Video: The Evolution of How Horror Filmmakers Have Scared Us

Horror filmmakers have been scaring the pants off of us since the earliest days of cinema. Back then, it was monsters and mummies and science experiments gone wrong doing the frightening; today, it can be anything from masked killers to sound-hating aliens to pop-up book characters to, well, US. But how do filmmakers use cinema to scare audiences? What tactics have they employed over the century to tickle our terror bone – and how have those tactics evolved? In our latest video essay, Rotten Tomatoes Editor Jacqueline Coley chronicles the history of horror in cinema, introducing us to the masters of the genre and describing their fiendish strategies. It’s a suspenseful journey that will take you from the original cinematic universe to the slasher phenomenon right through to today’s ambitious, expectation-subverting horror works – with pitstops at torture porn and Hitch along the way.

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