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Since the beginning of time, ghost stories and myths would often be told to strike fear into the heart of the listener. Horror as a genre originated in literature and the arts in around 1600's, with Gothic Horror being one of the most popular genres with the public, despite the critics and scholars at that time demeaning the genre as fabricated foolishness, particularly because of the books and the plays' content being very sexual and blasphemous at the time they were written. This creates parallels with horror films in the modern day, being very popular with the public but never really becoming precariously renowned by any of the critics and the intelligent thinkers behind them. It could be that in 200 years time, films such as Nightmare on Elm Street may have an elitist spot alongside Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Horror in films started mostly in the 1920's with silent films, such as Nosferatu, which is based on Bram Stoker's horror novel Dracula, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. With the arrival of Sound to the cinemas in the 1930's, audiences gained interest in the classic universal Monster series. This series included Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy and The Invisible Man. Although these stories are now considered tame, they were extremely terrifying and unsettling for audiences in the 30s and are now considered very iconic to the Horror Industry. Buckland (2009:53) clearly states these Universal films are 'the distinctive symmetry of classicism, the adherence to plotting and cutting regimes, the concentration on character psychology: such features distinguish them as products of the classical studio system.'