Psycho (1960)Hitchcock's psychological thriller still shocks - especially the brutal shower-murder montage. A young, in-love, attractive real estate office secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) impulsively steals $40,000, flees from Phoenix, and eventually ends up at the deserted Bates Motel. Following a conversation over dinner with the sympathetic, shy, and nervous motel manager Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), she vows to return and extricate herself from her predicament involving the larcenous crime. As a cleansing act before retiring for the night, she prepares to take a shower.
In the next scene, the vulnerable woman is shockingly stabbed to death - it is the most famous murder scene ever filmed. The infamous scene begins peacefully enough. She closes the antiseptic, white-tiled bathroom's door, removes her robe, steps naked into the bathtub, pulls the curtain across, opens up a bar of soap, and turns on the overhead shower water. There in the privacy of her bathroom, she begins to bathe, visibly enjoying the feel of the cleansing water on her skin, relieved as the water washes away her guilt. Large closeups of the shower head reveal the water pouring down on her. The bathroom door opens and a shadowy, grey figure enters the bathroom - seen through the cloudy shower curtain, whips aside the curtain, wields a knife high in the air and repeatedly slashes and stabs at her, shattering her sense of security and salvation. Split-second images of her flesh, the knife, blood, and the bathroom tile flash on the screen. The piercing, shrieking, and screaming of the violin strings of Bernard Herrmann's shrill music play a large part in creating sheer terror during the horrific scene. Marion resists and screams - the killing is kinetically viewed from many angles and views. She is standing in water mixed with blood. She falls against the bathtub tiles, her hand 'clawing and grasping' the back shower wall after the murderer (resembling a grey-haired woman) quickly turns and leaves. In a closeup, Marion holds her hand out, grabs the shower curtain and pulls it down from its hooks as she collapses over the edge of the bathtub - her face is pressed to the bathroom floor. She lies bleeding on the floor, with the shower nozzle still spraying her body with water. The camera slowly tracks the blood and water which flows and swirls together counter-clockwise down into the deep blackness of the bathtub drain. The drain dissolves into a memorable closeup of Marion's dead-still, open right eye with one tear drop (or drop of water). The camera pulls back up from the lifeless, staring eye, spiraling in an opposite clockwise direction and revealing her face - stiff, lying flat on the bathroom floor.
King Kong (1933)
In 1990, Kathy Bates won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a sick celebrity fan in Misery (1990), based on another Stephen King novel. The first film to feature the evil psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter was Michael Mann's slick Manhunter (1986). Respectability was awarded to the horror film genre when director Jonathan Demme's shocking horror/thriller 
One of the most effective, intelligent and stylish horror films of the new decade was Gore Verbinski's The Ring (2002) - a modern-day, gothic horror classic, a remake of the Japanese horror flick Ringu (1998). Other 
One of the newest trends of horror were variations on the sadistic, low-budget "trash" horror Z-films of the 1970's, many of which featured rape-revenge themes, in such films as:
In the new century, film audiences' threshold for sadistic gore and sickening violence (already numbed by years of 'slasher' films) was seriously tested, in such low-budget scarefest films as William Malone's hellishly dark and torture-filled FearDotCom (2002), and James Wan's grisly Saw (2004) (with lucrative sequels in 2005, 2006 and 2007), which featured a sadistic serial killer named Jigsaw who devised maddening, diabolical deathtraps for his victims. Also, there was Alexandre Aja's blood-soaked The Hills Have Eyes (2006) (a remake of Wes Craven's controversial 1977 cult low-budget film of the same name, and actually produced by Craven) with a psychopathic, mutated family of cannibals attacking a suburban family in the Nevada desert, and Eli Roth's xenophobic and uncompromising Hostel (2005), which told of two hedonistic American male backpacking tourists in Europe who were subjected to debased, medically-graphic physical, sexual and mental torture in the concluding 20 minutes. Other male film-makers who were contributing to this new violently-graphic trend included Rob Zombie (The Devil's Rejects (2005), the sequel to House of 1000 Corpses (2003)). 
