The horror genre is built upon the foundation of suspense or being creepy, aiming to create that spine chilling feeling we've come to associate with the horror theme. Initial fear is created by the thought, knowledge or suspicion of danger, in a film this should not be present first hand to the audience, as they will know it is just a movie and therefore the threat is empty. So the challenge for horror movies of any age is to establish its chosen horrific theme and make the viewer believe it is real and imminent to them personally.

These themes recur often as films attempt the copy what fears have already been established, for example; ghost and zombie movies are common as society is already predisposed to fear these beings. Over inflation of these themes are often what cause a change in the horror genre, an over exposure to the same theme can greatly dilute the fear. One such decline in horror movies is evident by a mass of monster movies in the 1930s to early 40s, films such as Dracula, King Kong and The Wolf  Man were just a few of many grossing large revenue for the time, yet due to the many other monster movies, the theme was no longer profitable to film makers to produce the same their audience has already seen.

Turning away from impossibly giant apes, by 1960, the Movie "Psycho" was released which was one of the first instalments in the slasher sub-genre. The true fear created by Psycho and most other slasher movies is created by the idea that a being with feelings as acute as your own fells the desire to take the lives of others, and that their next prey could easily be you yourself. This was different enough from a rampaging monster that these fears would be clean and ripe for the picking in the audiences minds.

Throughout the 1990's, we can see a definite lack in largely successful horror movies, no household names were created during this period. The target audience were most likly drawn to othe genres that were more active at the time, some of the most notable action and sci-fi movie franchises, such as Star Wars and Terminator, can be seen to have picked up many viewers early into their initial release, were some of these stolen from the jaws of Jaws?

A definitive factor of the horror genre is that a horror movie can usually be made at a lower budget than most other films you may see that have grossed similarly, making it appealing to amateur film makers and writers as a way of proving that they can make a successful movie by way of screen play and script writing rather than a large budget, special effect heavy action. Within this, we can see another factor in the change horror movies in general have changed over the years. As, in the current situation of movies, when the majority of people would flock to a large name Super Hero movie by a well known producer, like The Avengers, rather than watch a never before seen writer and producer's first movie, horror must search for a new appeal for their audience.