Haunted houses are probably one of the most iconic fixtures of the Horror Genre - not only are there stories that specifically focus on them, but they lend themselves well to pretty much any horror story. For example, see most visual depictions of Castles Frankenstein or Dracula - old, dilapitated buildings out of the way and alone on some Hill. The reason for this is easy - your horror story has to take somewhere, so why not make the setting itself a source of the horror?
I'm not going to go too in depth on my thoughts on Haunted Houses, for now what is important is simply that they are pretty common tropes in horror media - enough for them to be the first thing that came to mind when I thought about the genre.
This sub-site is going to be dedicated for my discussion of a particular series of horror films, one very dear to me and my Grandfather. Universal Horror.
Universal Horror is perhaps the most visually iconic series of horror movies out there, between Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy and the Invisible Man, it contains some of the most famous "classic" horror characters of all time - only really Jekyll and Hyde and an old hag are missing from their crop of iconic films. Additionally, the melodramatic gothic stylings of old abandoned buildings, churches and seemingly isolated woods, close up on monster faces, dramatic lightning strikes and campy overacting.
To a degree, in fact, I would claim that Universal Horror is more iconic as an aesthitic approach towards horror than a coherent series - after all it was never actually a series when it came out. It was in retrospect that Universal later started marketing their crop of horror films between roughly the 1930s and the 1950s as "Universal Horror". This, of course, makes the boundaries of what is and isn't a universal horror film somewhat fuzzy and without clear crtieria other than a horror film made by Universal between a itself fuzzy period of time. If the gothic styling is so iconic, does that mean that the sci-fi horror that dominated most of the 1950s doe not count? "Of course, many will state, those are their own specific niche in the series." But, then the question arises of why does The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a film that squarely falls into that niche often find itself -both by Universal and Popular Culture - among the list of Universal Horror?
Due to this, in order to gain a useable list of films to go through, I have decided to use the set of films found on various film box sets by universal, including all of the films across of all of them.
This subpage will be used by me to go through and briefly give my thoughts about the 41 films.