The Lingua Franca of Fear: A Dialectical History of Global Horror Cinema

This article argues that the history of global horror is not a linear progression of influence from a dominant West to the passive rest of the world but a dynamic, dialectical process of conversation, appropriation, and rearticulation. It is a history in which the archetypes and tropes of horror function as a lingua franca, a common language of fear, which is then inflected with distinct local “accents” to voice culturally specific anxieties. Through a process of cultural “domestication,” the global horror film becomes a powerful local mirror, reflecting the repressed social, political, and psychological terrors of the society that produces it.

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In Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998), a cursed videotape unleashes a vengeful spirit, Sadako Yamamura, whose spectral image crawls forth from a television set, her movements disjointed and terrifyingly unnatural. Four years later, in Gore Verbinski’s American remake, The Ring (2002), the same essential scene unfolds. The vengeful spirit, now named Samara Morgan, emerges from the screen with a similar uncanny gait. While the narrative skeleton remains, the resonance of the threat has been subtly yet significantly recalibrated. Sadako represents a distinctly Japanese anxiety, a clash between ancient folklore (Onryō) and invasive modern technology, a ghost literally trapped within the machine of progress. Samara, conversely, is framed within a Western context of familial dysfunction, media saturation, and the psychological trauma of a broken home. This act of translation – preserving the form while altering the cultural substance – is not an isolated phenomenon. It is, in fact, the central dialectic driving the evolution of horror cinema. This article argues that the history of global horror is not a linear progression of influence from a dominant West to the passive rest of the world but a dynamic, dialectical process of conversation, appropriation, and rearticulation. It is a history in which the archetypes and tropes of horror function as a lingua franca, a common language of fear, which is then inflected with distinct local “accents” to voice culturally specific anxieties. Through a process of cultural “domestication,” the global horror film becomes a powerful local mirror, reflecting the repressed social, political, and psychological terrors of the society that produces it.

To substantiate this claim, this article will first establish a robust theoretical framework, positioning the horror genre as a unique diagnostic tool for cultural analysis. It draws primarily on three key theoretical pillars. First, Siegfried Kracauer’s foundational concept of cinema as a reflection of a nation’s “psychological dispositions” provides the basis for reading horror films as social mirrors (Kracauer 1947, 6). Second, Robin Wood’s influential thesis, via Freud, of the return of the repressed will be employed to analyze how monstrous figures embody the very ideologies and social norms that a dominant culture seeks to suppress (Wood 2003, 78). Finally, Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject will offer a psychoanalytic lens to understand how body horror, in particular, taps into our most primal fears by violating the boundaries between the self and the other, the clean and the defiled (Kristeva 1982, 4).

Armed with this theoretical apparatus, the article will then proceed through a chronological, yet transnational, analysis of key moments in horror history. It will begin with the haunted landscapes of post-WWI Germany in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and trace its formal and thematic domestication in Hollywood’s Universal monster cycle. The analysis will then pivot to the Cold War, offering a comparative study of American paranoia in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Japan’s nuclear trauma in Godzilla. The subsequent section will explore the implosion of the family and the body in the 1970s and ’80s, examining the American slasher through the lens of Wood and Carol Clover, and David Cronenberg’s body horror via Kristeva, while also acknowledging the distinct aesthetic of the Italian giallo. Finally, the article will address the era of globalization, analyzing the transnational flow of J-horror, the rise of sociopolitical horror in South Korea and Iran, and the contemporary phenomenon of “elevated horror.” Through this historical survey, it will become clear that the horror film, in all its diverse and terrifying manifestations, serves as one of our most potent and enduring cultural documents – a global language expertly spoken with a local tongue.

Part 1: Theoretical Framework: Mirrors, Monsters, and the Abject

Before embarking on a historical analysis, it is crucial to establish the theoretical lenses through which horror cinema will be viewed. The genre’s capacity to articulate societal anxieties is not incidental; it is intrinsic to its very structure. As a genre predicated on the violation of norms – be they social, physical, or psychological – horror provides a unique space where that which is unspoken, feared, or suppressed can be given monstrous form.

