Horror films of Europe

The horror films of Europe (generally referred to as Euro Horror) were described by Ian Olney in Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture as often being more erotic and "just plain stranger" than their American counterparts. Horror cinema of the United Kingdom is viewed by some authors (e.g. Olney) as occupying a space between that of America and continental Europe, but the UK was involved in and produced many films regarded as Euro horror and is thus included in other analyses. European horror films draw from distinctly European cultural sources, including surrealism, romanticism, decadent tradition, early 20th century pulp-literature, film serials, and erotic comics. Compared to the narrative logic in American genre films, these films focused on imagery, excessiveness, and the irrational.

The concept of European horror films as a unified style is often defined by British and American critics and fans rather than by continental Europeans. Academic David Hutchings found that they are reliant on notions of the exotic and the foreign, and that they are "a lot more exciting than whatever we have here, wherever here is."

Hutchings said that there were two significant historical periods in European horror cinema, with the first period running from the mid-1950s to the mid 1980s where shortly after, production on these films was greatly diminished. The second being at the turn of the century. Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, European horror films emerged from countries like Italy, Spain and France, and were shown in the United States predominantly at the drive-in theatre and grindhouse theatres. As producers and distributors all over the world were interested in horror films, regardless of their origin, changes started occurring in European low-budget filmmaking that allowed for productions in the 1960s and 1970s for horror films from Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain, as well as co-productions between these countries.