A guided tour from 1920 to the present day
Horror is a century-old conversation between filmmakers. Every film is a reply to something that came before. This page walks through the genre chronologically — from the silent era through to the current new wave — using the Welcome to Horror catalogue as the course material.
You don't need to follow it in order. But if you want to understand why modern horror looks the way it does, going back to the beginning helps.
Horror existed before anyone called it that. The silent era gave us Nosferatu — still unsettling a century later. Universal Studios industrialised the monster in the 1930s: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man. These films invented the iconography every later horror film either inherits or reacts against.
Ep 120 Dracula 7 episodes in the catalogue
Hammer Horror out of Berkshire gave the classics colour, blood, and cleavage. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee became horror royalty. The British tradition ran deeper still — folk horror, psychological unease, the peculiarly English fear of the countryside. The Wicker Man belongs here.
Ep 120 Dracula 47 episodes in the catalogue
The late 1960s cracked the genre wide open. Rosemary's Baby brought dread inside the apartment. The Exorcist made it an event. Jaws made it blockbuster. Halloween in 1978 invented a template that would dominate the next decade. This is the era that created horror as a cultural force.
The Exorcist 35 episodes in the catalogue
Halloween's commercial success triggered a decade of imitation, excess, and occasional brilliance. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, the rules of the genre being written in real time. But the 1980s also gave us The Thing, The Fly, An American Werewolf in London — the decade's body-horror strand is as rich as its slasher one.
039 An American Werewolf In London 36 episodes in the catalogue
Scream arrived in 1996 and rewrote the rules by making the characters aware of them. Horror in the 1990s oscillated between self-referential deconstructions and straight-faced entries. The Blair Witch Project ended the decade by founding a new sub-genre in a forest.
Ep 109 Scream 24 episodes in the catalogue
The 2000s brought the Ring and Ju-On from Japan, Saw and Hostel from the US, and a wave of remakes of everything that came before. Not the genre's most dignified decade, but a productive one — beneath the gore there were films doing genuinely interesting things with dread.
30 episodes in the catalogue
Something shifted around 2012. Hereditary. The Witch. It Follows. Midsommar. Horror stopped apologising and started winning awards. Elevated horror is an irritating term but it points at a real thing: a generation of filmmakers treating the genre with the seriousness it always deserved.
Midsommar 40 episodes in the catalogue