Kracauer and the Social Mirror

In his seminal work From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Siegfried Kracauer put forth a revolutionary argument: that a nation’s films offer “clues to hidden mental processes” and reflect its collective subconscious (Kracauer 1947, v). Analyzing the distorted sets, tyrannical figures, and themes of chaos and madness in German Expressionist cinema, Kracauer argued that these films were not mere entertainment but premonitions of the societal psychosis that would allow Nazism to rise. The “soul of a people,” he contended, could be diagnosed through its cinematic output. For Kracauer, the cinema functions as a social mirror, reflecting anxieties that cannot be consciously articulated in the political or social sphere. This concept is foundational for our analysis. When we examine The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), we are not just seeing a horror story; we are, as Kracauer suggests, witnessing a collective retreat from reality and a “shattering of the self” in a nation defeated and humiliated by war (Kracauer 1947, 74). This framework allows us to read horror films from any culture – be it Godzilla in postwar Japan or Under the Shadow in post-revolution Iran – as vital documents of national trauma and psychological states. The monster on-screen becomes a direct reflection of the anxieties haunting the audience in the theater.

Wood, Repression, and the Return of the Repressed

While Kracauer provided the macro-level, societal framework, it was Robin Wood who refined the analysis of the monster itself as an ideological construct. In his essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” Wood, drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, famously defined the genre’s basic formula as “normality is threatened by the Monster” (Wood 2003, 77). But crucially, Wood argued that the monster is never simply an external evil. Instead, it is the product of repression within the society that defines “normality.” The monster is “the return of the repressed,” the embodiment of what our civilization represses or oppresses. This repressed “other” can take many forms: repressed sexuality, class anger, ethnic minorities, alternative ideologies, or even the wild, untamed nature that capitalism seeks to control.

Wood’s theory is exceptionally potent for analyzing the horror films of the 1970s and ’80s. The monstrous families of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) can be read as the repressed other of American capitalism – a grotesque parody of the nuclear family. Michael Myers in Halloween (1978) is not an alien invader but a product of the seemingly perfect American suburb, a repressed violence that erupts from within. As Wood states, “the genre is a sensitive barometer of the anxieties of the period that produces it” (2003, 93). This lens transforms the monster from a simple antagonist into a complex symbol of societal hypocrisy and discontent. It forces us to ask not “what does the monster do?” but “what does the monster represent? What part of ourselves have we disowned and cast out, only to have it return in terrifying form?”

Kristeva and the Power of the Abject

While Kracauer reads the social environment and Wood reads the ideological monster, Julia Kristeva provides a framework for understanding horror’s visceral, bodily impact. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva introduces the concept of “the abject”: that which is violently cast out from the symbolic order to constitute the self. The abject is not merely the opposite of “clean” or “proper”; it is what disturbs identity, system, order. It does not respect borders, rules, or the in-between (Kristeva 1982, 4). The corpse, for instance, is the ultimate abject object – it is something that was once a living subject but is now a thing, blurring the line between life and death.

This theory is indispensable for understanding the subgenre of body horror. The films of David Cronenberg, for example, are sustained meditations on the Kristevan abject. In The Fly (1986), the protagonist’s body gruesomely disintegrates, merging with insect DNA, dissolving the very boundary of what it means to be human. This is not just disgusting; it is philosophically terrifying because it challenges our core sense of a stable, bordered self. Similarly, the uncanny, fluid movements of ghosts in J-horror or the bodily possessions in films like The Exorcist (1973) trigger a sense of abjection. They confront us with a radical impurity, a breakdown of the distinctions between inside and outside, me and not-me. As Kristeva writes, the abject “is what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (1982, 3). The horror film, in its most potent moments, forces us to confront it. This confrontation – with the social mirror, the repressed monster, and the primal abject – is what makes the genre a uniquely powerful tool for cultural diagnosis.

