Horror in the dictionary it means to have an intense feeling of fear, shock or disgust it derives from the french word 'Horrere' meaning to shudder. To scare people has been an art that has been around from the beginning of storytelling, there is an innate need to be scared or to gain enjoyment from finding something scary and the rush of adrenaline that this gives us. This is obvious wherever we look through history, through the ancient ballads to modern urban myths, the enjoyment of fear is written into human history.
The term Horror was first used in the 1764 novel ' The Castle of Otranto' by Horace Walpole which was full of suspense and hideous mystery, this was then imitated greatly by many authors creating the birth of the Gothic Fiction that was an incredibly popular style of book in the 18th and 19th century's authors that followed where Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte and Charles Dickens.
The earliest horror films were silent and where known as Spook Tales and were created by people such as the Lumière brother. Horror was not used to describe a genre until the 1930's. Horror films where gory and terrifying to audiences this was until the Hay's code stepped in and put controls over films that made it very difficult to create scary films. it also banned classics such as 'Frankenstein' and 'Freaks'.
Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' was released just as the Hay's code was starting to loose its grasp over the film industry and ever since horror films have become more and more horrific and pushed boundaries more and more as audiences are becoming desensitized to what they are seeing on screen. For instance the 'Evil Dead' (1981) was Banned because of the tree rape scene however when it was re-made in (2013) the scene was made worse and the film was still screened this shows how audiences are becoming desensitized to horror and how horror will progress in the future.
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