Lions, tigers and bears. Oh my! Those are what you would consider scary, if you saw one of them coming towards you then you’re running for the hills, right? but over time the concept of ‘scary’ has changed. People don’t think of scary bears jumping from out their closet, no, it’s those make-believe characters from films that scare the living bejeezus out of you. To say the least horror films have evolved like fine wine in the past year and the question on everyone lips is simple, how has the horror genre managed to grab our attention? And how have they maintained it?

SFX and music (film scoring) play a vital role in today’s horror genre and grabbing the audience’s attention, Tony Evans, Gibraltar’s leading SFX specialist agrees to say, “the demand to make something grotesque and haunting is constant and would be virtually impossible to fulfil without the use of SFX”. Music plays a different role but no less important that SFX, music sets the ambience. The suspense that you feel when you know a jump is right around the corner is magnified thanks to the eerie music playing in the background, “String instruments play a huge role in adding effect, any effect to be honest because string instruments bend to your will, sad, happy, suspenseful, creepy- they can produce it all” says Jenny Zammit, award-winning violinist based in Gibraltar. Horror TV Shows like Stranger Things and movies like Halloween revolve around string-heavy music and sound synthesisers which adds to the audience’s sense of nostalgia, there is no one music trend that dominates the market, as some films abstain from using string and synthesisers altogether, using low-frequency effects when highlining their scariest moments. That’s what’s great about horror films, you never know what kind of boogie man is going to come around the corner and you don’t know what music scores to expect either, you just know it’s going to blow your socks off.

“It’s not just about what you add to the movie after it's filmed, it’s how it is filmed and the quality that makes it so damn horrifying and in my case easy to work with…” says Tony, an example of this is the movie Halloween, released in 1978 drove fear into the toughest of men with its suspense but ask a millennial to watch it today and they will most likely end up going on their phones, some of the main reasons for this is due to film quality, the ‘ketchup’ blood and the robotic-like stabbing by Michael Myers is almost laughable. However, in the newest Halloween released June 2018 proves that with the addition of SFX, 4K recording and the modernisation of FX prosthesis, this movie created the perfect distraction with it reaching the second highest worldwide Box Office sales ($253.5M) in the 2018 horror genre.

Horror is unique when it comes to film genres as there is a recognisable loop that can be seen throughout the years, a film will be released and capture the audience with its terrifying scares making their imaginations run wild, more scares means more moola being raked in. Filmmakers spy this trend like vampires spy a vein, then they pounce creating sequels or imitator films of an original, which this year proved to be the perfect time to do a sequel as Halloween (2018) shows. The reason why audiences tend to lose interest in the movies created by this trend is due to the simple fact that “filmmakers drag out a plot just to get two or three extra movies out of it and it gets boring and repetitive” says Tony, these ‘extra movies’ or ‘sequels’ are known as subgenres created by the smash hit original, and usually tend to fade to memory lurking in the corners of history ready to be rediscovered and remade, “this is referred to as a horror cycle, because only horror films can pull them off repeatedly without a major hit to audience viewings” says Tony. An example of this boom and fade cycle is The Conjuring series, or better known and ‘The Conjuring Universe’, the first movie The Conjuring (2013) hit a booming $319.4M in worldwide Box Office which is one of the highest numbers ever seen in horror movie history, unfortunately after 2013 The Conjuring Universe began to collapse and all hope was lost until… this year when The Nun was released surpassing the worldwide Box Office sales of The Conjuring and reaching $365.6M, with people queuing hours at their local cinema to get a seat the majority walked out due to the sheer horror of the movie, “there is no such thing as too scary, the SFX and FX was out of this world, maybe the world wasn’t ready for so much improvement in the horror genre” says Tony. “…as the audiences' tolerance threshold for chills and thrills went up and the technical capacities to create monstrous and grotesque effects increased, horror films have come to rely more and more on sheer, explicit representations of the ugly and the terrible - and less on psychological fable, artful suggestion and the filmgoer's imagination.” writes Elliott Stein, in an article for The New York Times in 1982 called ‘Have horror film gone too far?’. He speaks of horror films as a distraction being that to be scared is the most powerful emotion one can feel, but will the scary monsters ever stop being so… scary? The answer proven is no, they will only get more “creative”.

Besides those already named 2018 gave us, ‘Hereditary’ where Toni Collette's acting was so harrowing, she was nominated for best actress AACTA International Award.

 We were also given ‘A Quiet Place’ with actors Emily Blunt and John Krasinski both being put up for an AACTA International Award in 2019 for their heart-breaking and soul-shaking film directing and acting.

It was understandable that in 1982 people were worried about horror films and “the horrifying extent to which they reflect a culture that is falling apart.” says Dr. Harvey R. Greenberg in Elliott’s article, but in today’s society the films continue to reflect just that - disasters, mental health issues, racial discrimination to name a few issues in our crumbling world and for a world that has so many issues people know they can find peace watching their problems on a screen entwined with beautifully horrifying creatures of the night - their distraction. 2018 brought the devils from hell to dance upon our screens and we relished in the frights.

“For those who believe that today's horror films have gone too far, there is hope. The red tide may be receding…We could be witnessing the twilight of the ghouls,” writes Elliott Stein.

That twilight never came, but a movie called ‘Twilight’ was created filled with blood-sucking vampires and it was great.