Part 2: The Birth of the Modern Monster and Its Domestication (1920-1960)

The early 20th century witnessed the birth of the cinematic monster as we know it, a creature forged in the crucible of world war, economic collapse, and social upheaval. This period exemplifies the dialectic of global influence and local domestication, beginning with the psychic wounds of Germany and finding a new, commercialized form in Hollywood.

Case Study: German Expressionism and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is more than a film; it is a fever dream rendered on celluloid. Its power derives not from jump scares but from a pervasive, suffocating atmosphere of dread. The film’s visual language – jagged, painted shadows, impossibly tilted buildings, and distorted perspectives – is a direct externalization of a traumatized national psyche. As Kracauer argues, this aesthetic reflected a German society reeling from the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, a society retreating from a reality too painful to confront into a world of madness and paranoia (Kracauer 1947, 67-76). The tyrannical Dr. Caligari, who forces the somnambulist Cesare to commit murder, symbolizes a malevolent, arbitrary authority, a theme that Kracauer saw as a chilling premonition of the rise of Hitler. The film’s narrative twist, revealing that the story is the delusion of an asylum inmate, only deepens this reading. It suggests a society where the boundary between sanity and madness has dissolved, where authority is absolute and the individual is powerless. Caligari’s horror is distinctly German and of its time, a raw, artistic scream from a nation on the brink of psychosis.

Case Study: Universal Monsters and American Anxieties

When German filmmakers like Karl Freund (cinematographer for The Golem and Metropolis) emigrated to Hollywood, they brought the expressionistic style with them. However, in the hands of the American studio system, this style was domesticated. The raw, psychological horror of Germany was polished, structured, and adapted to voice American anxieties. James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) is a prime example. The monster, famously portrayed by Boris Karloff, inherits the visual legacy of Expressionism – the high-contrast lighting, the dramatic makeup. Yet its symbolic meaning is transformed.

While the German monster was a symptom of internal societal decay, the Universal monster became a symbol of the external other. Frankenstein’s creation is a composite of body parts, an unnatural assembly that speaks to Depression-era America’s anxieties about immigration, racial mixing, and scientific hubris (Skal 1993, 137). The famous, often-censored scene where the monster innocently drowns a little girl is pivotal. It encapsulates the American fear of a powerful, misunderstood force that, despite its potential for tenderness, is inherently destructive and cannot be integrated into the idyllic social order. The monster must be hunted by a torch-wielding mob and destroyed in a burning windmill – a communal exorcism of the foreign and the unnatural. The dialectic is clear: the visual language was imported from Germany, but the monster’s narrative function was entirely domesticated to serve American ideological needs.

Comparative Study: Cold War Paranoia in Body Snatchers vs. Godzilla

The dawn of the atomic age and the Cold War provided fertile new ground for horror, giving rise to two of the genre’s most enduring icons, each a perfect mirror of its nation’s deepest fears. In the United States, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) weaponized paranoia. The film’s antagonists are “pod people,” alien duplicates who look and sound identical to one’s friends and neighbors but lack all emotion and individuality. The horror is not one of overt monstrosity but of insidious infiltration. As film scholar Vivian Sobchack notes, the film perfectly channels the dual anxieties of McCarthy-era America: the fear of an external communist takeover and the internal fear of soul-crushing suburban conformity (Sobchack 1997, 120-125). The protagonist’s desperate, final scream – “You’re next!” – is a cry against a world where individuality is being systematically erased. The horror is psychological, social, and deeply American.

Simultaneously, across the Pacific, Japan was grappling with a far more tangible and recent trauma. Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla (1954) is a film born from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The monster, Gojira, is not a subtle infiltrator but a colossal, radioactive force of nature awakened by American hydrogen bomb testing. The film’s tone is not paranoid but mournful, resembling a disaster documentary more than a monster movie. Scenes of Tokyo in flames, hospitals overflowing with irradiated victims, and Geiger counters clicking ominously are not allegorical; they are near-literal restagings of the atomic bombings. Godzilla is the return of the repressed on a national scale – the nuclear trauma that postwar Japan was struggling to process (Napier 2005, 18). While both Body Snatchers and Godzilla are “atomic age” monster movies, their accents are radically different. One speaks the language of psychological paranoia and ideological conformity; the other speaks the language of physical annihilation and collective trauma.

