Read the dialogue and study the phrases below.

A: I’m bored. Do you want to do something tonight?

B: Sure. What do you feel like doing?

A: Well, the film festival is in town. And I’m in the mood for seeing a movie. How does that sound?

B: I could go for a movie. What’s playing?

When the first horror films were made at the bottom of the depression, the producers were horrified at what they’d done.

For many years now Universal Pictures has been ministering to the American public’s apparently insatiable appetite for ghouls, werewolves, zombies, vampires and mad scientists.

“Dracula” opened in Cleveland,” said Universal’s Mr. X. “We sold that picture with all the horror we could put on it. We had an ambulance in front of the theater. We had the house full of girls in hospital uniforms, and signs saying: “See the Doctor – Nurses in Attendance”. In the papers we ran ads made to look like tombstones, daring people to see the picture and warning people with weak hearts to see their doctors first. We hired women to faint. The funny thing was, we got as many real ones as plants. People lined up in the lobby could see the limp bodies of the patrons being carried out. Pretty soon they were fainting themselves.

“But,” Mr. X. continued proudly, “Frankenstein” was where we really turned on the horror. Fortified with our “Dracula” experience, we gave it everything we had. We sat down and mapped out a strictly horror campaign: leather badges to the customers for courage, faint routine, gravestone motifs in the advertising. We got thirteen real faints in one afternoon.

Universal Pictures may be looked upon as the First Family of Virginia of the horror industry. Not only did Universal make the first real horror films; they have maintained almost a monopoly on frenzied scientists, phantoms with operatic ambitions, mad ghouls and Frankenstein monsters of both sexes. All this has put a pretty penny in the studio’s poke.

The highly conventionalised techniques of horror films have been developed over a number of years. Perhaps the first of the prototypes were old silent serials like “The Iron Claw”, cliff-hangers that featured masked villains, opiumden conspirators, and hands that groped out of the wall.

The writing of horror scripts has come to be as peculiar an art as publicising them. In writing for a mummy, for instance, it’s scarcely necessary to tailor the part to the actor when he’s a foot deep in old bandages. One must, on the other hand, include several conventional but absolutely necessary scenes. Most important of these is the beauty-and-the beast combination, usually a head-on shot of the monster lurching through a miasmal swamp, carrying the unconscious heroine in his arms. The heroine must be dressed in a diaphanous nightshirt, and is allowed to have no more than one hair out of place. Sometimes a large, perfectly symmetrical black smudge is rubbed on the center of her forehead for the sake of realism.

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