A monster calls: why the ‘horror universe’ is an idea whose time has come

Horror has been a staple of the movie business since its inception. People love to be scared, and Hollywood studios have wisely capitalised on this. There are many companies that have built their business, and their reputation, on horror films: cool-kid studio A24 are the newest in the game, with Ti West’s trilogy of sweaty slashers X, Pearl and MaXXXine, the upcoming third film.

Horror universes may seem like a new phenomenon – but in fact horror films kicked the whole “universe” concept off, decades before superhero-led multi-platform series and films. Specifically, they started with Universal and its classic monsters series. Universal was associated with horror from the early days, when they accidentally hit the jackpot in 1931 with their versions of two literary properties, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The now classic adaptations by Tod Browning and James Whale, respectively, were cash cows that helped keep Universal afloat during the depression. They were joined by The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and The Wolf Man (1941). Subsequent films were an interchangeable pick’n’mix of ghouls; from the moment Frankenstein’s monster met the Wolfman in 1943’s imaginatively titled Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Universal mixed and matched their creatures to maximise box-office potential.

However, this diluted the monsters’ fearsomeness, with their appearances becoming more comedic than frightening as the years went by. The 1934 Hays Code ban on “brutality and possible gruesomeness” made actual horror all but disappear from American screens, and the monsters that had once terrified became old-fashioned. Oversaturation killed the monster.

Operating parallel to Universal was the now defunct RKO Films, which released more than 140 genre films between 1929 and 1956. The studio is mostly remembered for the array of classy horror pictures produced by Val Lewton, such as Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and The Seventh Victim (1943). Lewton was a fan of suggestion and shadow-play rather than outright monsters. His movies have influenced film-makers in the genre ever since, but they never quite acquired icon status.

It was the British production company Hammer that revitalised the monster and perfected a formula of gothic, violent and eroticised film-making – coincidentally, using the same two public-domain novels that had saved Universal. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) introduced a brutal, borderline-gory new take on Shelley’s creature; a year later came Dracula, made by the same team of director Terence Fisher and stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, with Lee intentionally playing a much more overtly sexual take on the vampire. The success of these two films launched a franchise for each monster, establishing a signature style for Hammer horror fare, and the longstanding on-screen collaboration of Cushing and Lee.

More recently, Universal Studios had another shot at trying to reinvigorate its horror universe. In the mid-2010s they launched the star-studded Dark Universe, announcing Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s Monster, Russell Crowe as Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde, Sofia Boutella as the Mummy and Tom Cruise as, conveniently, a new character that was bound to have a lot of very impressive stunts. Despite this marketing hubbub, only one film was released, 2017’s The Mummy, which was entombed under the weight of negative reviews, disappointing box office and rumours of creative control battles between director Alex Kurtzman and Cruise. The Dark Universe was dead on arrival, leaving behind two lonely tweets.

The slack was taken up by independent production outfit Blumhouse, who, through their 10-year first-look deal with Universal, successfully reinvented The Invisible Man in 2020 as a tech-rich story of domestic abuse. Blumhouse had already hit it big with the 2015 found-footage haunter Paranormal Activity, which supposedly became the most profitable movie ever made and spawned a franchise of eight further films. Blumhouse was also responsible for two more original franchises, a rare achievement in the past couple of decades: political slasher The Purge and the haunted house series Insidious. In 2017, their film Get Out established a bold new voice in the genre in Jordan Peele and spawned endless think pieces about “elevated horror” – as well as acting as a major cultural reset.

Related: Horror king Jason Blum: ‘You have to find new ways to get under people’s skin’

Blumhouse has become shorthand for modern horror in the same way that Hammer became synonymous with British horror. Meanwhile, A24, which turns 10 this year, made their mark on the genre in 2015 with Robert Eggers’ lauded The Witch before cementing it with Ari Aster’s horror family drama Hereditary in 2018.

The first generation of monsters – Dracula, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein’s monster – would become cornerstones of the horror genre, bigger than any single adaptation, performance or film. Their impact is still being felt and it is only a matter of time until we see if Blumhouse or A24 have given birth to a new generation.

• Anna Bogutskaya is a writer, host of The Final Girls podcast and co-lead programmer of In Dreams Are Monsters, which runs at venues across the UK from 17 October to 31 December. For more details click here.