Seeking Shivers with Scary Movies

WITH HALLOWEEN on the horizon, you can expect your film offerings to skew scary.

- BY Mara Reinstein

Movie studios love to put out horror flicks: Compared with other genres, they tend to do better at the box office—and they're generally cheaper to make. To date, the highest-grossing scary movie is 2017's It, adapted from the Stephen King novel. It earned $701 million worldwide. In second place with $483 million: the 1975 classic Jaws.

MORE THAN 50 of Stephen King's books have been adapted for the big screen, starting with Carrie in 1976. The latest, The Long Walk, centers around a grueling, last-man-standing competition among teenage boys. King published the book under his pen name, Richard Bachman, in 1979. At the time, reviewers interpreted it as a metaphor for the Vietnam War.

BELA LUGOSI set the standard for Dracula with his 1931 portrayal of the iconic bloodsucker. More than 200 film and television adaptations of Bram Stoker's story have come out since, with many in the main role imitating Lugosi's Hungarian accent. But 1931's Dracula isn't the first spooky "talkie." That's The Terror from 1928, one of the many lost films of the early 20th century; only its soundtrack survives.

HORROR AS a film genre dates back even further, to 1896, when pioneering French director Georges Méliès came out with Le Manoir du Diable (known in English as The Haunted Castle or The House of the Devil). The silent film includes spooky touches such as skeletons and ghosts.

POSTWAR ANXIETY fueled a flurry of monster movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954),