By Gustavo Valenza Patino
Halloween has just passed and by extension October, which has become the month of horror films, a genre that grows more every day, has more viewers and, above all, has changed and has evolved into certain sub-genres that have long maintained no relation to that cinema of horror and fear with which it originated and lasted several decades. That cinema that has frightened and horrified several generations since the days of silent cinema with vampires and monsters. Dracula and Frankenstein, his main referencess, along with other monstrous rivals such as King Kong and Godzila, were changing to unsuspected levels, so that, since the end of the last century, there are already other well-defined contents, those that they attract a large audience under the generic name of horror films.
What was clear to the film industry early on was that this nascent genre was a huge hit with audiences. That paying to go and feel fear generated an inexplicable and unsuspected welcome and has become an immense source of income. Thus, the genre was quickly established. Its massive acceptance, which has been maintained for more than a century, necessarily implies that its evolution has been unceasing to go hand in hand with the technological advances of cinema, with the new times and especially with people whose interests and tastes are also variable and changing.
Today’s horror cinema, which presents several films a year on commercial billboards, continues to hold the basic scheme for provoking strong emotions in the viewer, taking advantage of the fact that images on the big screen generate a greater effect. They do this through the unknown, the supernatural, the terrifying monster, as well as murders and disappearances, such that one way or another the audience is terrified or at least shot into their psyche or surprised into their normal emotional state. .
