Horror films of Europe
The horror films of Europe were described by Ian Olney in Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture as often being more erotic and "just plain stranger" than their American counterparts. Horror cinema of the United Kingdom is viewed by some authors as occupying a space between that of America and continental Europe, but the UK was involved in and produced many films regarded as Euro horror and is thus included in other analyses. European horror films draw from distinctly European cultural sources, including surrealism, romanticism, decadent tradition, early 20th century pulp-literature, film serials, and erotic comics. Compared to the narrative logic in American genre films, these films focused on imagery, excessiveness, and the irrational.
Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, European horror films emerged from countries like Italy, Spain and France, and were shown in the United States predominantly at the drive-in theatre and grindhouse theatres. As producers and distributors all over the world were interested in horror films, regardless of their origin, changes started occurring in European low-budget filmmaking that allowed for productions in the 1960s and 1970s for horror films from Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain, as well as co-productions between these countries. Several productions, such as those in Italy, were co-productions due to the lack of international stars within the country. European horror films began developing strong cult following since the late 1990s. Since the year 2000, European horror cinema has undergone a major revival, with productions from France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom getting larger audiences and critical recognition.
Austria
Jon Towlson in his book Global Horror Cinema Today said that Austria had little in a tradition of horror films in 20th century cinema, with only a few standalone films in the 21st century such as The Hands of Orlac, Parapsycho – Spectrum of Fear, and Angst. While Towlson classified The Hands of Orlac as horror, Tony Rayns said the film was closer to pulp thrillers like Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films. By the 1970s, Austria's film industry had hit an all-time low producing five to ten films a year, with many of them being sex comedy films co-produced with West Germany. There were no there were no horror film productions in Austria in the 1990s. Director Veronika Franz of the Austrian film Goodnight Mommy has said that "In Austria, there isn't much of a horror film tradition, Austria wanted to represent itself as an art film country. It was thought that horror films had no stories and were filled with clichés."The first tentative horror film productions of the 21st century were described by Towlson as being based on the post-Scream wave of slasher films. These included Silent Bloodnight, Dead in 3 Days and its sequel . Dead in 3 Days became Austria's highest grossing film of 2006. Dead in 3 Days financial success led to the further production of films in the country such as Blood Glacier, Swiss-Austrian co-production One Way Trip, and Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies and The Dark.
France
France never truly developed a horror film movement to the volume that the United Kingdom or Italy had produced. In their book European Nightmares, editors Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley noted that French cinema was generally perceived as having a tradition of the fantastic, rather than horror films. The editors noted that French cinema had produced a series of outstanding individual horror films, from directors who did not specialize in the field. In their book Horror Films, Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc referred to the director Jean Rollin as one of the country's most consistent horror auteurs with 40 years of productions described as "highly divisive" low budget horror films often featuring erotic elements, vampires, low budgets, pulp stories and references to both high and low European art. The works of Rollin or films like Eyes Without a Face are generally viewed as exceptions in a national film industry that was not known for producing horror films in the 20th century.The development of explicit and violent French films had a small increase since the year 2000.
A 21st-century movement of transgressive French cinema known as New French Extremity was named by film programmer James Quandt in 2004, who declared and derided that films of Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Gaspar Noé, and Bruno Dumont, among others, had made "cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile, or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration mutilation and defilement." In her book Films of the New French Extremity, Alexandra West described the phenomenon as initially an art-house movement, but as the directors of those films started making horror films fitting arthouse standards such as Trouble Every Day and Marina de Van's In My Skin, other directors began making more what West described as "outright horror films" such as Aja's High Tension and Xavier Gens' Frontier. Some of these horror films of the New French Extremity movement would regularly place on "Best Of" genre lists, such as Martyrs, Inside and High Tension while Julia Ducournau's film Titane won the Palme d'Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Academic David Pettersen described internationally successful films such as Raw or The Swarm were situated "somewhere between the poles of genre and art film, suggesting a distinctly hybridized relationship."
Few French 21st century horror films have performed well in their domestic box office, with only the film Deep in the Woods performing well with 740,000 tickets in France. The only post-2000 horror film as of 2021 to have more than 200,000 tickets sold in the local box office was Them. French director Alexandre Aja said that "the problem with the French is that they don't trust their own language . American horror movies do well, but in their own language, the French just aren't interested." Pettersen found that the most financially successful films that could be described as horror films were ones that mixed horror with other genres such as Brotherhood of the Wolf, Vidocq and The City of Lost Children.
Germany
A film movement that appeared in Germany in the first half of the 1920s labeled the German expressionist film closely resembled the horror film. The term is borrowed from art groups such as Der Blaue Reiter and Der Sturm. These films feature sensationalist titles such as Warning Shadows, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Secrets of a Soul. German film historian Thomas Elsaesser wrote that what was retained in popular film memory of these films were the characters who resembled bogeymen from children's fairy tales and folk legends. These included characters like the mad Dr. Caligari, Jack the Ripper from Waxworks and Count Orlok as well as actors like Conrad Veidt, Emil Jannings and Peter Lorre. Director F.W. Murnau, made an adaptation of Dracula with Nosferatu. Newman wrote that this adaptation "stands as the only screen adaptation of Dracula to be primarily interested in horror, from the character's rat-like features and thin body, the film was, even more so than Caligari, "a template for the horror film."German horror films remained marginal after the silent film era. The Third Reich ended the production of horror films and German productions never gained a mass audience leading the genre to not return in any major form until the late 1960s. Between 1933 and 1989, Randall Halle stated about only 34 films that could be described as horror films and 45 which were co-productions with other countries, primarily Spain and Italy. Among the first horror films from Germany following World War II were Alraune ''The Head and Horrors of Spider Island with The Head one of the few German horror films to reach an American film market in the 1960s. Outside of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre most of these films were low-budget that focused on erotic themes over horrific turns in narrative.
In the mid-1970s, Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons was tasked with the protection of minors from violent, racist and pornographic content in literature and comic books which led to increased the code which became law in 1973. These laws expanded to home video in 1985 following the release of titles such as Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead and the political change when Helmut Kohl became chancellor in 1982. The amount of West German film productions were low in the 1980s, leaving the genre to be shot by amateurs with low-budget productions. In the early 1980s, West Germany's government cracked down on graphic horror films similar to the United Kingdom's Video nasty panic. A direct response to this led to West German independent directors in the late 1980s and early 1990s, West German indie directors to release a comparatively high number of what Kai-Uwe Werbeck described as low-budget "hyper-violent horror films" sometimes described as German underground horror. Werbeck described the most prominent of these were of Jörg Buttgereit, described by Werbeck as "arguably the most visible German horror director of the 1980s and early 1990s", one which Harald Harzheim claimed to be "the first German director since the 1920s to give the horror genre new impulses". Similar gory films such as Olaf Ittenbach's The Burning Moon was the first, and last film to be made in Germany that is still banned there as of 2016.
German horror films returned in what Werbeck described as a more "mainstream fashion" in the 21st century. This included the box office hit Anatomy and Antibodies, who Odell and Le Blanc described as being a similar to the 1960s krimi genre of crime films. The second were films made for international markets such as Legion of the Dead and the video game adaptations directed Uwe Boll such as House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark''.