Horror movies have been a big part of our culture from Le Manoir du Diable being the first horror movie ever, all the way to the new movie “evil dead rise” being the latest movie at the moment. With the movies over the years changing it’s no surprise that the characters in them will change as well as the plots or even the qualities of the movies.

An example of movie changing would be Frankenstein’s monster from the classic horror movie Frankenstein released in 1818. The plot is of a monster being created of dead human body parts sewn together by a crazy scientist, to a newer masterpiece of a horror movie, “Halloween” released in 1978, with our antagonist Michael Myers being a 6-year-old who stabbed his older sister to death and then being locked up in an asylum until he escapes one Halloween night.

The central theme for horror movies has changed, but how did we go from Frankenstein to a masterpiece like ”Halloween?” A teacher that I interviewed said that a big thing that played in the horror movie plot change, is mental health. Now I know that some movies are more about creatures, ghouls, or evil things but if you look at a pattern some point horror movies combined mental health and horror!

Examples of those types of movies being Halloween II with our final girl Laurie Strode repressing trauma and forgetting parts of her childhood that she starts to remember that night. Another example of that kind of movie would be American Psycho. Starting our main character Patrick Bateman is a wealthy business owner who starts to lose it little by little until he snaps, but considering that his mental state wasn’t the best in the movies or the books, there are some suggestions that he might’ve hallucinated some of his kills (another example of mental health problems).

Nightmare on Elm Street consists of insomniacs, while also diving into your own deepest fears or anxieties that are interpreted by nightmares. But a thing that plays into the mental health effect is also gore and high-quality jump scares. When I asked another teacher if she thought that gore and jump scares also play a huge part and they said, ”Yes and no, it depends on how good of the quality the jump scare is.” Which brings me to my reason.

“Well it’s not a surprise that the horror genre has changed with the time and with all the technology and events that have happened,” was what the staff I interviewed said.

It’s true, one reason horror movies have changed is because with all the new technology we have now it would be the perfect opportunity to try to make the movie scarier. Not to mention that movies like Dracula or Frankenstein were black and white, while movies like Halloween or A Nightmare On Elm Street have color to them, and have more special effects than when the first horror movies were created. With more special effects and editing or better quality, it’s the perfect opportunity to make the audience more uneasy.