2. Horror films are unsettling movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, disgust and horror from viewers. They usually feature frequent jump scenes that make the viewers jump and startled through the means of the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres. Horrors also frequently overlap with the thriller genre. Horror films deal with the viewer's nightmares, hidden worst fears, revulsions and terror of the unknown. Although a good deal of it is about the supernatural, if some films contain a plot about morbidity, serial killers, a disease/virus outbreak and surrealism, they may be termed "horror".
3. The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by film pioneers such as Georges Méliès in the late 1890s. It was in the early 1930s that American film producers, particularly Universal Pictures Co. Inc., popularized the horror film. With advances in technology that occurred in the 1950s, the tone of horror films shifted from the gothic toward concerns that some saw as being more relevant to the late-Century audience. The horror film was seen to fall into two sub-genres: the horror-of-armageddon film and the horror-of-the-demonic film.