Horror films have dominated the box office for decades.

But did you ever wonder why some horror movies get under your skin and stay there for years?

Aside from the fun of simply having that shit scared out of you, they take our real life anxieties, manifest them on screen and tap into the instinctual fears that reside deep within our psyche.

While the term horror film wasn't mainstreamed until around 1930 the first horror movie on record is believed to be 18 96 is Lemon Wa Do Diablo, a House of the Devil.

In the years that followed, early horror films adapted popular Gothic literature like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Between the 19 thirties and 19 fifties, Universal Studios released a series of horror movies with monsters as the driving force and never looked back.

The appeal of films like Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man and Creature From the Black Lagoon lies in their ability to tap into social anxieties and transform them into fiction.

Take Frankenstein, for example, released during the height of the depression.

Frankenstein's monster, abandoned by his master and turned on by the Villagers who tried to burn him alive, was the embodiment of the millions of Americans who had just lost their jobs.

And we're fleeing the frustration and neglect of their government.

The monsters on screen allowed audiences to address their fears without looking at them to directly.

This'll takes us to the 19 fifties, where the aftermath of World War Two and the Red Scare was terrifying Americans, and this manifested through our monsters on screen.

Monsters like Godzilla or the super sized ants in them embody the unknown repercussions of the atomic age and the perpetual fear of a future apocalypse.

And the spread of communism and the mass hysteria of McCarthyism played out on screen.

An invasion of the Body Snatchers as the pod slowly open and the aliens who appear to be physical duplicates of the townspeople emerge.

But Hollywood was not prepared for what would happen in 1960 when a single silhouette would change the industry forever.

Alfred Hitchcock It all started with the clatter of shower curtain, followed by a shot of a deliberate blade taking aim at a naked female body blended with a haunting score.

The lingering, vulnerable, blood curdling screams of Janet Leigh is what haunts audiences to this day and set the scene for the Scream queens who would follow, including her own daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis.

But we'll get to her later.

With Psycho.

Hitchcock took horror films to a new level, introducing audiences to a flawed heroine and challenging his audiences stomach for blood.

To take it even further.

The assassinations of John F.

Kennedy, Robert F.

Kennedy and Martin Luther King, along with the Vietnam War, exposed the violent and brutal ways in which humans could harm one another and you can mention horror and leave out Night of the Living Dead.

This film was made before the M P A.

A film rating system went into effect and shown during Saturday matinee days, which meant that young Children were in the audience and probably scarred for life.

Considered one of the most violent and bloody horror films of its time, it also set box office records proving that despite the gore and terror of being besieged by flesh eating zombies, people enjoy the escape from, or perhaps the parallels to modern day life and political turmoil in America as the violent horror and imagery of the Vietnam War.

The first televised war was broadcast on the nightly news.

Horror movies took advantage of the Times once again.

In addition to becoming more gory and explicit, the horror genre explored sexuality, particularly among teams.

That brings us to the genre's next evolution through the use of what are now some of the most obvious horror movie tropes of all time.

The Final Girl and Death by Sex.

Both of these tropes were explored to great success in John Carpenter's iconic 1978 film Halloween.

And while her mother may have originated the title Scream Queen, no one wears that crown better than Jamie Lee Curtis.

As Laurie Strode, Strode was the virginal suburban good girl.

Her purity would be her saving grace.

More promiscuous friends fall prey to the knife of Michael Myers.

While she's always just missed, and even when she's coward and trapped in a corner of a closet, she maintains the ability to defend herself and eludes death.

Subliminal message.

Sex leads to falling prey to bad things.

Speaking of prey, recognize these two notes.

Everything about this ethical opening scene from jaws of two drunk teenagers running and stripping their clothes as they head to the water.

Only tow.

Have everything go terribly wrong?

Reads as a morality tale.

What better way to drill the message about the dangers of alcohol in sex than being attacked by a 20 foot great white shark in the film's opening scene?

The amount of remakes and use of excessive gore spilling over from the eighties ultimately groove tiring to audiences in the nineties, when the tone shifted to being more self referential and reignited the slasher in supernatural sub genres.

In films such as Scream and I Know What You Did last summer, the teenage characters were now snarky M.

O and Self Aware and Justus.

Those sub genres evolved with the times.

So did psychological horror, focusing on what truly made a killer Tic 24 7 News coverage and the emerging popularity of true crime revealed the scariest monsters were real and human and living among us, and no one was more terrifying than Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.

No Annie from Misery.

Maybe a close second.

I Love You.

Lecter was the serial killer who lived next door, but he was not your cardboard villain today about poor Catherine, though, has played out through his various interviews with Clarice Starling Lecter exposes his vulnerabilities and seduces us with his humanity, only to brutally remind us of his taste for flesh paired with fava beans and Chianti thief.

Popularity of teen focused and psychological horror films continued into the two thousands.

But parallel to the growing trend of reality shows on TV, a new sub genre emerged and change the game in viewer experience and storytelling found footage films like 1990 nine's The Blair Witch Project paved the way for a shift to horror minimalism.

Think low budget, high thrills box office returns.

The amateur video element of these films is what makes them so creepy.

It gives the impression that the situation playing out on screen could happen to anyone.

And with the war on terror and full swing by the early to mid two thousands, the majority of horror movies focused on humans doing whatever they could to survive the evil around them.

The fear of Doom's they re emerged into the zeitgeist with the help of movies like 28 days Later, Jordan Peale's 2017 film Get Out was Oscar winning proof that horror, both in movies and in real life can take many different forms.

Peel expertly wove together the sub genres of psychological and technological horror while also examining the traumas of modern day society.

An institutionalized racism while the horror genre bias.

Israel.

Eze Air Several horror films that garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan and Get Out.

But no horror film achieved the level of success of Silence of the Lambs, which received seven nominations and went on to win the Big Five.

Best actor, best actress, best director, best adapted screenplay and best picture, the only horror film to ever win that category.

So even if critics do not always embrace hard the same way they do most Jennifer Lawrence movies this genre has been ableto last because it consistently looks at cultural markers as an opportunity to redefine itself.

And so, in honor of the latest revival of his classic film, Halloween, maybe we should just leave it to director John Carpenter.

To sum it all up, horror is a reaction.