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For almost as long as movies have been a thing, horror movies have been a thing. Dating back to the earliest classics of the genre, such as director F.W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire masterwork “Nosferatu,”<\/a> things that go bump in the night have been a staple of the silver screen. But in the 1970s, things changed as horror went mainstream in a way it never had before. Between an emerging group of filmmakers who would make their stamp on the genre, dozens of enduring classics arriving, and a dramatic shift in the way the genre was approached, the ’70s changed horror forever and, quite arguably, for the better.<\/p>\n Benefitting greatly from the New Hollywood movement<\/a> that saw studios give free rein to independent-minded and radical filmmakers pushing the boundaries of the art form, ’70s horror saw a group of directors influencing horror who, in many ways, were the first ones to grow up on popular horror of yesteryear. They had reverence for the genre but also wanted to do something new with it.<\/p>\n Popular horror arguably started with the Universal Monsters<\/a>, and filmmakers like John Carpenter (“Halloween”), Tobe Hooper (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”), and Joe Dante (“Piranha”) came of age watching them on TV. As they too got their chances to showcase their skills behind the camera, they had something to say using horror as the vehicle to do precisely that.<\/p>\n “I think it was a huge transition from the old horror \u2014 (Boris) Karloff, Vincent Price and the old monster movies \u2014 to the kind of new brand of scares that you saw in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘Alien,’ and ‘Halloween,'” Jason Zinoman, author of “Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror,” said of ’70s horror to NPR<\/a> in 2011.<\/p>\n