Wes Craven also began his career in violent horror films in the 70s, with the low-budget shocker Last House on the Left (1972) (a re-tooling of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960)) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) - about brutal, desert-dwelling, hillbilly mutant cannibals stalking a family in the wilderness. His two most famous films were teen slasher flicks that spurred a flurry of imitations and sequels:
Friday the 13th (1980), the first of the horror genre's most recognizable horror series - with an astonishing number of sequels (ten), ripped off more original films of the 70s (such as director Mario Bava's definitive slasher/gore film A Bay of Blood (1971, It.) - R-rated) with tales of terrorized teen camp counselors. It also inspired a TV series and several spoofs.
Writer/director Sam Raimi created some of the most exuberant, inventive, comic-book, tongue-in-cheek parodies with horror themes ever produced starring Bruce Campbell as the one-armed protagonist with a chain saw. The low-budget series began with The Evil Dead (1981) about a remote Tennessee cabin possessed by evil spirits and haunting five university students. It was followed by Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987), and Army of Darkness (1992). Raimi's more mainstream film Darkman (1990) brought together elements of gothic horror and characters (the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, and the Phantom of the Opera) and featured Liam Neeson as the tortured, vengeful, and disfigured scientist Peyton "Darkman" Westlake. He also directed the major blockbuster Spider-Man (2002) with the comic-book super-hero Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) battling his evil nemesis, the Green Goblin/Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe). Director Raimi's sequel was equally successful both critically and at the box-office: Spider-Man 2 (2004) with a villainous Dr. Octopus (Alfred Molina).
Classic Wolfman, Dracula/Vampire, and Frankenstein films were also resurrected and refashioned in the 80s and 90s with bigger budgets and stars. A few of the more accomplished but cliched horror films involving werewolves included John Landis' An American Werewolf in London (1981) (re-made as An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) in the setting of Paris), Joe Dante's horror/comedy The Howling (1981), and Mike Nichols' Wolf (1994) with Jack Nicholson as the afflicted individual - these films featured stunning metamorphosis sequences of man-into-wolf, elements that are now standard procedure for such films. Other recent werewolf films included: Michael Wadleigh's classic werewolf film Wolfen (1981), Neil Jordan's fairy tale-monster film The Company of Wolves (1984), Silver Bullet (1985) - an adaptation of Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf, the spoof Teen Wolf (1985) with Back to the Future's Michael J. Fox - and its sequel Teen Wolf Too (1987).
Another suspense/thriller director Alfred Hitchcock, whose early silent film The Lodger (1926) explored horror's themes, brought out his most horrific film over 30 years later at the start of the decade. His film changed the face of all horror films ever since. Pure archetypal horror was now to be found in the dark shadows of the human soul itself - in a psychopathic, cross-dressing Bates Motel operator and taxidermist (Anthony Perkins). The low-budget, television-influenced, B & W 
Roman Polanski's Horror Films in the 60s: 
George Romero, now known as the Master of the 'zombie film,' debuted as director with the low-budget, black-and-white, intensely-claustrophobic, unrelenting B&W cult classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), a milestone 'splatter' film about newly dead, stumbling corpses/zombies that returned to life with ravenous hunger for human flesh. The amateurish, allegorical film made in just one month showed rotten human corpses walking with outstretched arms and threatening a few trapped survivors who sought refuge in a Pennsylvania farm-shack. By film's end, the townsfolk discovered that zombies could be killed by shooting them in the head - although they mistakenly shoot Ben (Duane Jones) after his desperate fight for survival.
Zombies are 'walking dead' creatures, often with decayed flesh, that are destructive, malevolent, prey on human flesh, and almost impossible to 'kill.' The word zombie was derived from the Bantu language of Angola (n-zumbi meaning ghost or departed spirit), and zombies (involved in Haitian voodoo) debuted in William B. Seabrook's book The Magic Island. It could be argued that the 'somnambulism' in the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) was one of the earliest examples of a hypnotic, sleep-walking state similar to that exhibited by zombies. 
One of the better zombie films of the 40s was RKO director Jacques Tourneur's (and producer Val Lewton's) atmospheric, intelligent and spooky I Walked With A Zombie (1943), based loosely on the Jane Eyre novel. Its most famous scene/moment was the encounter with a sinister zombie guardian (Darby Jones) in West Indies sugar cane fields. Monogram's Voodoo Man (1944) recycled Revenge of the Zombies (1943) and brought back Bela Lugosi as practicing voodoo master Dr. Marlowe, and John Carradine as a retarded manservant. The zombie sub-genre declined after the mid-40s, although there were a few notable entries, such as Republic's 12-part serial Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952), producer Sam Katzman's The Zombies of Mora Tau (1957), Voodoo Woman (1957), and Hammer's The Plague of the Zombies (1966) - notable for a realistic zombie decapitation in a dream sequence.