Part 3: The Collapse of Social and Bodily Order (1970-1980)

The cultural revolutions of the 1960s gave way to a period of profound cynicism and disillusionment in the 1970s. This societal fragmentation was mirrored in a horror cinema that turned its lens inward, exploring the decay of the family, the fragility of the human body, and the darkness lurking beneath the surface of social institutions.

Case Study: The American Slasher and the Return of the Repressed

John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) codified the slasher subgenre, and in doing so, perfectly illustrated Robin Wood’s theory. The film’s monster, Michael Myers, is not an alien or a gothic creature; he is a product of the idyllic American suburb. His evil erupts from within a “normal” family on Halloween night, the one night of the year dedicated to playfully acknowledging the monstrous. After escaping a sanitarium, he returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, a name that evokes a pastoral, manicured ideal. His campaign of terror is a direct assault on the post-60s generation of teenagers, specifically targeting those who engage in premarital sex, drink, or smoke.

This is where the analysis of Carol Clover becomes indispensable. In her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover identified the archetype of the “final girl” – the one virginal, resourceful, and intelligent young woman who survives to confront the killer (Clover 1992, 35). Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the quintessential final girl. While her friends are punished for their transgressions, her perceived moral purity and watchfulness allow her to fight back. The slasher thus becomes a deeply conservative morality play, a violent reassertion of patriarchal, puritanical values that the 1960s had challenged. Michael Myers is the return of the repressed sexual anxieties of a conservative culture, a monstrous id brutally policing the “normality” that Wood described. He is the repressed violence of the suburban family unit made manifest.

Case Study: Cronenberg’s Body Horror and the Kristevan Abject

While the slasher explored the violation of the social body, Canadian director David Cronenberg focused on the literal, visceral violation of the human body. His films are sustained, philosophical explorations of the Kristevan abject. In Videodrome (1983), the protagonist, Max Renn, discovers a pirate television signal that broadcasts extreme violence and torture. As he investigates, the signal begins to physically alter his reality and his body. The film’s most iconic and abject moment is the emergence of a vaginal slit in Max’s stomach, into which videotapes – agents of the signal – can be inserted.

This is the abject in its purest form: the catastrophic breakdown of borders. The boundary between flesh and technology, organic and inorganic, inside and outside, collapses. The television, once a passive screen, becomes an active participant in human biology. As Kristeva would argue, this confronts the viewer with what has been “cast out” to form a stable sense of self: the messy, porous, and mutable nature of the flesh (Kristeva 1982, 3-4). Cronenberg’s horror is not about a knife-wielding killer; it is about the terror of losing one’s own bodily integrity, of realizing the self is not a sealed, sovereign entity but a fragile and permeable system. The film’s famous last line, “Long live the new flesh,” is a horrifying embrace of this abjection, a surrender to a new, terrifying form of existence beyond the traditional boundaries of the human.

The European Accent: Italy’s Giallo and Aestheticized Violence

Concurrent with the American slasher, Italy was perfecting its own unique horror dialect: the giallo. Taking its name from the yellow covers of pulp mystery novels, the giallo, particularly in the hands of Dario Argento, is a distinct cinematic language. Films like Deep Red (1975) and Suspiria (1977) share surface similarities with the slasher – a mysterious, black-gloved killer, elaborate murder sequences – but their focus is entirely different. Where the American slasher is driven by narrative and morality, the giallo is driven by aesthetics and psychology.

Argento’s films are less concerned with who the killer is and more with the sensory experience of the murder itself. He employs a lush, baroque visual style, saturated colors (especially red), and disorienting prog-rock scores (by the band Goblin) to create an operatic, dreamlike atmosphere. The murders are not merely brutal; they are extravagantly choreographed ballets of violence. The narrative logic is often secondary to Freudian psychology, with killers motivated by deeply buried childhood traumas, often witnessed but repressed. The giallo is therefore a Freudian-inflected, highly aestheticized horror. It is not the return of the repressed in a social sense, as Wood would have it, but the return of a repressed memory, a primal scene of trauma that replays itself through stylized violence. It is a language of horror spoken with a distinctly Italian, operatic, and psychoanalytic accent.

