Horror film

Horror is a film genre seeking to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's primal fears. Inspired by literature from authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley, horror films have existed for more than a century. The macabre and the supernatural are frequent themes, and may overlap with the fantasy, supernatural fiction and thriller genres.

Horror films often deal with viewers' nightmares, fears, revulsions and terror of the unknown. Plots within the horror genre often involve the intrusion of an evil force, event, or personage into the everyday world. Prevalent elements include ghosts, extraterrestrials, vampires, werewolves, demons, gore, torture, vicious animals, evil witches, monsters, zombies, cannibals, psychopaths, and serial killers. Movies about the supernatural are not necessarily horrific.

History

1890-1920s

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, which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. Another of his horror projects was 1898's La Caverne maudite (a.k.a. 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. The era featured a slew of literary adaptations, with the works of Poe and Dante, among others. In 1910, Edison Studios produced the first film version of Frankenstein, following the 1908 film adaptation of the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The macabre nature of the source materials used made the films synonymous with the horror film genre.

Horror

Horror or The Horrors or variant may refer to:

Films

Genres and techniques

Music

Other uses

Willem Dafoe

William J. "Willem" Dafoe (born July 22, 1955) is an American actor. A member of the experimental theater company The Wooster Group, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Platoon (1986) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000). His other film appearances include The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The English Patient (1996) and the Spider-Man trilogy (2002–07). He has also had voice-roles in Finding Nemo (2003) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), as well as two episodes of The Simpsons.

Early life

Dafoe was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. One of seven children of Muriel Isabel (née Sprissler) and Dr. William Alfred Dafoe, he recalled in 2009: "My five sisters raised me because my father was a surgeon, my mother was a nurse and they worked together, so I didn't see either of them much." In high school, he acquired the nickname Willem. His father's ancestry is French-Canadian, Swiss, and English, and his mother's ancestry is German, Irish, and Scottish.

He was once expelled from high school for shooting a pornographic film.