1952: Cinema start to fear it is losing it’s audiences to television a new gimmick is born, it is the 3D movie. The first 3D film is a cheap spectacle which makes a fortune at the box office.
1960: Finally with a larger budget to work with and freed from the constraints of his back to back movies Roger Corman begins a cycle of horror films based upon the works of Edgar Allen Poe, many starring Vincent Price and all borrowing liberally from Hammer’s style of filmmaking. The first in the cycle is House of Usher. Hammer itself releases Brides of Dracula a sequel to their first Dracula.
1969: Boris Karloff dies aged 82 and with him the last link to the Golden Age of Horror is lost.
1972: Cushing and Lee star in Hammers Dracula AD 1972. In an attempt to appeal to younger audiences the setting is updated, teenagers become the main characters and the film is filled with psychedelic rock music. The film is cut and banned in some countries notably in the UK where the BBFC refuses it a certificate.
1986: Cronenberg releases his most commercially successful film yet, a remake of the nineteen fifties movie The Fly.
1987: As horror films become increasingly comedic Sam Raimi releases a slapstick remake of his own earlier film under the title Evil Dead 2. It seems that the horror boom of the seventies and eighties is largely over and that audiences are once again looking elsewhere for their entertainment.
1996: Wes Craven launches his new slasher franchise with Scream. The film has it’s tongue partly in it’s cheek with many knowing references to horror movie history and laughs mixed in with the scares.
1997: Producers rush out a film of I know What You Did Last Summer to cash in on the success of Scream. This slasher movie will spawn two less successful sequels.
1999: James Fermann leaves his post as head of the BBFC. There will now be a softening of stance towards explicit content and over the next few years many ’video nasties’ will be certified and finally released in the UK. After a decade bereft of new ideas in the genre a low budget movie shot on a handheld camera becomes a worldwide phenomenon.
2000: The Exorcist (1973) is given a cinema rerelease.
2004: Saw an ultraviolent movie franchise is launched it is to be the first in a series rumoured to be stretching to six films and a videogame. It also sees the advent of a new sub-genre of extremely violent splatter movies called by some critics ‘torture porn’.
2006: The Hills Have Eyes is remade.
2007: Halloween becomes the latest 1970’s horror movie to get the update treatment.
No comments:
Post a Comment