Horror monsters in their cultural contexts can give an insight into anxieties and concerns of the contemporary culture. This is expressed through the worries that people suffer in everyday life and the monsters they have to face metaphorically. Its therefore possible to identify general cultural and contextual trends in monsters created.
The political uproar of World War 1 produced contexts in both Dracula(Browning, 1931) and Dracula, which involved corrupt aristocrats.
The film Psycho(Hitchcock, 1960) emphasises theories on the cultures understanding of the human psyche.
Social conflict was shown in Living Dead (Romero, 1968) by putting a black man as the lead character which at the time was unthinkable as racism was rife within America in the 1960s.
In the 70s horror became more violent and sadistic, this was prevalent in The Exorcist(Friedkin, 1972) and The Last House On The Left(Craven, 1972).
By the 80s horror had become even more visceral in mutilated images. This increased the production of slasher films. This was down to the audience becoming used to seeing these kinds of images.
In the 90s horror connected with the comic horror affect. An example is scream(Craven, 1996)
The 2000s saw CGI becoming more widely used to create monsters bringing horror up to date with modern day technology. This also made horror into a larger pool of ideas as a genre as more realistic things could be created allowing people to display even more visceral and horrific images such as Saw(Wan, 2004). Political points were touched on such as overpopulation in Dark water(Salles, 2005)
Horror continues to provide a cultural catharsis over 100 years since it first hit celluloid unlike genres such as westerner's.
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