A Century of Horror Villains and the Fears That Inspired Them

For more than 100 years, filmmakers have mined collective fears to shock audiences with fresh nightmares.

“We all fear essentially the same things no matter when or where we are born,” says Mathias Clasen, co-director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark. “But sometimes those very basic universal fears take a peculiar kind of local shape. So the fear of death in the 1950s might take the shape of a nuclear holocaust, while later it takes the shape of a global airborne pandemic.”

Here are some of the most terrifying forms that horror has taken across the decades.

Silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) introduced audiences to expressionistic European nightmares, but it was the arrival of talkies that electrified the genre. Depression-era audiences flocked to screwball comedies and horror movies to escape the deprivations of daily life. Universal Studios popularized the horror genre in the early 1930s with a run of classic monster movies, including Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi, Frankenstein (1931) with Boris Karloff and The Mummy (1932).

For American moviegoers, it helped that early horror films—mostly adapted from literary works—were set in exotic European locations. That distance played into xenophobic anxieties of the time, framing danger as something foreign. “They provided a threat scenario where the monster was in ‘darkest Eastern Europe,’ wandering around in his castle," says Clasen, author of Why Horror Seduces. "It was a way to stare fear in the face but at a safe distance.

With the detonation of the first nuclear weapons in 1945, a new existential threat entered the world.

No film was a clearer response to the anxieties of the nuclear age than the original Godzilla (1954), produced in Japan in the shadow of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Godzilla the towering monster, is the product of nuclear testing, as were countless other B-movie monsters and mutants of the 1950s.

“Moviegoers are concerned about this new invisible danger, which is nuclear radiation,” says Clasen. “In Them!, it was giant irradiated ants, and there were a lot of these giant bug movies.”

But not all horror pointed outward toward science. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) played on a different fear simmering in 1950s America: that your neighbor might secretly be a communist. Body Snatchers follows a doctor as he discovers mysterious space pods near his California hometown. One by one, the residents are quietly replaced with identical, emotionless copies of themselves.

“Considering the state of public opinion in the United States today…it is natural to see the pods as standing for the idea of communism which gradually takes possession of a normal person, leaving him outwardly unchanged but transformed within," wrote critic Ernest G. Laura in 1957.

With Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock signaled a turn away from supernatural or sci-fi fears and toward the most disturbing recesses of the human mind.

“It’s difficult to overstate the significance of Psycho in movie history and popular culture history,” says Clasen. “With Norman Bates—an Ed Gein-inspired serial killer—Hitchcock created a psychological horror movie where it’s not a demon or an alien that invades, it's just human nature gone wrong.”

That idea that danger might come from ordinary people only deepened as the decade progressed. On the surface, Night of the Living Dead (1968) looks like a classic zombie flick, but director George Romero was more interested in the darker side of the living than the undead. Shot in black and white to resemble news footage, Night of the Living Dead focuses on a group of terrified strangers hiding from hordes of flesh-eating ghouls.

“Trust completely breaks down,” says Clasen. “In a sense, the zombies become catalysts for a kind of social, psychological drama that plays out in this little farmhouse.”

"In 1968, you have the Civil Rights Movement and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the movie, the protagonist—a Black man (spoiler alert)—is mistaken for a zombie and killed by law enforcement. In retrospect, it’s such a marker of the moment," says media scholar Michelle Martinez.

That same year, Rosemary’s Baby tapped into a different kind of paranoia surrounding women’s changing roles and bodily autonomy at the edge of the feminist movement. That blend of domestic realism and the occult carried into the 1970s.

Starting with Rosemary’s Baby (1968), there was a string of hit horror films concerned with Satan and the occult, including The Omen (1976), in which a child named Damien is revealed to be the Antichrist. In these films, evil invades the sacred spaces of domestic and religious life.

Nothing prepared moviegoers for the unprecedented shock and gore of 1970s horror films. During screenings of The Exorcist (1973), some audience members famously vomited and passed out. However, director William Friedkin’s graphic masterpiece is more than a gross-out movie about a young girl possessed by a foul-mouthed demon.

The Exorcist is often interpreted as a conservative response to the social upheaval of the 1960s. “The film presents these fundamental American institutions—the church, the family—that are under attack by foreign forces of evil,” Clasen says. “Some critics read the film as a commentary on a growing generation gap, when young kids start wearing their hair long, bad-mouthing their parents and criticizing the powers that be.”