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987), d. Wes Craven, based upon the autobiographical book with the same title from Wade Davis, about a Harvard researcher sent to Haiti to investigate voodooism and drug-induced zombies
Future director Steven Spielberg's first notable film (originally made-for-TV) was the paranoic Duel (1972) about a monstrous and malevolent gas-tank truck without a driver. Director Nicolas Roeg's psychological thriller Don't Look Now (1973) duplicated Hitchcockian terror in a tale of disaster in Venice for Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Although it was a musical/comedy, the cult-campish Frankenstein classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) was set in a haunted castle with a group of transsexual aliens, and starred a young Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, and Tim Curry. The weird and bawdy film soon became a cultural institution and phenomenon as it played for many years in packed midnight showings, with costumed audience members participating in the screenings. Jack Starrett's fast-paced horror chase film, Race With the Devil (1975) starred Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as innocent vacationers - with their wives (Loretta Swit and Lara Parker) - who are pursued by Satanists after inadvertently watching them perform a human sacrifice. 
Two of the most effective, box-office successes of the 70s included the camp classic It's Alive! (1974) about a murderous baby, and Tobe Hooper's exploitative, low-budget, hand-made cult film - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). The notorious first film about a terrorized group of teenagers was loosely based on the true crimes of grisly, notorious Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, as was Hitchcock's 
John Carpenter's influential, and acclaimed independent-sleeper horror classic 
Italian cult horror film director Dario Argento featured gory, blood-and-guts special effects in the malevolent, art-horror, stylistic classic Suspiria (1977) that starred Jessica Harper as an American dancer in a European ballet academy run by witches. Argento also directed the bloody thriller Unsane (1984) (originally titled Tenebrae). 
Evil spirits possessed the body of a young 12 year-old girl (Linda Blair) in director William Friedkin's manipulative critical and box-office success 
The Mummy Films: 
The witty Frankenstein sequel directed by James Whale titled 
The next few films in Hammer's Dracula series with Lee were:
Hammer Studios in England had its first horror hit with the Frankenstein creature in director Terence Fisher's gory The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), with actor Peter Cushing in the starring role as the insane Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Christopher Lee in his first appearance as the monster. It was the first of many installments of Frankenstein sequels from the studio. 
Russian-born Val Lewton, using a more subtle, suggestive, eerie approach in a number of atmospheric, sophisticated horror/suspense films, produced eleven low-budget films for RKO Studios in the 1940s, directed first by Jacques Tourneur, and then by Mark Robson and Robert Wise. Lewton's first psychological horror film, directed by Tourneur in his feature-film debut, was the suspenseful horror classic 
A few American-made monster/horror films of the time, however, effectively capitalized on terrorizing threats that included extraterrestrial powers or space invaders, such as the alien found in the Arctic in The Thing (From Another World) (1951), the unusual Gil-man monster in The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), mutant ants in the New Mexico desert in Them! (1954), or the aberrant or alien threat in Don Siegel's classic tale of Cold War paranoia - 
Producer/director Roger Corman, known for his low-budget, 'exploitation' films, helped to keep the horror genre alive when the larger Hollywood studios turned away. He created the low-budget, horror lampoon-satire A Bucket of Blood (1959), a pre-Little Shop of Horrors. It starred regular Corman character actor Dick Miller as Walter Paisley - a talentless, mentally-unstable beatnik coffee house bus-boy who became a famous artist after he started murdering and encasing his victims in clay and passing them off as his sculptures (i.e., "Murdered Man"). In the next year, Corman's quickly-made cheapie cult film The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) about a meat-eating house-plant named Audrey inspired an off-Broadway stage musical with the same title and another film in 1986 directed by Frank Oz. 
Horror Films in the 60s: 
Director Robert Aldrich's modern gothic thriller starred two aging Hollywood actresses (Bette Davis with her tenth Oscar nomination and Joan Crawford) as sisters in