Supernatural Horror

What defines it

Supernatural horror features forces that lie beyond natural explanation: spirits, demons, curses, witchcraft and the undead. The threat often cannot be defeated by ordinary means, and guns, locks and good sense tend to help very little. What the form promises is a breach in the rules of the world, and the drama usually comes from watching people discover how large that breach is.

These stories often turn on belief and knowledge. Someone has to understand the rules of the haunting before they can survive it, which is why so many supernatural films contain a researcher, a priest, a medium or a skeptic who is slowly converted. The genre is therefore as much about investigation as about fear. The audience is handed clues about what the thing wants, what it can do and what might send it away, and the suspense comes from whether the characters will work it out in time.

Scholars separate the form from its neighbors in useful ways. The writer Mathias Clasen describes supernatural horror as involving some suspension or breach of physical law, which psychological horror does not, since that form relies on menaces that could exist in the natural world. Charles Derry, describes supernatural and pseudoscientific monsters as two different ways of explaining a horror story's events. Aaron Smuts treats supernatural and realist horror as the two main sub-types of horror. The boundaries blur easily: a ghost may turn out to be a character's mind, and a scientific experiment may behave like a curse. The library's psychological horror and folk horror pages cover two of the nearest neighbors.

A short history

The subgenre is as old as cinema, and in a sense older, because film borrowed it from literature and folklore. In the silent era German expressionism supplied some of its first great images, and Nosferatu gave the vampire its screen form. Universal's horror cycle, which began with Dracula in 1931, made supernatural stories the dominant mode of the early sound years. After the Second World War, science-fiction and psychological horror took over for a time, but ghost and haunted-house films never disappeared.

The 1960s brought a new seriousness, with The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963) and Rosemary's Baby (1968) using the supernatural for psychological depth. Then The Exorcist brought possession to mainstream attention, and The Omen (1976), Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980) and Poltergeist (1982) kept the wave going. Ringu revitalized the ghost story for the late 1990s, and its success sent a wave of Japanese and then American ghost films around the world.

Hallmarks

• A threat that does not follow ordinary rules and cannot be stopped by ordinary means.
• Rituals, curses or rules that must be understood before they can be broken.
• Atmosphere and slow build over action, with suggestion often preferred to display.
• An outsider, researcher or believer who pieces together the history of the haunting.
• A place, object or family line to which the threat is attached: a house, a tape, a doll, a bloodline.
• A past wrong, often a death or betrayal, that explains why the dead have not left.
• Sound design and music that signal the supernatural, often with dissonance and silence.

Roots in folklore and literature

Horror writers and film-makers inherited ghosts from stories told long before the cinema existed. Spirits of the dead appear in Homer's Odyssey, and the Roman playwright Plautus wrote what is the earliest known work to feature a haunted dwelling. Around the year 100, Pliny the Younger described an Athenian house haunted by a ghost in chains, an image that recurs in later literature. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually considered the first Gothic novel, and from it comes a set of ideas film still uses: a cursed family, an ancient house and a past that will not stay buried.

The modern ghost short story took shape in early nineteenth-century Germany, with writers such as Kleist and E. T. A. Hoffmann. In English, Walter Scott's Wandering Willie's Tale (1824) moved the form away from Gothic excess, and in the Victorian period Sheridan Le Fanu and Charlotte Riddell, along with Charles Dickens, whose A Christmas Carol and The Signal-Man are famous examples, made the ghost story a popular form. Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898, left it unclear whether its ghosts were real, an ambiguity that later films such as The Innocents and The Others used.

M. R. James, Lovecraft and the rules of the form

In 1929 the English scholar and ghost-story writer M. R. James set out what he thought a good ghost story needed. According to a summary of his criteria, they included a pretense of truth, a sense of pleasing terror, no gratuitous bloodshed or sex, no explanation of the supernatural mechanics, and a setting in the writer's and reader's own day. His stories tended to feature a reserved scholar and an old object that unleashes something malevolent, and James favored suggestion over display. Many later films follow the pattern, whether or not they know it.

H. P. Lovecraft, the American writer, surveyed the field in an essay called Supernatural Horror in Literature. He wrote it between 1925 and 1927, it first appeared in August 1927, and he revised it in 1933 and 1934. It traces horror from folklore and alchemy through the Gothic novel, and it names four modern masters: Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany and M. R. James. The essay is still a common starting point for readers who want to see how writers themselves understood the tradition.

