The Evolution of Horror By Jonathan Berman

One could write entire books on how horror has evolved over the last 100 years, it's socially relevant ambitions, cyclical monsters that represent economic and social anxieties.  

Take for example, Godzilla, a creature created in Japan to represent the deeply rooted perspective shift after the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the horrors of world war 2, now look at Cloverfield, a similar monster that was created to represent the shift in consciousness in America after 9/11.  

Throughout film and even story, fable, and oral tradition before the written word, there have been archetypes to represent the darker natures of man, the monster under the bed, the subconscious, the waltz over the dark water... Horror changes but it always stays the same, in its core it shines a light into the darkness of the human mind, investigates the cobwebbed and forgotten corners of consciousness.  

The horror of the '70s was a very story based character driven world of cinema, in the '80s, we became more physical, more visceral, showing the true of the nightmare rather than talking about it.  Today, horror is shifting yet again, from the visceral to the visual to the hyper surreal, and perhaps back around to the storybook form eventually in its cyclical nature.  I believe the found footage genre is representative of the bridge between the two, and in the next five to ten years we will see a return to character driven horror and thoughtful writing.  

Or not...  Who can say?  What happens in the world, effects consciousness, so we cannot say with certainly where it will lead, but what we can say with certainty is that eventually, everything comes full circle.