More than monsters: Icons of horror films on the definition of the genre

Dracula, Van Helsing, The Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster - what, or who, makes a good horror movie?

That’s something the legends of the genre debated over the years, often unsatisfied at the simple classification. Classic stars like Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee were all asked through their careers to define the films they made and explain their appeal. So what did the masters of horror think?

Boris Karloff’s eerie portrayal of the Monster in Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein in 1931 helped to make him a leading star of the golden age of horror, but it wasn’t a label he enjoyed. In a 1965 interview with the BBC, he said: “Well I always rather quarrel with the word ‘horror’ because I think the connotation of the word is revulsion. And the idea, the exercise, surely is not to make you lose your breakfast, it’s to make your hair stand on end.”

Peter Cushing, who played Van Helsing to Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the Hammer Horror films, was of a similar mind. In a 1973 BBC interview, he said: “Horror to me is a film like the Godfather, or anything to do with war, which is real and can happen, and unfortunately will no doubt happen again sometime. But the films that dear Christopher Lee and I do are really fantasy. And I think fantasy that’s a better adjective to use. I don’t object to the term horror, it’s just the wrong adjective.”

Such films have been a staple of cinema for nearly as long as it has existed, external as a medium. Audiences have always been drawn to the creepy, the morbid, and the supernatural. Many of the early films were adaptations of gothic literature - from 1922’s Nosferatu (based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula) to 1931’s Frankenstein (an adaptation of the 1818 Mary Shelley novel). Edgar Allan Poe’s works were also a popular source for adaptation.

But why has it been so enduringly popular? Research has suggested that horror films can help fans deal with anxiety, external or learn that they can cope with stressful situations in their own lives. A 2020 study, external even suggested that horror film buffs exhibited higher mental resilience during the pandemic. And, of course, some people just like the thrill and the adrenaline rush.

Although he spurned the ‘horror’ label himself, Alfred Hitchcock was a master of suspense and of eliciting heightened emotions in an audience. He explained to Huw Weldon in 1964 why he thought audiences loved to be scared by thrillers: “I think it’s the satisfaction of temporary pain. And that’s the same thing when people endure the agonies of a suspense film. When it’s all over, they’re relieved.”

Karloff believed that above all else, “plot and story are absolutely vital” in horror films - that the best films in the genre had to focus on plot, situation, and character above cheap thrills or gore. “Shock for the sake of shock, I think, is hopeless,” he said.

Christopher Lee, whose portrayal of Count Dracula is one of the most enduring images of the genre, believed that the key to horror was “escapism into a world of fantasy and unreality and the weird”.

“We harbour within all of us a basic, perhaps subconscious, love for things that we don’t understand and don’t know,” he said.

Vincent Price, a star of gothic horror films, many of which were based around the works of Edgar Allan Poe, firmly believed that horror films were “entertainment”, first and foremost.

“I think Edgar Allan Poe was probably the finest American writer of the 19th Century, maybe of all time, but he wrote for entertainment,” he said.

He too believed that fantasy was key to horror: “We try to create unreality by being real.”

For Karloff, Cushing, Price, and Lee, the films they made were less about shock and horror and more about engaging the imagination of the audience and bringing them into a world of fantasy and unreality.

Karloff said: “Everyone likes to believe that there is something around the corner. They know perfectly well there isn’t, but they have fun doing it.”