The classical age: Universal, Lewton and Dead of Night

The early sound era's supernatural horror came mostly from Universal, which began with Dracula in 1931. In the 1940s a quieter approach grew up. Producer Val Lewton joined RKO in 1942 to lead a unit that made low-budget horror films, and his first, Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur, cost about $135,000. It relied on shadows and sound, including a sudden bus noise that became known as the Lewton bus, and the studio's pressure to show a cat on screen was met with ambiguity. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1993.

In Britain, Ealing Studios released the anthology Dead of Night in 1945, with four directors, Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer, sharing five stories linked by a dream-like frame. Its ventriloquist's dummy segment drew special praise, and its circular structure has inspired later films. Together these productions show the two strands of classical supernatural cinema: the quiet, suggestive story and the portmanteau of shocks. Both leaned on the principle, later associated with Lewton, that the unknown frightens more than the seen.

The haunted house

The haunted house is the form's oldest and most flexible setting. Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), adapted by Nelson Gidding from Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, remains the model. It was made on a budget of about $1.05 million, mostly at MGM's British studio, partly to take advantage of tax incentives, and Wise showed almost nothing, relying on camera angles, a specially distorting lens, disorienting cuts and a recorded soundtrack of noises that the actors reacted to on set. Humphrey Searle's atonal score is considered among the first in that style. Martin Scorsese has ranked it first on his list of scariest horror films.

Later films reworked the idea. Poltergeist (1982), produced and co-written by Steven Spielberg and credited to director Tobe Hooper, was made for $10.7 million and earned about $121.7 million worldwide. It was first rated R and moved to PG on appeal, which let a family audience in. The Amityville Horror (1979) and Poltergeist both mix lullaby-like music with sudden dissonance. James Wan's The Conjuring (2013) cost about $20 million and earned about $319.5 million, launching a connected series. Its marketing leaned on the claim that it was based on real cases, a claim that the film's source material, the reported cases of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, does not settle.

Possession and the devil

Possession and satanic stories moved the subgenre from the old house to the family. Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), adapted from Ira Levin's 1967 novel and produced by William Castle, cost $3.2 million and earned about $33.4 million. Ruth Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and in 2014 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. Its horror is domestic and paranoid, and much of its power comes from the question of whether the heroine is being deceived or is unwell.

William Friedkin's The Exorcist followed on December 26, 1973. William Peter Blatty adapted his own 1971 novel. The production ran far past its schedule, with over 200 shooting days instead of 85 and a budget that rose from about $4.2 million to about $12 million. It grossed about $193 million in North America in its original run and an estimated $441 million overall, and it is widely described as the first horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, with ten nominations and two wins, for Blatty's adapted screenplay and for sound. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2010. Some cities tried to restrict the film, and audiences reportedly fainted or were sick. Its mixture of faith, medical science and a child in danger became a template for decades of possession films.

Curses, tapes and the J-horror wave

The curse is a favorite structure because it comes with a clock. Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998), released in Japan on January 31, 1998, is built on one: a videotape that kills those who watch it unless they take the right action in time. It was based on Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel, cost an estimated $1.5 million and became a hit, the highest-grossing Japanese-language film in Hong Kong at the time. Its restraint, with deaths mostly implied, set it apart from the gore of the 1980s. The vengeful-spirit figure that Ringu brought to the world is discussed in the library entry on the onryo.

Ringu drove what the English-language press called J-horror, including Ju-On and Dark Water, and the American remake The Ring (2002). Japanese horror itself draws on much older sources, including kaidan, or ghost stories, of the Edo and Meiji periods, and on Noh and Kabuki theater, which often staged tales of revenge and ghosts. Hokusai's ghost prints came from the same folklore. Recurring images include the long-haired woman, the broken family and the monstrous mother. Kwaidan and Onibaba, both from 1964, are early landmarks that adapted traditional forms.

Ghosts around the world

Supernatural horror is not only an American and British form. Spain's The Devil's Backbone (2001) draws on the Spanish Civil War, and Alejandro Amenábar's The Others (2001), a Spanish-American production starring Nicole Kidman, cost about $17 million and earned about $210 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing Spanish film of all time to that point. It won eight Goya Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, and a critic at The Observer suggested it was inspired by The Turn of the Screw. Colombia's Los Silencios (2018) addresses the country's armed conflict, and Guatemala's La Llorona (2019) draws on the Guatemalan genocide.

