Research- Historical background on horror films

The first horror films are surreal, disturbing pieces, owing their visual appearance in part to expressionist painters and in part to spirit photography of the 1860s, and their narrative style to the stories played out by the Grand Guignol Theatre Company and drawn from Gothic literature. They draw upon the folklore and legends of Europe, and render monsters into physical form. Spirit photography – the practice of using double exposures or superimpositions to depict ghosts within a frame of film – was popular from the 1860s onwards, not only among Spiritualists (who may have believed the images were real, vindicating their belief in the afterlife) but also among stage musicians and their audiences, who delighted in the fakery as entertainment.

The first horror film on record is Le Manoir du Diable (1896), created by one of film's earliest visionaries, Georges Méliès. Although it has a running time of a little over three minutes, this supernatural story still manages to pack in the genre paradigms: bats, devils, witches, cauldrons, ghosts, trolls, all appearing and disappearing in puffs of smoke:

              

The Conjuring is a 2013 American supernatural horror film directed by James Wan and written by Chad Hayes and Carey Hayes. It is the first film in The Conjuring franchise.[3] Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga star as Ed and Lorraine Warren, paranormal investigators and authors associated with prominent cases of haunting. Their reports inspired The Amityville Horror.[4] The Warrens come to the assistance of the Perron family (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor), who are experiencing increasingly disturbing events in their farmhouse in Rhode Island in 1971.[5] The Conjuring was released in the United States and Canada on July 19, 2013, and in the United Kingdom and India on August 6, 2013. The film received positive reviews from critics and grossed over $318 million worldwide from its $20 million budget, making it one of the highest-grossing horror films of all time. A sequel, The Conjuring 2, was released on June 10, 2016, also to critical and huge commercial success.
This is the trailer of The conjuring which was first taken: