. 4-5

To a certain extent, matters were helped by the fact that much of this 1970s definitional work was organized around the western genre which, fortuitously, turned out to be one of the easiest mainstream genres to define (although even here there were problems). In searching for that ‘Factor X’ that bound together all the films belonging to a particular genre, one could point to the western’s specific geographical and historical setting, to a fairly consistent set of visual conventions and devices, and, perhaps more contentiously, to a number of themes that, according to some critics, all westerns addressed, notably the conflict between civilisation and the wilderness. 5

In retrospect, the most interesting feature of this problem is that it was only a problem for critics, not for the film-makers and audiences who seemed able to negotiate their way through various genres with ease. 6

Other critics have taken issue both with Wood’s politico-ideological readings of horror and with his reliance on some psychoanalytical terminology. 6

Or if, following Wood’s lead, horror films are about repression, one also has to take into account that repression can be seen as an important element in various westerns, melodramas, thrillers and musicals. 7

It has already been noted in this chapter that in fact industrial and fan-based definitions of horror are far from cohesive or consistent, and that, for the market at least, horror—and, for that matter, other genres as well—exists as a provisional grouping of films subject to significant alteration as the requirements of the market change. 7

Horror cinema began in the early 1930s in the American film industry. In other words, the early 1930s marked the point where the term ‘horror’ became understood—by the industry, by critics, by audiences—as designating a particular type (or, as we shall see, types) of film, with the recognition of this term apparent not just in America but in other countries where American films were distributed. For example, in 1933 the British film censors actually came up with a new classification, the H certificate, specifically for this new category of film. 9

It follows from this that when critics designate films made before the early 1930s as horror films, they are doing so retrospectively. 9

Many critics have also seen gothic literature as providing another important source for the horror film. However, establishing the precise nature of the connection between gothic and horror is complicated by the fact that the term ‘gothic’ itself can be just as vague and imprecise as the term ‘horror.’ 10

Inasmuch as they display an interest in gothic literary texts at all, horror film-makers have tended to focus, with the notable exception of Frankenstein, on the late-Victorian gothic novels, works which in many respects are very different from the original gothics. The other significant fact about the cinematic adaptations of gothic novels that do exist is that none of them is even remotely faithful to the literary originals, with this applying to all film versions of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from the 1930s onwards. 11

Historians of the horror film have often argued that monsters in 1930s US horror cinema are, in the main, non-American, with their activities usually taking place on foreign shores safely distant from America. From this perspective, horror itself becomes a kind of foreign intrusion into American cinema, with some of its non-American sources including British gothic literature and German Expressionist cinema. Underlining this is the fact that the two main stars of 1930s US horror, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, were, respectively, Hungarian and English, and a number of important horror film-makers from this period were also not American. 14

However, such an understanding of 1930s horror tends to be based on one specific type of horror from the period, the horror films produced by Universal Studios (including Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy). If one looks at horror films produced by other studios, one can quite easily find narratives set in contemporary America. 14

Instead they were all drawing upon and reworking material that had a proven contemporary commercial life either in theatre or in cinema itself. 15

The term ‘horror’ itself can become somewhat embarrassing and vulgar in this respect, doubly vulgar in fact because not only is it a marketing term but it also describes a crude bodily sensation that stands at some distance from the ‘higher’ feelings that culture is meant to instill in us. 15

One might go further and argue that, so far as an understanding of genre history is concerned, the follow-up films are more important than the films that spawned them inasmuch as they reveal patterns of generic development not immediately apparent from just looking at the initial work. 16

This tardiness can in large part be assigned to the absence in the 1930s of what might be termed an established ‘sequel culture’. Serials—weekly twenty-minute episodes usually with a cliffhanger ending setting up the next episode—were a popular part of the cinema-going experience, and there were also series of feature films structured around particular characters—the aforementioned Andy Hardy films, for example, or numerous Charlie Chan and Mr Moto detective films. But the idea of making a film that in some way followed on chronologically from a previous film, as opposed to a film that simply feature a returning character, was a novel one. Matters were complicated further for Universal when it quickly became apparent from the critical and public response to Dracula and Frankenstein that the figures of fascination, the potential brand names, were not Frankenstein or Van Helsing, Dracula’s nemesis, but rather the monsters themselves. Unfortunately Universal had killed off both these monsters at the end of the films in which they appeared (and had also killed off the mummy and the werewolf for good measure). 17

The other, more / influential approach is to bring back the ‘destroyed’ monster, either by retrospectively finding a loophole in the plot of the original film that enables the film-makers to claim that the monster did not die really, or by actually resurrecting the dead monster. 17-18

This involved finding of resolving the apparent contradiction between the narrative imperative that dictated the monster must die (not until the 1960s would it become acceptable for a horror monster to be left alive at the end of a film) and the commercial imperative dictating that the monster must survive. 18

Critics have often seen this 1940s works as entailing a falling away in terms of quality from the 1930s films. Budgets and production values were generally lower in the 1940s than they had been in the 1930s, and an increasing reliance on sequels—with virtually every 1940s Universal horror film a sequel of some kind or other—apparently denoted a more openly exploitative approach to the horror genre than before. Because of this, it has become common in histories of horror for 1930s Universal horror to be considered as a separate entity from 1940s Universal horror, with the former deemed more original, innovative and imaginative. 20

Equally, sequels themselves afforded all sorts of opportunities for film-makers to innovate and engage imaginatively with the material, with this happening more often in 1940s Universal horror than has sometimes been acknowledged. 20

However, the term ‘film cycle’ has also been used by historians of cinema to designate a group of films emanating from a particular studio, films which are seen as sharing certain stylistic or thematic features. 20

But these very general expectations, and the brand name with which they are associated, should not be confused with or used to define the films themselves, which are often more distinct from each other than the brand name suggests. 22

1930s: Universal horror – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, etc.
1940s: Val Lewton’s production at RKO – Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), etc.
Early 1950s: US science fiction/horror – Creature from the Black Lagoon, It Came From Outer Space, The Thing from Another World. /
Late 1950s: British horror, especially films produced by Hammer – The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), Curse of the Werewolf (1961).
Post-1968: The modern/contemporary US horror film – Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), etc.
Post-1978: The slasher film – Halloween and Friday the 13th. 27-28

(Giallo–the Italian word for yellow–referred to the yellow covers of the Italian pulp
fiction from which these films drew their inspiration. 29

Meanwhile, Jeepers Creepers presents itself as a no-frills horror movie harking back to
the brutal simplicity of low-budget 1970s horror and generally (but not entirely) avoiding
the self-parodic approach endemic in US horror since the success of Scream.

A number of horror historians, notable among them Andrew Tudor, have seen horror’s development in terms of a move from closed narratives (where the monster is definitively destroyed) and a relative security about social authority towards open narrative (where the monster is not always definitively destroyed) and a relative insecurity about social authority (Tudor, 1989). To a certain extent, this sort of development could be mapped on to the structure I have just outlined, with the closed forms of horror associated with the first American regime and the socially conformist practices of the traditional Hollywood studio system and the open forms of horror with the second international regime and a greater willingness generally to question social norms. Ultimately, however, this is just too neat a picture of the genre. 32