These examples share a habit that is among the genre's most useful: the ghost stands for something that a society has not finished dealing with. A haunting is a way of saying that the past is still present. The same logic runs through the Japanese vengeful spirit, the European war ghost and the American house built on a wrong. Readers looking for a different kind of unquiet past may also want to see the library's pages on folk horror, and the English film The Wicker Man, in which a belief system rather than a spirit is the threat.

Decline, return and the modern wave

After the 1980s, the subgenre competed with slashers and, in the 2000s, with so-called torture-porn films, but it regained popularity by the end of that decade. The Blair Witch Project (1999) popularized the found-footage style, and Paranormal Activity extended that technique into a film series; the library's found footage page follows that thread. Reports in 2013 said that supernatural horror had outgrossed other horror sub-genres.

The 2010s and 2020s brought a wave of films about grief and family trauma, in haunted-house form. Examples include Insidious (2010), The Conjuring (2013), Oculus (2013), Personal Shopper (2016), Hereditary (2018) and Martyrs Lane (2021). Comedy-horror also grew, with titles such as Housebound (2014) and Extra Ordinary (2019). The subgenre is also commercially the most robust: The Exorcist remains the highest-grossing of the form when its box office is adjusted for inflation, with an estimated gross above $1 billion in 2019 dollars, and the unadjusted leader is It (2017), at about $701 million worldwide.

Reading the ghost: scholarship

A small shelf of books maps the subgenre. Jeremy Dyson's Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film (1997) looks back at an older tradition of the form. Charles Derry's Dark Dreams 2.0 (2009) is a general study of horror, and Paul Meehan's Horror Noir (2010) is a study of the genre in its relation to noir. Mathias Clasen's Why Horror Seduces (2017) is another standard reference, and Harry M. Benshoff edited A Companion to the Horror Film (2014), which collects essays on many national and historical traditions.

Critics have also noticed how censorship shaped the form. Under the Hays Code in the 1960s, some films encoded themes that could not be named, including queer-coded characters, and The Haunting includes an openly lesbian character, Theodora, which was unusual for Hollywood at the time. Scholars of film music, such as Joe Tompkins, have written about the use of dissonance and atonality to signal paranormal activity, and Janet K. Halfyard has written about how music helps supernatural comedy-horror stay close to fear while inviting laughter.

Where to start in the library

A good order begins with Nosferatu, which shows the older folklore creature on screen, and the vampire entry that follows its history. The Exorcist covers the possession cycle, and Ringu the ghost and curse. For a contrast between a monster that is supernatural and one that is biological, compare these with the xenomorph in Alien, a haunted-house story in space whose creature has no spiritual meaning at all. The slasher page shows how the genre developed in a different direction, and the full set of films can be browsed in the explorer.

Verified details

• The Exorcist (1973) is widely described as the first horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
• The Haunting (1963) is an influential haunted house film, adapted from Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House.
• Ringu led to American remakes beginning in 2002.
• H. P. Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Literature first appeared in August 1927 and named Machen, Blackwood, Dunsany and M. R. James as modern masters.
• Dead of Night (1945) was directed by four people: Cavalcanti, Crichton, Dearden and Hamer.
• Cat People (1942) cost about $135,000 and was added to the National Film Registry in 1993.
• Rosemary's Baby (1968) won Ruth Gordon the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
• Poltergeist (1982) was first rated R and changed to PG after an appeal.
• The Others (2001) won eight Goya Awards and was the highest-grossing Spanish film to that date.
• The Conjuring (2013) cost about $20 million and grossed about $319.5 million worldwide.
• The Exorcist was added to the National Film Registry in 2010.

Sources and further reading

• Supernatural horror film, Wikipedia
• Ghost story, Wikipedia
• Supernatural Horror in Literature, Wikipedia
• The Haunting (1963 film), Wikipedia
• The Exorcist (film), Wikipedia
• Ring (1998 film), Wikipedia
• Japanese horror, Wikipedia
• Dead of Night, Wikipedia
• Cat People (1942 film), Wikipedia
• Rosemary's Baby (film), Wikipedia
• Poltergeist (1982 film), Wikipedia
• The Conjuring, Wikipedia
• The Others (2001 film), Wikipedia

Related subgenres