Do Horror Films Mirror Our Society

Do horror films mirror our society’s fears and social problems? Horror movies gives audiences a jolt of fear as the most frightening scene takes place on screen, but is that scene of horror connected to the horrors of our everyday life. The problems we fear everyday are coming alive on the big screen. Creators of these films are cleverly disguise our fears of isolation, change, and the unknown into their films. Or do we as a society have a sick need to have these fears scare us? Throughout the years of film history movie monsters have mirrored our social problems and fears; as our society changes through the years so do the monsters on the big screen. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) was undoubtedly a revolutionary film and paved the way

Also exposing the madness inherent in authority, but it was transformed by Wiene to a framing story which has Francis as the madman. Film historian, Siegfried Kracauer comments on this change, “A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one- following the much-used patterns of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum (Kracauer,67).” The changes was made not to please Weien himself, but to please the masses and give the audience what they desired. Caligari did however predict or had a premonition of the coming of Hitler. Dr. Cagliari uses hypnotic power to force his will upon his tool, Cesare. A technique that is foreshadowing, manipulation of the soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a massive scale (Kracauer, 73).
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the first horror film of its kind, but it wasn’t till a decade later that the real movie monsters started to come

Frankenstein opens with Henry Frankenstein and his partner Fritz digging up a grave and removing the body from the coffin. During the dig Henry states, “What changes darkness into the light?”, which is a question many Americans at this time where asking themselves. How where they going to get out of this darkness of fear and back into the light of the way things used to be. Americans can sympathies with Henry Frankenstein in that his dreams have gone fatally awry and with the monster as well (Dillard, 12). When his creature has made his dreams gone completely out of