Derived from The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror by Tom Milne, Kim Newman, Julian Petley, Tim Pulleine, Paul Willemen, edited by Phil Hardy. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1995, but expanded. After a lull in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, horror was back, and the majority of the films were made in Europe. They note the development of the spaltter film by Hershell Gordon Lewis, the atmospheric horrors of Roger Corman and Kaneto Shindo, the failure of parodies like Carry on Screaming because so many films in the genre were self-parody, the medical horror film, the sex-vampire film as initiated by Jean Rollin, the Paul Naschy werewolf saga, Santo and Blue Demon, and the eclipsing of the vampire film with the zombie film beginning with George Romero. They consider the four key directors of the genre over the decade to be Alfred Hitchock (despite omitting The Birds), Roman Polanski, Michael Powell, and Romero, with particular props for Polanski exploring the genre's many facets.
