The horror genre responds to, and adapts according to what society finds frightening. It is a genre that shifts and changes as our fears do the same.
For example, looking back on the history of horror films, films such as ‘The Fly’ in the 1950’s related to a fear that society was going through which was the investigation in labs of new medicines and treatments which had a lot of bad press; many worried about the weird and demonic side effects. So producing a film about a man who had the head and arm of a fly because of a mistake made in a lab made society want to go and watch the film. Audiences would have been able to relate to it and they would have found it particularly scary because they were going through a time where they believed, due to bad press, that this could actually happen. You could say, therefore, that, in some ways, the success of horror can rely on moral panic.
Another example of how film makers adapted their films to what society was finding frightening is the making of the 1970’s film ‘The Omen’. This film was about a mother who gives birth to a child called Damien who we later find out to be demonic and possessed by what we believe to be the devil. In the 1960’s, a new anti nausea drug called, Thalidomide which was introduced to help pregnant women with morning sickness. This was then banned as it caused over 10,000 babies to be born with some sort of deformity, both physical and mental. This therefore created a moral panic in society and was broadcasted for months in the media and in the news. Film makers then began to make films that would be appropriate to the time period and the fears that were happening at that time. Horror films with demonic children captured the fear of women everywhere about giving birth to a deformed child. A theorist such as Colin McArthur (1972) refers to genre as a ‘constantly growing amoeba’ where fears and society is constantly changing shape and form. With this in mind, I decided to base my narrative too around a fear in our current society which is relevant to children antagonists. For example, demonic children relate to the issues in recent society such as the killers of James Bulger.
