A court ordered Nosferatu destroyed
NOSFERATU, made in Germany in 1922, was an unofficial version of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, with the names changed. The film-makers had not paid for the rights, and Stoker's widow took them to court. The judge ordered every copy of the film to be destroyed. A few prints survived abroad, and it is now counted among the most important films ever made.
Its vampire, Count Orlok, looks nothing like the charming Dracula of later films: bald, rat-like, with long fingers and pointed teeth. Stories like these come from the same Victorian and older fiction covered on our classic novels page.
A cheap mask and a tiny budget
HALLOWEEN, released in 1978, was made quickly and cheaply. Its masked figure's face was a shop-bought mask of the Star Trek captain James T. Kirk, with the eyeholes widened and the face spray-painted white, which made it blank and unsettling. The film earned many times its cost and led to a wave of imitators.
Horror has a long record of doing a lot with a little. ALIEN, in 1979, kept its creature mostly in shadow, which made it more frightening, and JAWS used a mechanical shark that kept breaking down, so the director showed it far less than planned.
Films that changed the age ratings
In 1984 two films aimed at family audiences, GREMLINS and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, shocked parents with scenes much scarier than they expected. In response, the American ratings body created a new PG-13 rating to sit between PG and R. In Britain, the British Board of Film Classification introduced a 12 certificate for cinema in 1989.
That is the point of age ratings: many of the films in this grid are rated 15 or 18, and are made for adults and older teenagers rather than children. Word searches only use the titles, but the films themselves are best left until the age on the box.
Most of the fear is in the sound
Turn the sound off and many frightening scenes stop working. Horror film-makers use sudden loud noises for jump scares, long silences to build tension, and very low rumbles that the audience barely hears but feels. JAWS is remembered for two notes on a double bass, played faster and faster as the shark gets nearer.
John Carpenter, who directed HALLOWEEN, wrote its theme music himself on a synthesiser. It is a simple piano pattern in an unusual rhythm of five beats, which never quite settles, and Carpenter has said that an early viewer from a film studio was not frightened by the film at all until the music was added.
Why people like being scared
Psychologists think a good scare can be enjoyable when the brain knows it is safe. The heart races and the body reacts as if in danger, but sitting in a cinema or on a sofa, the fear arrives without real risk, and the relief afterwards feels good. Many people watch with friends partly for the shared jumps and laughter.
The rest of the grid holds more titles from a century of horror: PSYCHO, SCREAM, CARRIE, SAW, HEREDITARY, INSIDIOUS, the CONJURING, ANNABELLE, POLTERGEIST, SINISTER, CANDYMAN, CHUCKY, the BABADOOK, MIDSOMMAR, HELLRAISER, SUSPIRIA and NOPE.