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Speaker 1: Are you a devotee of horror flicks? The more blood

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Speaker 1: and gore and shock the better. Okay, what is the

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Speaker 1: deal with that? Why do we want to scare the

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Speaker 1: living daylights out of ourselves? And when do the movies

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Speaker 1: get involved? I'm Patty Steele. Why we crave horror? Next

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Speaker 1: on the backstory. We're back with the backstory. What made

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Speaker 1: early Hollywood movie makers decide they could earn a few

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Speaker 1: bucks from our bloodlust? Well, you know the thrill of

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Speaker 1: spine dingling terror, sure you do, but what is it?

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Speaker 1: Psychologists say it's that crazy rush of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine,

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Speaker 1: which kind of energizes us and inspires the fight or

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Speaker 1: flight response, Except when you get it from watching a movie,

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Speaker 1: you also know you're safe, and that's the thrill without

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Speaker 1: the threat. They say. The reaction to horror flicks is

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Speaker 1: called excitation transfer. Okay, thank you psychologists. Your heart pounds

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Speaker 1: and you breathe really heavy, and as that wears off,

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Speaker 1: you feel intense relief, filling your brain with feel good chemicals.

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Speaker 1: About ten percent of us really crave that adrenaline rush,

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Speaker 1: and they tend to be more aggressive individuals. But folks

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Speaker 1: who avoid those movies have trouble differentiating between the thrill

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Speaker 1: and just plain fear. They say it's because some of

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Speaker 1: us have a harder time separating what's on screen from reality,

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Speaker 1: and they tend to be more empathetic types who don't

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Speaker 1: want to see others in pain, even if inside we

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Speaker 1: know it's fake. But how did early movie makers know

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Speaker 1: to cash in on all this? Okay, let's go back

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Speaker 1: to the dawn of motion pictures. Imagine you've never seen

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Speaker 1: people or animals even moving little and doing anything else

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Speaker 1: on a screen. It was mind blowing for them. The

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Speaker 1: first moving picture that survives was part photography, part animation

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Speaker 1: of a horse galloping for just a few seconds. That

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Speaker 1: was in eighteen eighty. Thomas Edison's first short flick in

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Speaker 1: eighteen ninety four was called The Sneeze, Literally just five

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Speaker 1: seconds of an Edison employee sneezing. Can you imagine everybody

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Speaker 1: wanted to see it? Wouldn't even have time for one

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Speaker 1: piece of popcorn. But by the eighteen nineties there were

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Speaker 1: a slew of films. Most were just movement with no

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Speaker 1: story attached, because people were pretty thrilled with that in

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Speaker 1: the beginning. But finally folks were getting bored. Come on,

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Speaker 1: they said, tell us a story. Along comes George Melius.

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Speaker 1: He was a French illusionist who had a lifelong fascination

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Speaker 1: with scary, suspenseful literature from as far back as ancient

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Speaker 1: Greece and Rome, but also more recent stories from everybody

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Speaker 1: like Edgar Allan, Poe, Jules Verse, and H. G. Wells,

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Speaker 1: as well as Mary Shelley, who of course wrote Frankenstein.

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Speaker 1: His eighteen ninety six film The House of the Devil

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Speaker 1: is considered the first horror film ever made, with images

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Speaker 1: coming from centuries of books and legends. It showed demons, ghosts, witches,

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Speaker 1: and a skeleton at a haunted castle, and it was

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Speaker 1: only three minutes long, but included some of the first

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Speaker 1: special effects ever, with people disappearing and a bat suddenly

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Speaker 1: turning into a person. Imagine what that looked like to

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Speaker 1: someone at a time when almost no one even had

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Speaker 1: electricity in their homes, there were still lighting their homes

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Speaker 1: with gas lamps. And along comes this. People loved and

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Speaker 1: sort of hated it. It made him nervous, sort of

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Speaker 1: like looking at a car wreck. More scary short films

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Speaker 1: flooded the market, and by the way, the word hard

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Speaker 1: didn't get used much, maybe too disturbing of a word, right,

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Speaker 1: so most of these were referred to as mysterious, magical, mythical,

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Speaker 1: or even as trick films. Whatever they were called, people

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Speaker 1: couldn't get enough. Meliaz had tapped into something timeless, our

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Speaker 1: need to feel that rush of adrenaline without the fear

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Speaker 1: of death. Over the years, the horror movies evolved into

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Speaker 1: a really gripping storytelling medium, and the envelope kept getting

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Speaker 1: pushed further toward the edge. Thomas Edison's movie company made

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Speaker 1: Frankenstein into a sixteen minute film in nineteen ten that

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Speaker 1: has some really chilling scenes and it disturbed people. By

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Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties and thirties, horror really took off. There

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Speaker 1: was Dracula, the Mummy, Doctor Jekyl, and mister Hyde and

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Speaker 1: yet another iteration of Frankenstein. And remember, after nineteen twenty

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Speaker 1: seven or so, they added talk, which meant screaming too.

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Speaker 1: But it was never enough to keep the adrenaline rush going.

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Speaker 1: Things had to get more shocking, and that set off

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Speaker 1: the morals police. They tried to get these films intensely censored.

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Speaker 1: In a lot of cases, depending on where they were running,

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Speaker 1: the movies were either banned outright or locally edited. It

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Speaker 1: wasn't until the nineteen fifties that the science fiction element

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Speaker 1: of horror kicked into high gear, with movies like The

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Speaker 1: Original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Wore the Worlds

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Speaker 1: as well as Godzilla, and the nineteen sixties finally introduced

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Speaker 1: everything from zombie flicks to really edge of your seat

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Speaker 1: horror in Hitchcock movies like Psycho, as well as films

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Speaker 1: like Rosemary's Baby and The Haunting. Now director Martin Scorsese

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Speaker 1: calls The Haunting the scariest movie of all time. It's

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Speaker 1: all suspense, no blood, It's all about what you don't see,

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Speaker 1: and it is total goosebumps. By the seventies and onward,

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Speaker 1: slasher flicks like Texas Chainsaw, Massacre and Halloween All the

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Speaker 1: Halloween's even Carrie, moved horror into a more in your

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Speaker 1: face mode. But like them or not, horror movies feed

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Speaker 1: that craving for an adrenaline rush, and Halloween season is

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Speaker 1: the perfect time to indulge. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory

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Speaker 1: is a production of iHeartMedia and Steel Trap Productions. Our

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Speaker 1: producer is Doug Fraser. Our executive producer is Steve Goldstein

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Speaker 1: of Amplified Media. We're out with new episodes twice a week.

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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the backstory, the pieces of history

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Speaker 1: you didn't know you needed to know.