The Classic Age of Horror Cinema

Last year, I wrote about the Silent Age and the Golden Age of Horror Cinema. They focused on the earliest films towards the ones released in the 70´s and 80´s. Of course, the way I label them is entirely subjective, and the same goes for the next time period.

The Classic Age of Horror Cinema reaches out in my opinion from the 30´s towards the 60´s, where enough innovative flicks have been directed, produced, edited and shown on the silver screen in order to influence and inspire present films.

King Kong(1933) is a milestone in filmmaking which truly impressed me with it's production values, originality and brave direction and paved the way for Creature Features to come out, which remain highly popular in Japan.

The gothic horror subgenre involves vampires primarily, and they usually have suspenseful settings and plots to immerse into. World famously, Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee in their respective Dracula portrayals(1931 and 1958) dominate the first thing that people think of when speaking of gothic horror.

The Universal Monsters Studios and the Hammer company managed to roughly over 3 decades populate not only Dracula, but his partners in horror as well, including Frankenstein's monster, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon and my personal favorite, The Invisible Man.

The 50's saw the rise of doomsday and monster pandemonium flicks, which usually involved giant versions of animals, and/or silly stories involving nuclear deterrences and radiations. Admittedly, the 50's aren't a favorite of mine when speaking of horror cinema.

The 60's gave rise to prototypes of the slasher subgenre, with Psycho(1960) remaining another remarkable film to have changed the landscape of horror cinema. Other highly influential titles include the birth of the modern zombie in Night of the Living Dead(1968), and fear of the unknown in The Haunting(1963).

The Classic Age of Horror Cinema is a vast space of unsettling features with enough content to provide for anyone interested in digger deeper down the horror hole. Although I only talked about the most popular titles, and modern young audiences most likely won't feel or appreciate them, you should definitely give the ones I mentioned a try if nothing else interests you from this age.