I argued that as Hollywood filmmakers of the 1940s turn to tropes and themes of collective trauma, amnesia and investigation, they create films that scholars resist reading as horror (Kaplan, 2005; Toles, 2009; Bould, 2005: 67). This resistance occurs especially in light of horror scholarship that overwhelmingly frames the Universal Studios’ 1930s supernatural monster cycle as a classical period or prototype for horror cinema.

What, if anything, do the monsters of horror cinema have in common, besides the fact that they are not real? They may be human — just think of Norman Bates, Leatherface, or Hannibal Lecter — but they are not real, in the sense of experientially real. They may even be non-fictional — just think of ‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’ (1990), a film about real-life mass murderer Henry Lee Lucas — but that still does not make them real (the Henry Lee Lucas of the film is just an actor, Michael Rooker, pretending to be the serial killer).

Since the dawn of man, there have been stories told to frighten others. Some of the elements of horror are present in the form of massive epics like ‘The Odyssey’ or ‘Beowulf,’ where monsters and men interact on an alarmingly regular basis, but horror, as we understand it today, has been shaped not only by the distance of time but also of geography.

In 1931, Universal Pictures released James Whale’s ‘Frankenstein,’ a horror film whose music score is confined to its credits, featuring a monster denied the power of speech. By 1935 — with Hollywood having embraced the almost wall-to-wall scoring procedures of Maximilian Raoul Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold — James Whale’s follow-up ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ calls upon the resources of Franz Waxman’s music to lend the Monster a voice: a voice that, in turn, seems to awaken the character’s ability to communicate.

Traditionally, Québécois cinema has been associated with two broad practices. On one hand, we find auteur films: relatively small-scale projects that typically focus on ambivalent individuals struggling with existential angst and moving within a narrative world where realism hides deeper humanist concerns.

David Pirie was the first critic to positively engage with Hammer Film Productions on a scholarly level, which aligns with the studio era. David Pirie saw Hammer Film Productions operating as a mini-major in a dilution of the early Hollywood mode of production.

Perpetually reincarnating Abraham Stoker and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley tales among others provided a rough generic template for later Hammer Film Productions Gothic films. These templates were hard to reshape, both formally and in the minds of consumers. In Hollywood genres, Thomas Schatz draws a convincing parallel between the makeup of film grammar and language, arguing that film narrative becomes a recognizable genre when it recalibrates familiar denotative signs into a new configuration. Thomas Schatz cites single cinematic occurrences — individual genre films — as potentially affecting the entire organizing structure from which they sprung and by which they are controlled.