[tomedwards7]

i want to know your opinions on how horror has changed overall as a genre, for example how it has changed from Dracula to the likes of saw. these are my points and why i believe horror has evolved.

1) Globalization and instant access to worldwide media has affected horror. The real world isn't any more terrifying than it was a hundred years ago, but now we can see it for ourselves. Foreign wars and drug cartel beheadings and third world famine zones are now right in our living rooms and horror seems to have adjusted to match - especially in terms of depicting human cruelty and depravity.

2) Modern horror has largely replaced implied danger and atmosphere with more visceral moments and jump scares. Not true in all cases of course, but certainly in a lot. Older audiences were more entertained by what was going to happen, rather than what is happening now.

3) I think we're seeing a new exploration of how to drive the emotions of horror with art direction and cinematography. This was common in the older movies (pre 60s) but seems to have gotten lost, especially in the 80s and 90s. From the 2000s forward we started seeing a lot of subdued and sepia tones, grain filters, film scratch effects - sort of like a modern effort to achieve some of the chiaroscuro effects of the old B&Ws, and also mirroring the darker, more squalid tones coming out in modern horror.

4) As much as horror evolves, the element of the supernatural - or rather the unknowable - never seems to change much. Monsters became ghosts, and now ghosts are becoming Aliens - the common factor is that they're not us and the ways to fight them are hard to discover for the protagonists.

5) Each era seems to have an underground batch of entries that hanker back to a previous era. The Haunting (63) didn't have to be black and white, for example, colour had been commonplace for quite some time by then. Today we see movies harking back to the late 70s (House of the Devil) and the campiness of the 80s (Hatchet, Slither, Cabin in the woods). I suspect that in 20 years time we'll have some throwbacks being released that try to affect the tone of the 2010s.