Successful Horror Directors

William Friedkin

William Friedkin is an Academy Award-Winning American movie director and is best known for directing The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). His most well-known film was The Exorcist and is considered by many to be the greatest horror movie of all time and was also nominated for 10 Awards. It was also surrounded by a lot of controversy as the special effects were dramactically graphic, such as the posessed childs face. The actor playing the child was Linda Blair, and after the film was released she recieved many death threats and bodyguards were hired to protect her for 6 months. William Friedkin was also critisised for using subliminal messaging throughout the film as the demons face pops up quickly and he stated,

'The subliminal editing in The Exorcist was done for dramatic effect — to create, achieve, and sustain a kind of dreamlike state.' - William Friedkin

Also subliminal messaging requires the images to be below the threshold of your concience and this was simply not the case with The Exorcist. The film shocked people in all cinemas and showed the audience levels of horror they had never witnessed using the technology of special effects and it became the most talked about movie of its time. The film seemed too real for a lot of people to bare and they had to leave the cinema before the film even finished.

William Friedkin changed the face of horror forever creating movies which were so realistic other horror directors had to match it and from then on horror became a much more developed genre with films such as Halloween, A Clockwork Orange, Texas Chainsaw Massacare and The Omen.

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick directed a number of highly acclaimed and sometimes controversial films. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism, and his reclusiveness about his films and personal life. He is very well known for a lot of his feature films but The Shining and A Clockwork Orange are two of his most famous. A Clockwork Orange features disturbing, violent imagery to facilitate social commentary on youth gangs, and other topics in a futuristic dystopian Britian. Many people found it too be quite a sadistic motion picture as it includes scenes of rape and ultra-violence. Stanley Kubrick commented to the New York Times regarding this film,

'Man isn't a nobal savage , he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.' - Stanley Kubrick

This statement definately shows that Kubrick had views about the world and the people in it, it also may gain him the reputation of a cynic. He often related his views to his films, not only in A Clockwork Orange but in Full Metal Jacket aswell.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock is known to many as the master of suspense as he has directed and produced many great psychological thrillers in his time, such as Psycho and The Birds. Psycho is considered to be one of Hitchcock's best movies and it was nominated for 4 Academy Awards. It was genre defining and shaped the future of the horror genre. Critics saw it as techniqually flawless and even a work of art. The shower scene was one of the most discussed scenes at the time and stuided to find out why it was just so terrifying. The combination of the screams and high pitched music coupled with the fast jump cuts, disorintates the viewer and makes everything seem very realistic.

Psycho starts with Marion who steals $40,000 from the office where she works and drives to California to the man she wants to marry Sam who needs the money to pay off his ex-wife. She stops off over night at the Bates Motel where see meets Norman Bates who shows her to her room. Later in to the night we see a figure murder Marion when she is in the shower and we see Norman clear up the mess when he finds it, eliminating any incriminating evidence. Private detectives visit the hotel and question Norman, they search the room Marion stayed in and find the $40,000. Marions sister goes in to Normans home and finds Normans mother in the basement as a mummified corpse, Norman comes up behind her wearing his mothers clothes and runs at her yelling with a knife, but the detective saves her just in time. We then find out that Norman was impersonating his mother the whole time as when he was younger his father died and his mother found a new love which enraged him and he killed them both - preserving his mother. It created a split personality and at times he truly believed he was his mother.

Wes Craven

Wes Craven has created many great iconic horror films, such as Nightmare On Elm Street, The Scream Trilogy, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and The People Under the Stairs. Most popular and successful is probably Nightmare On Elm Street which featured the icon Freddy Krueger. Wes Craven often experiments with the nature of reality in his films, for example, in The Serpent and the Rainbow the film presents a man who can not disinguish the difference between nightmarish visions and reality. Also, the characters in Scream refrence horror films similar to their position and at one point Loomis tells his girlfriend that lifes just one big movie. A more recent motion picture Wes Craven has directed is The Hills Have Eyes which also has a sequel. Both are very graphic and almost fall in to the genre of 'torture porn'.
During his career, Wes Craven won eight awards and received three nominations. He did well in the box office, since he was known for his thriller films.