Part 4: Globalization, Transnational Horror, and the Return to the Political (1990-Present)

The late 20th and early 21st centuries, defined by digital technology and globalization, saw the language of horror become more fluid and interconnected than ever before. This era is characterized by rapid transnational flows, the resurgence of overtly political horror, and a self-conscious re-evaluation of the genre’s artistic potential.

Case Study: The J-Horror Phenomenon and Its American Remake

The global success of Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998) heralded the arrival of “J-horror” as a major international force. The horror of Ring was perfectly suited to a globalized world grappling with the anxieties of new technology. The film’s ghost, Sadako, is a techno-specter, a fusion of a traditional Japanese ghost figure (Onryō, a vengeful spirit) with the modern media of television and the VCR. Her horror is viral, spreading like a digital file from viewer to viewer. This resonated with a distinctly Japanese cultural anxiety about the tension between deep-rooted tradition and rapid, often alienating, technological modernization (Iwabuchi 2002, 126). The film’s quiet, atmospheric dread and its focus on psychological suggestion rather than explicit gore offered a stark contrast to the dominant American horror of the time.

The success of Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake, The Ring, demonstrates the process of cultural domestication at its most explicit. The remake retains the core mechanic of the cursed tape and the seven-day deadline but recontextualizes the horror for an American audience. The supernatural logic of the Onryō is replaced with a more Western-friendly psychological backstory centered on child abuse and a broken family. The focus shifts from the societal tension between tradition and technology to the personal, psychological horror of failed motherhood and media’s invasive role in family life. The terror is no longer a haunted technology but a technology that reveals a haunted past. The global success of both the original and the remake proved that the core concept was a powerful lingua franca, but its terrifying power was only fully unlocked when spoken in a familiar local accent.

Horror as Socio-Political Commentary: South Korea and Iran

As horror became a global genre, filmmakers in various nations began to powerfully domesticate it as a tool for sharp social and political critique. In South Korea, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006) uses the monster movie trope to launch a scathing indictment of both the South Korean government’s incompetence and the lingering, problematic presence of the American military. The monster emerges from the Han River after an American military base orders toxic chemicals to be dumped into the drains – an event based on a real incident. The creature is not a mythical beast but a direct product of American negligence and bureaucratic apathy. The film’s true horror lies less in the monster itself and more in the systemic failure of every institution meant to protect the central family.

Similarly, Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow (2016) brilliantly fuses the language of the haunted house genre with the specific anxieties of post-revolutionary, war-torn 1980s Tehran. A mother and daughter, trapped in their apartment during the Iran-Iraq War’s “War of the Cities,” are tormented by a Djinn, a malevolent spirit from Middle Eastern folklore. The Djinn, which travels on the wind and can possess people, becomes a powerful metaphor for the pervasive, invisible, and suffocating anxieties of the time: the fear of bombs falling from the sky, the oppressive presence of the morality police, and the psychological trauma of war and social repression. The loss of the mother’s chador to the Djinn is a profoundly resonant moment, symbolizing the loss of identity and security in a world where both external and internal threats are closing in. In both The Host and Under the Shadow, the global language of horror (monster movie, haunted house) is masterfully employed to articulate urgent, localized political and social realities.

The Rise of “Elevated Horror” and the Genre’s Future

The most recent trend in Western horror has been the rise of what is often labeled (sometimes contentiously) “elevated horror” or “post-horror.” Films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), and Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) consciously move away from genre conventions like jump scares in favor of atmospheric dread, complex psychological themes, and overt social commentary. This movement can be seen as a return to the genre’s roots, echoing the social diagnosis of Kracauer and the ideological critique of Wood.

