Horror films are a film genre seeking to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus they may overlap with the fantasy and supernatural genre. Horrors frequently overlap with the thriller genre.

Horror films often deal with the viewer's nightmares, hidden worst fears, revulsions and terror of the unknown. Plots written within the horror genre often involve the intrusion of an evil force, event, or personage, commonly of supernatural origin, into the everyday world. Themes or elements often prevalent in typical horror films include ghosts, torture, gore, werewolves, ancient curses, satanism, demons, vicious animals, vampires, cannibals, haunted houses, zombies, sadism and serial killers. Conversely, stories of the supernatural are not necessarily always a horror movie as well.

The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by the film pioneer Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the best known being Le Manoir du diable (aka, The Haunted Castle, 1896) which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. Another of his horror projects was 1898's La Caverne maudite (aka, The Cave of the Unholy One, literally "the accursed cave").Japan made early forays into the horror genre with Bake Jizo and Shinin no Sosei, both made in 1898. In 1910, Edison Studios produced the first film version of Frankenstein, which was thought lost for many years.

Cerina Vincent (born February 7, 1979) is an American film actress, and model best known for playing the Yellow Ranger Maya in the television series Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy, a naked foreign exchange student in Not Another Teen Movie, and Marcy in Cabin Fever. She is considered a scream queen.

Vincent was born in Las Vegas, Nevada of Italian descent. In 1996, she won the Miss Nevada Teen USA title and competed at Miss Teen USA. Though she made it to the top 15, she failed to place at the pageant (televised live), which was held in Las Cruces, New Mexico and won by Christie Lee Woods of Texas.

Vincent's first major role was as the Yellow Ranger Maya in the 1999 television series Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy.

In 2001 Vincent appeared in the feature film spoof Not Another Teen Movie as the foreign exchange student Areola, and spends the entire film nude. The character was a spoof of Shannon Elizabeth's character, Nadia, in American Pie (1999). She says that being nude throughout the entire movie made her feel much more comfortable with her body and since then she has become a nudist.