Horrifying people is an ancient art form, used to trigger fear and expose taboos of society.

The horror film genre expands and exploits these ideas with a design to terrify and entertain us. There’s something fun and exciting to watching horrendous, disturbing images, knowing that you yourself will be safe. As the mediam of film evolved, so did the use of horror.

When the first movies came into existence, light and shadows, today used as critical effects, became almost impossible to show. Instead they used European legends and folklore to obtain their inspiration of monsters and vampires that ruled the early years.

"Nosferatu" (1922), the first vampire movie, though there was no sound, was frightening even for today’s standards, for the vampire simply being utterly inhuman.

Then sound forever changed film and the horror genre itself. Most of the original horror movies, including "Dracula" (1931), King Kong (1933) and Frankenstein (1932) came from the booming horror film decade.

Sound added a new element of terror since the audience could now hear the screams of victims and music that built tension. The worlds in these 1930 horror films were exotic, with elaborate settings, costumes and ideas. Creepy but compelling, horror was wildly entertaining with 65 percent of American’s in the 1930s seeing a horror film on a weekly basis.

Jumping to the ‘60s, director (and often considered the master of thrillers) Alfred Hitchcock produced some of his best films, including "Psycho" (1960), which dealt with mental illness and insanity. It had one of the most famous scenes in horror, where the main heroine (played by actress Janet Leigh) gets famously and brutally stabbed in the shower.

"Birds" (1963), his second horror classic, was an apocalyptic invasion from above as the characters suffered vicious attracts from, what else—birds.

Also in that decade, the classic "Rosemary’s Baby" (1965), directed by Roman Polanski, debuted showing a young, innocent pregnant woman (the fabulous Mia Farrow) who becomes paranoid that she is threatened by witches and the devil himself.

In the 1970s, a new wave of horror began to settle in as the norm. The decade gave us director Steven Spielberg’s "Jaws" (1975), the first modern Hollywood blockbuster about a great white shark (which is rarely seen, an addition to the suspense), that terrorizes a mostly youth-populated beach.

Then psycho men with their tools popped up in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974), a film based on a true story of a serial killer who terrorized teenagers.

"Halloween" (1978), with its masked slasher who escaped from a mental institution and wrecked havoc on more teenagers, advanced a cliché notion that sex-loving, promiscuous teens would be marked for death.

In today’s horror film, gore and horror have almost become synonymous. The rise, almost obsession, with torture films, is obvious with films like "Saw" (2001-2010) becoming a franchise. Others include "The Hills Have Eyes" (2006) and "Captivity" (2007). These films often blur whether the audience is supposed to support the torturer or the victim.

These over-the-top "slasher" films leave little to the imagination as most horror films have. They thrive on the detail of the amazingly realistic effects of mutilation. Though they can still shock an audience, viewers are usually shocked by their disgust rather than by being truly scared.

Some filmmakers have said that we are going into a new "Golden Age" of horror. After the attacks of 9/11, people viewed what was frightening in different ways. Horror films have grossed above-average at the box office since 2005. People use today’s horror films as a way to escape, just as their grandparents did in the ‘30s during the Great Depression.