Get Out uses horror tropes to construct a stunning allegory for the insidious nature of “liberal” racism in post-Obama America. The horror is not the overt bigotry of the past but the new, terrifying desire to literally colonize and appropriate Black bodies. Hereditary eschews a traditional monster in favor of a devastatingly intimate portrait of inherited family trauma, suggesting that the most terrifying demons are the ones passed down through our bloodline. The Witch meticulously recreates 17th-century New England to explore the historical roots of religious fanaticism and patriarchal oppression, showing how a family’s own paranoia can become a self-fulfilling prophecy of evil. This wave represents a full-circle moment for the genre, where horror is once again unapologetically deployed as a serious art form, a complex mirror held up to the darkest corners of the contemporary Western psyche.

Conclusion

The history of horror cinema, from the shadowy streets of Weimar Germany to the globalized digital streams of the 21st century, is a testament to the genre’s remarkable adaptability and enduring cultural power. As this analysis has demonstrated, horror is far more than a simple catalogue of scares. It is a dialectical language, a lingua franca of fear that facilitates a continuous and vital conversation between the global and the local. The archetypal figures of the vampire, the ghost, the monster, and the killer are not static forms; they are empty vessels, waiting to be filled with the specific anxieties of the culture that summons them.

We have seen how the German fear of societal chaos was domesticated into the American fear of the foreign other; how the atomic anxieties of the Cold War found vastly different expressions in the paranoid suburbs of America and the irradiated cities of Japan; how the collapse of the nuclear family and the body itself gave rise to the distinct terrors of the slasher, body horror, and the giallo; and how, in an era of globalization, this language has been used to articulate everything from technological anxiety and post-colonial critique to the horrors of systemic racism and inherited trauma.

The power of horror lies in this very duality. It speaks a universal language of fear – of death, of the unknown, of the loss of self – that allows it to travel across borders. Yet it derives its true resonance and meaning from its local accent, its ability to tap into a specific cultural pressure point and give monstrous form to what a society represses. The horror film is, and always has been, one of our most honest and revealing social mirrors. In a world increasingly defined by global crises – from pandemics and climate change to political polarization and digital disinformation – the lingua franca of fear will undoubtedly continue to evolve, generating new dialects and new monsters to help us understand the terrors of our time. It remains a language we will need to learn to speak, and to interpret, for the foreseeable future.

Works Cited

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Duke University Press, 2002.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton University Press, 1947.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982.

Napier, Susan J. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Faber and Faber, 1993.

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. 2nd ed. Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Robin Wood and Barry Keith Grant, 75–96. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Films Cited

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Wiene. Germany: Decla-Bioscop AG, 1920.
Deep Red (Profondo Rosso). Directed by Dario Argento. Italy: Rizzoli Film, 1975.
The Exorcist. Directed by William Friedkin. USA: Warner Bros., 1973.
The Fly. Directed by David Cronenberg. USA: Brooksfilms and 20th Century Fox, 1986.
Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale. USA: Universal Pictures, 1931.
Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele. USA: Blumhouse Productions, 2017.
Godzilla (Gojira). Directed by Ishirō Honda. Japan: Toho, 1954.
Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter. USA: Compass International Pictures, 1978.
Hereditary. Directed by Ari Aster. USA: A24, 2018.
The Host (Gwoemul). Directed by Bong Joon-ho. South Korea: Showbox, 2006.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel. USA: Allied Artists Pictures, 1956.
Ring (Ringu). Directed by Hideo Nakata. Japan: Toho, 1998.
The Ring. Directed by Gore Verbinski. USA: DreamWorks Pictures, 2002.
Suspiria. Directed by Dario Argento. Italy: Seda Spettacoli, 1977.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Directed by Tobe Hooper. USA: Bryanston Distributing Company, 1974.
Under the Shadow. Directed by Babak Anvari. UK/Jordan/Qatar: Wigwam Films, 2016.
Videodrome. Directed by David Cronenberg. Canada: Universal Pictures, 1983.
The Witch. Directed by Robert Eggers. USA/Canada: A24, 2015.

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.