I am starting a little bit of a journey to learn more about the horror genre of film. The goal of this project is to go back to the origins of film itself and see how the horror movie has changed over the last 120 years.

I have 41 films selected, which you can see listed in order below.

The Movies

1. The House of the Devil (1896)
2. The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin (1896)
3. The Bewitched Inn (1897)
4. The Devil’s Castle (1897)
5. The Infernal Boiling Pot (1903)
6. The 400 Tricks Of The Devil (1906)
7. The Witch (1906)
8. LA DANSE DU FEU (1910)
9. Frankenstein (1910)
10. The Lonedale Operator (1911)
11. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913)
12. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
13. Haxan (1922)
14. Nosferatu (1922)
15. Faust (1926)
16. The Terror (1928)
17. Dracula (1931)
18. Vampyr (1932)
19. King Kong (1933)
20. The Wolf Man (1941)
21. Cat People (1942)
22. Witch’s Cradle (1944)
23. Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
24. Godzilla (1954)
25. Diabolique (1955)
26. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
27. Eyes Without a Face (1960)
28. Black Sabbath (1963)
29. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
30. The Exorcist (1973)
31. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
32. Alien (1979)
33. The Shining (1980)
34. Sleepaway Camp (1983)
35. Funny Games (1997)
36. Chucky (1998)
37. Ginger Snaps (2000)
38. Deadgirl (2008)
39. A Serbian Film (2010)
40. We Are The Flesh (2016)
41. Cabin In The Woods (2011)

I will be breaking up the 41 films into five groups, each marking what I consider to be an important period in film. We start with the short films, dominated by Georgies Melies and his trick films. From there, movie length explodes and we see our first full length feature films. After that comes audio, and the first significant time sink in this project. When color is introduced, I break up the periods with the Cold War because it’s easy. Between these two periods, I see Cold War Color as developing and furthering the horror genre, getting us to Contemporary Horror.

I haven’t seen any of these except the last film I’ll watch, which is a meta-analysis of the genre itself. Besides Cabin in the Woods, I will be watching every film in order of release year, touching some of the highlights like the first horror feature, the first horror feature with audio, and the first horror feature with color. There are a number of classics as well, covering the popularity spectrum from famous blockbusters to the heights of obscurity.

I will do my best to keep an eye out for a few things that have consistently been a part of films since the inception of the medium:

• Plot Complexity
• Set Design
• Camera Work

I will probably come back and add a few more things to this list.

For furthering my education, I have been recommended the following items:

• History of Horror by Eli Roth
• A History of Horror by Mark Gatiss
• Horror Europa by Mark Gatiss

With that, I will be back after I watch the first 12 films!