Iconic Horror Directiors

Iconic Horror Directors

Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock used cinematic devices such as suspense, the audience as voyeur, and his well-known "MacGuffin," a plot device that is essential to the characters on the screen, but is irrelevant to the audience so is therefore always hazily described.

A central theme of Hitchcock's films was murder and the psychology behind it.

Psychology of characters

Hitchcock's films often feature characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers. 

For example, In North by Northwest (1959), Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant's character) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him. 

In The Birds (1963), the Rod Taylor character, an innocent man, finds his world under attack by vicious birds, and struggles to free himself of a clinging mother (Jessica Tandy). 

The killer in Frenzy (1972) has a loathing of women but idolises his mother. 

The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but has an incredibly close relationship with his mother (played by Marion Lorne). 

Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Notorious has a clearly conflictual relationship with his mother, who is (correctly) suspicious of his new bride Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman). 

Norman Bates has troubles with his mother in Psycho.

Inspiration for suspense and psychological thrillers

In a 1963 interview with Oriana Fallaci, Hitchcock was asked in spite of looking like a pleasant, innocuous man, he seemed to have fun making films which involve a lot of suspense and terrifying crime, to which he responded,

“I'm English. The English use a lot of imagination with their crimes. I don't get such a kick out of anything as much as out of imagining a crime. When I'm writing a story and I come to a crime, I think happily: now wouldn't it be nice to have him die like this? And then, even more happily, I think: at this point people will start yelling. It must be because I spent three years studying with the Jesuits. They used to terrify me to death, with everything, and now I'm getting my own back by terrifying other people.”

Modern day 'Psycho' trailer:

'Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho as embodies "the fear of the boy next door". 

The terror lays in the fact that the killer "could be the person sitting next to you"

Anthony Perkins's maternally obsessed misfit in Psycho who most perfectly distilled the modern fear of the monster who looks just like you. 

After half a century of terror, Psycho is still ensuring that no one feels safe in the shower.'

Wes Craven

Wes Craven, the 'Master of Horror' left behind a legacy of genre-defining films that have shaped and satirised the horror movie:

“The prolific filmmaker wrote and directed over 25 movies after rising to fame in 1977 with his first major feature film The Hills Have Eyes, which went on to earn cult classic status.”

“Craven is best known for A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, which spawned eight sequels as well as a TV series, and iconic Nineties horror film Scream, whose fourth sequel he directed in 2011.”

“Craven’s slasher movie following a group of high school teenagers who become terrorised by a vengeful ghost called Freddy Krueger. The film was made on just under $2m, earning back its budget during the first week at the box office.”

“Scream satirised the cliché of the horror film, seeing its teenager characters openly discuss horror film tropes that Scream tried to subvert. The slasher film mixed the comedy of a “whodunit” mystery to great effect, spawning a series of three sequels.”

Film style

'Craven's works tend to share a common exploration of the nature of reality. A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, dealt with the consequences of dreams in real life.
New Nightmare "brushes against" (but does not quite break) the fourth wall by having actress Heather Langenkamp play herself as she is haunted by the villain of the film in which she once starred. At one point in the film, the audience sees on Wes Craven's word processor a script he has written, which includes the exact conversation he just had with Heather — as if the script was being written as the action unfolded.
The Serpent and the Rainbow portrays a man who cannot distinguish between nightmarish visions and reality.
In Scream, the characters frequently reference horror films similar to their situations, and at one point Billy Loomis tells his girlfriend that life is just a big movie. This concept was emphasized in the sequels, as copycat stalkers reenact the events of a new film about the Woodsboro (Woodsboro being the fictional town where Scream is set) killings occurring in Scream. Scream included a scene mentioning a Richard Gereurban legend. Craven stated in interviews that he received calls from agents telling him that if he left that scene in, he would never work again. The last film that he directed before his death was Scream 4.'

George A. Romero

a.k.a The Godfather of the Dead

'Romero directed and co-wrote Night of the Living Dead, which became a cult classic in the horror genre and a defining moment for modern horror cinema.

His ‘Dead’ films were a heavy influence on the Resident Evil video games, and as a result the film, despite the company rejecting Romero’s script for the film and choosing Paul W. S. Anderson’s instead.

Some critics have seen social commentary in much of Romero's work. They view Night of the Living Dead as a film made in reaction to the turbulent 1960s, Dawn of the Deadas a satire on consumerism, Day of the Dead as a study of the conflict between science and the military, and Land of the Dead as an examination of class conflict.

Romero ranked his top ten films of all time for the 2002 Sight & Sound Greatest Films Poll. They are The Brothers Karamazov, Casablanca, Dr. Strangelove, High Noon, King Solomon's Mines, North by Northwest (a film on which a teenaged Romero worked as a gofer), The Quiet Man, Repulsion, Touch of Evil and The Tales of Hoffmann. Romero listed the films in alphabetical order, with special placement given to The Tales of Hoffman, which he cites as "my favourite film of all time; the movie that made me want to make movies." Romero has also cited Carnival of Souls as an influence on his work.

Other inspiration for Romero's filmmaking, as told to Robert K. Elder in an interview for The Film That Changed My Life, was the film The Tales of Hoffmann.

"It was the filmmaking, the fantasy, the fact that it was a fantasy and it had a few frightening, sort of bizarre things in it. It was everything. It was really a movie for me, and it gave me an early appreciation for the power of visual media—the fact that you could experiment with it. He was doing all his tricks in-camera, and they were sort of obvious. That made me feel that, gee, maybe I could figure this medium out. It was transparent, but it worked".'