Halloween Movies, Hollywood Horror Movies, Scary Movies, Horror Films 31st October, 2005  Save as Bookmark  Send this Page to Friend. Halloween Home   Halloween Wallpapers   Halloween Movies   Halloween Recipes   History   How to make Halloween Toys   Jack-O-Lantern   Religious Views   Samhain   Send Halloween Greetings   Putting on a horror show has become a constituent part of Modern Halloween. The quest for the scary thrill intensified by promoting Boo zoos & haunted houses in early 1980s, as community centers across North America were converting their premises into temporary haunted houses for children. Haunted houses are not the only sites of simulated terror that now characterize Halloween. Before their appearance came the movie theater. Precisely when the cinema became a venue for ghostly or gristly Halloweens is unclear. In the early 1930s there was no disposition to synchronize the opening of horror films with the witching season, Halloween parties featured tales having hilarity accent not horror, however the scenario changed in the late 1930s. Orson Welles’s radio production were broadcasting a story, a series of news bulletins interrupted generating frissions of fear & a mass panic. From then on, the commercial possibilities of promoting the scary & the macabre on Halloween became more likely.     In the Toronto area in 1958, the best that the television could offer was ‘Whispering Ghosts’ & ‘Footlight Serenade’. As for the cinema, viewers could watch adaptations of Tennessee Williams & Ernest Hemingway. A decade later, horror movies were definitely part of seasonal fare. The biggest scare at the cinema was “Wait Until Dark” starring Audrey Hepburn. It was in the 1970s and beyond that horror really became the dominant cinematic genre at Halloween. In 1986, 6 horror movies had been aired over the network, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead (1969)” a horror classic about flesh eating ghouls was the most prominent among them & regarded as the turning point in the horror genre.     The association of Halloween with the supernatural, darkness, decay & death is alluded in the movies. One such movie “Night of the demons (1987)” portrays Halloween as a night of supernatural possession, precipitating the elimination of horny young men at the hands of their demonic girlfriends in a haunted house. Its sequel (1994) is as predictable, with sexually precocious teenagers mixing their seasonal shenanigans with a touch of black magic & falling captive to predatory demons from the haunted house.     Halloween 2 (1981) refers to the bloody rites of Samhain, to the sacrifices of the first born that are part of Irish lore, but only as incidental graffiti. Halloween 6 (1995) develops this theme a little further, in that Jaimie Lloyd’s baby is cast as the potential victim of an ancient sacrifice to the Lord of dead. Halloween 3 (1982) the only exception in the cycle, as the film explores the sacrificial aspects of Halloween. The plot revolves around a crazed Irish entrepreneur who concocts a diabolical plan to eliminate children by placing life threatening chips into Halloween masks that were programmed to explode at 9 PM on Halloween. Halloween was the first of the slasher films to bring stalking closer to home. Halloween (1963) is about 8 year old Michael Myers dressed in a clown’s costume & is neglected by his sister as she is making out with her boyfriend upstairs. Once the boyfriend departs Michael confronts a sexual encounter by taking her life. Myers returns on Halloween in the sequel (1978) seeking to eliminate the surviving members of his immediate family & their friends. In Halloween 4 (1988) Myers manages to transmit the “evil” within him to his niece Jaimie Strode who at the finale of the film kills her stepmother the same way Myers had killed his sister when he was 8 years old. Only in Halloween H20 (1998) Laurie decapitates Myers with an axe.     "Friday the 13th" was one of the main films directly responsible for the horror explosion of the early 80's. For the next 5-7 years many classic horror films such as Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, Re-animator, Evil Dead 2, and Hellraiser came along and forever changed the horror landscape. Now far from this heyday of horror, we are witnessing the general self-destruction of the genre with films such as, "Scream" , "Scream 2", and "I know what you did last summer". The melding of Hollywood with Halloween & the critical importance of hyperrealism to modern mass culture can be seen in ventures such as Spooky world, a horror theme park near Foxboro, Massachusetts. Here visitors can enjoy not only haunted hayrides but also a ghoul school run by Tom Savani, the godfather of special effects.