What makes a horror film? Early examples focused on generating fear through unnerving visuals. A product of the uncertainty of the post-WWI world, German Expressionism birthed an artistic movement with a focus on razor-sharp shadows and distorted settings. Horror cinema adopted this style, most famously in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) in which the silhouette of Max Schreck’s vampire Count Orlok creeping up the spiral staircase with his spindly fingers curled set the standard for what scary should look and, more importantly, feel like.

In the 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock popularized how scary should feel with the iconic Psycho (1960). Eschewing the previous decades of cinematic cereal-box monsters, Hitchcock chose to shock rather than spook the audience with the shower stabbing of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane by using 52 jump cuts to avoid censure whilst replicating the kineticism of the attack in cinematic form; later echoed in the caffeinated editing of horror films like Saw.

Scored using Bernard Herrmanns jarring strings, Psycho cemented the feeling of horror. While it didn’t invent the fetishization of women in peril, the film did popularize it, influencing the glove-handed murder of ladies in the ‘60s and ‘70s Italian subgenre of giallo. As director Dario Argento stated: “If they [women] have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.” His words would signal a shift in horror from spooky to sleazy.