Horror films seem to reflect the mood of the times, according to Stephen F. Austin State University theater professor Alan Nielsen.

"They show what we're afraid of as a culture" he says.

For instance, during the depression era, Nielsen says horror films often portrayed a sympathetic monster such as Frankenstein or King Kong.

"This was sending a message to people in the depression that 'times may be tough, but it's not your fault,'" he says.

Then the face of the horror film villain changed to outer space aliens coming to destroy the American culture in the 1950s.

"It was the fear of the Red Menace," he says, referring to the period characterized by the fear that communism would upset the capitalist social order in the United States.

Horror film villains in the 1960s changed once again to campy serial killers often played by famous actors Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. The decade had been one in which real-life serial killers such as Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Albert DeSalvo and The Zodiac Killer became infamous figures in American pop culture. Then the face of the horror film villain changed once more in the late '60s and 1970s with the discovery of the Watergate Scandal. Films like "Close Encounters of a Third Kind" and "Planet of the Apes" depicted the government as the villain.

"In all of these, the government represents the chief danger to either the protagonist or to society at large," he says.

In recent years, with technological advancements, remakes of films from these various periods have surfaced.

Nielsen says while some of the remakes are very good, the evolution of horror film technology has lost a part of the splendor of the old films.

"In the old days, you had stunt men out there doing these terrible stunts; there was always that element that these are real people doing them, and now we've kind of lost that," he says. "For future generations, they're never going to know the difference, but for somebody like me who grew up on great stunts ... you miss that sense of reality. It's not a fear for the person exactly, but an awareness that there is some real danger."

Nacogdoches resident Joe Lansdale, who has authored numerous horror novels and short stories, says sometimes "less is more" with the special effects and the graphic capabilities available in film making today, but other times "more is more."

He says most mid-20th century horror films were made as B movies, or low-budget films, and geared toward younger audiences. And, as those younger audiences got older and continued to enjoy the films, the industry took notice, and began to incorporate more sophisticated special effects.

One of the most recognizable changes in those special effects can be seen in horror film franchises like "Saw" or "A Nightmare on Elm Street" films.

Nielsen says the popularity of the film franchise is a throwback to old-fashioned melodrama, where a heroine is thrown into some kind of bad trouble with the villain always after her, and the hero has to come save her.

"It goes back to what we're afraid of. There is something out there that seems inevitably after us and I think that is what is behind a lot of these (franchise films)."

The same concept, he says can be applied to the success of low-budget, independent horror films like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity," which were shot documentary style, using footage from a character's camera to capture what is after them. Both films had budget figures of $20,000 and $15,000, respectively, and grossed millions of dollars at the box office.

"Everybody likes to be scared," Nielsen says.

He says he is not sure what he would consider his all-time favorite film, but he does enjoy the 1930s films the most.

"I guess I like them because they do sympathize with those characters," he says. "They humanize rather than just make them villains for no reason. I guess as a theater person I respond to that more than the out-and-out cardboard creature who is here to destroy us and we need to spend two hours screaming."

Lansdale says he is partial to the Robert Wise's "The Haunting," which depicts a scene of a door breathing at one point, that "really does it" in terms of fear.