By the mid-1970s, horror predominantly shifted toward low-budget, high-suspense slasher films drenched in blood. Movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978) introduced terrified audiences to rampaging murderers preying on sex-crazed teenagers.

"The release of the film Halloween in 1978 quickly became the blueprint adopted by future filmmakers of the genre," writes Gabriel White in "Killer Fears: Slasher Films and 1980s American Anxieties." Directed by John Carpenter, it introduced many of the slasher’s defining tropes, following Michael Myers as he escapes a psychiatric institution and stalks a quiet suburban town.

The success of Halloween made the slasher film the defining face of 1980s horror—and horror villains turned into full-blown pop culture icons.

"In the 1980s, conservative ideals began to become mainstream due to the presidency of Ronald Reagan," writes White, "the films promote and contain many anti-conservative images while at the same time making it clear that those who do partake in them will be punished."

Friday the 13th (1980) introduced Jason Voorhees and the ill-fated counselors of Camp Crystal Lake. By the end of the decade, Hollywood had released seven sequels, with Jason finally donning his iconic hockey mask in Part III.

Director Wes Craven twisted the slasher formula with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Set in suburban Ohio, teenagers are hunted and killed in their dreams by Freddy Krueger, a child murderer with a knife-fingered glove.

Four Elm Street sequels were made in the 1980s, and Freddy became so culturally ubiquitous he starred in talk shows, music videos and Halloween specials. Other villains, like Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Pinhead from Hellraiser (1987) and the killer doll Chucky (Child’s Play, 1988), launched their own long-running franchises.

For Clasen, one of the most overlooked horror films of the 1980s was John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), a remake of the 1951 The Thing from Another World. In the movie, a mysterious alien object is found deep beneath the ice at an Arctic research station and begins to infect people, turning them into monsters.

Like Night of the Living Dead, The Thing is about how a group of people trapped in a hostile environment succumb to their fears. “It’s really a case study in paranoia,” says Clasen. “Some see The Thing as a late Cold War response to the fear of infiltration by ‘the other’ who you can’t tell is evil. Others have interpreted it as an imaginative response to the AIDS crisis, because the Thing infects people through their blood.”

Slasher franchises kept churning out sequels into the 1990s, but the formulaic plotlines were running thin. Meanwhile, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) proved that horror could be elevated into serious prestige—winning five Oscars and shifting fear from supernatural monsters to the psychologically real serial killer.

Then Wes Craven revived the slasher with Scream (1996), a darkly funny, self-aware horror film that poked fun at the genre. “Scream is a postmodern, self-referential horror movie for an audience who has seen it all,” says Clasen. “It plays very knowingly and intelligently with the conventions of slasher movies.” Ironically, it became its own formulaic franchise.

By decade’s end, horror had morphed again. The Blair Witch Project (1999) delivered an entirely new kind of terror made for the emerging internet age. Marketed as “found footage,” the film was presented as a tape recovered from a group of young documentary filmmakers who disappeared in the woods while researching an occult mystery.

The filmmakers cultivated an aura of realism by listing the actors as “deceased, presumed dead” and building websites that purported to collect news clips and evidence about their disappearance. “The Blair Witch Project was another postmodern horror movie at a time when truth was becoming blurred,” says Clasen.

"The film somehow bypasses technology altogether, returning us to an authentic psychological (think Hitchcock) rather than technical horror (Wes Craven)," writes David Banash. "The marketing of the film exploits this fact—i.e. here is the real horror of your imagination rather than the overproduced kitsch of Freddy Krueger or Pinhead."

As the world reeled from the real-life horror of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, new types of monsters appeared on movie screens.

“Whenever the world gets unpredictable and scary, we see a huge uptick in people's interest in horror movies,” says Clasen. “Which seems counterintuitive, but it suggests an important function for horror as a tool with which people try to make sense of a scary world.”

The shocking psychological thriller Saw (2004) launched an entirely new horror subgenre known as “torture porn.” Directed by James Wan, the movie follows a group of strangers trapped in a house by a psychotic serial killer. Clasen says that if you look beyond the few minutes of truly gruesome and graphic violence, Saw was a timely meditation on human cruelty. Other films in this genre include Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), Rob Zombie's The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and Wolf Creek (2005), each pushing boundaries of gore.

Films like It Follows (2014), Get Out (2017) and Hereditary (2018) proved there was an audience for artistically crafted and complex horror.

“We’ve seen a rise in horror movies like Get Out that are very artistically ambitious and socially conscious,” says Clasen. Like earlier generations, 2010s horror filmmakers blended psychological terror with supernatural elements.