Back in the day, horror films were lots of fun

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in a DVD column that horror movies just aren't much fun anymore. Someone challenged that, asking, when is horror ever fun?

I understand the question.

Somewhere in the 1970s and '80s, the "fun" in horror movies gave way to graphic gore and glop-and-goo special effects, becoming stomach-churning exercises, and I mean that in a nauseating rather than thrill-ride kind of way.

Especially the slasher trend of the 1980s, all those "Halloween," "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" sequels and rip-offs with creative killings from the psycho's point of view and victims too dopey to care about.

As this paper's movie critic at the time, I saw them all, and it's one of the things that drove me from the job after 20 years. Fortunately, I moved on before the torture-porn trend of the 2000s; I've never had to sit through a "Saw" or "Hostel" picture.

But before faceless slashers and flesh-eating zombies and graphic dismemberments by serial killers, fright flicks really were a lot of fun.

In the 1920s, Lon Chaney's silent classic "The Phantom of the Opera" scared audiences in a way that had them returning with friends to relive the experience.

The 1930s and '40s were the era of Universal's monsters, with myriad sequels following the studio's seminal versions of "Frankenstein," "Dracula," "The Mummy," "The Invisible Man," "The Wolf Man" and many more.

In the '50s Universal kept at it, but even as we saw "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" and its sequels, the emphasis began to shift to fears of a nuclear cataclysm, resulting in movies with mutant monsters rising from radiation, usually on the cheap so that even at the time these pictures seemed campy.

But they were still fun.

Then, in the 1960s, when I was a teenager, all of these black-and-white monster fantasies evolved into bigger-budgeted color movies that pushed the boundaries, but which were still fun.

I'm referring to the movies of Roger Corman, especially his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, and the British studio Hammer Films' "reboots," to use modern parlance, of the Universal monsters.