These are such things as screams are made of! From the black-and-white nightmares etched out of the German Expressionist movement to today's terrifying exercises in cinema verite, the horror film has never gone out of fashion, decade after decade. Essential Horror Movies charts the history of the horror film - its creation, development, and evolution-through the movies that have been essential to the growth and continuance of the genre. What makes a horror movie "essential"? It can be that the silent masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has lost none of its eerie power after almost a century, or that 1931's Dracula is not just a classic, but also one of the most influential pictures in the history of Hollywood. It can be that the film established a new form of cinematic storytelling, such as 1945's Dead of Night, or introduced a visceral level of screen terror, like 1957's Curse of Frankenstein. Small pictures whose influences belied their budgets—-such as Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, and The Blair Witch Project - were essential to the continuing development of the genre. They, along with many other impactful fright films, are described and analyzed in Essential Horror Movies. Lavishly illustrated with color and black and-white photographs, many of them rare, and featuring insights from the filmmakers themselves and behind-the-scenes information on the making of the films, Essential Horror Movies is the most comprehensive "biography" of one of the cinema's most popular and enduring genres, and a book that offers a frighteningly good time!
