Horror genre on way back

This Halloween looks set to last longer than in other years.

The entertainment industry in America and across Europe is cranked up to provide more than the usual quota of homicidal ghouls and disturbed spirits.

In fact, an onslaught of terror and psychological trauma is in store both at the cinema and in the bookshop, as new releases set vampire against zombie and see devastating plagues laying waste to the globe.

Film producers and critics are hailing a return to the serious business of making convincing horror this autumn.

"There are a number of big American horror films, but we have seen some new players entering the field too," said Julian Petley, an expert in horror cinema and a professor of media and film at Brunel University, England. "The recent trend started with a number of Spanish horror films, and now it seems that the French have joined in too. I am beginning to wonder if this has caused British film-makers to set off down this path again, too."

Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director of the award-winning Pan's Labyrinth who is, for many, the most powerful imaginative force on the horror scene, has underlined his love of the genre by signing a vampire book deal with HarperCollins. The director, who plans to make film versions of Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the future, is now to write his own trilogy about a vampiric virus that invades New York. His first volume, The Strain, is due in the summer.

But it is mainstream American cinema that will be blazing a trail for horror this autumn with the film Quarantine, out early next month. It is the claustrophobic story of a group of firefighters trapped in a Los Angeles tenement after encountering a mutant strain of rabies. A remake of the Swedish vampire hit, Let the Right One In, portrays a bullied 12-year-old boy who falls for a schoolgirl who must drink blood to survive.

Further vampires will be queuing up to amuse audiences with the release, just before Christmas, of the feverishly awaited Twilight, adapted from Stephenie Meyer's bestselling novels. This time it is a misfit teenage girl who falls for a schoolboy vampire.

Vampires will not be having it all their own way, though. Werewolves are to have their howl too, with the release next year of The Wolf Man, starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt. If not true horror, somewhat broader, disturbing and apocalyptic visions are on their way in Blindness, Fernando Meirelles's new film based on the novel by the Nobel prize-winner Jose Saramago, and in The Road, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Britain provides the backdrop for several gritty and terrifying new films. Flick stars Faye Dunaway as a Memphis cop called in to investigate a series of strange deaths following the resurrection of a young murder victim from the fifties. In the wake of last month's British 'hoodie horror ' success, Eden Lake, from writer-director James Watkins, comes an indie offering, The Dead Outside.

Filmed in two weeks, the action begins once a neurological pandemic has wiped out most of the population. Two survivors meet on an isolated farm where they are confronted by an enemy 'even deadlier' than the one outside.

"I do think the horror film has always been quite an effective way of exorcising social fears," said Petley. "A fear of feral people, of underclasses, is a common theme. Horror, at its best, should always be about something."

While there is a fresh and concerted effort to scare British audiences silly, there are also some pastiche offerings in production, along the lines of the comic hit Shaun of the Dead. Next year will see the release of Lesbian Vampire Killers, starring James Corden and Paul McGann, which is set in a Welsh village and billed as 'a comic horror film'.

Ewan McGregor and Daniel Craig are also due to star in a humorous film adaptation of Glen Duncan's novel, I, Lucifer. Guillermo Del Toro, the director turned horror novelist, will be entering an equally crowded publishing market. His trilogy will have to compete not only with Meyer but with Justin Cronin's trilogy, also to be published next year and also about a vampiric plague, although this time one caused by medical experiments.

These books will follow in the bloody tracks of Anne Rice's series, filmed in Interview with a Vampire, and of Elizabeth Kostova's recent vampire novel The Historian. Dracula's influence has spread far and wide since his first encounters with the people of Whitby in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel.

And for the Texas Tech University academic and pop culture pundit Rob Weiner, it is time to call a halt. "It is not that horror buffs don't still love spending quality time with Nosferatu's spawn it's just that vampires have gone glam in recent decades, given a sexy makeover by the likes of Stephenie Meyer and Francis Ford Coppola," he said recently.

British film critic Philip French believes that the 'great period of horror' was the thirties, the era when the classic films starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were made. "They weren't made by hacks, and the best ones, I think, were Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, both made by James Whale," he said, pointing out that periods of boom time in horror correspond to periods of anxiety and change.

"These films, along with Tod Browning's Dracula, came after the Wall Street crash. They were about the Depression and fear. The second great period came in the fifties, when one could argue it was a response to the nuclear threat and the paranoia of McCarthyism."

French also points out that the enduring appeal of horror films for young directors is that they are a cheap way to get into the industry. "Like Roger Corman's horror films, they are often very cheap, but they travel internationally. One of the only expensive ones I can think of is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which he took a year to make. Yet one of the most profitable was The Blair Witch Project, which made a virtue of looking like a home movie."

Vampire plague stories are not always a metaphor, however, and not always even a fiction. Last August 38 members of Venezuela's Warao tribe were killed by a plague spread by bats. The infection, thought to be a form of rabies, induced a fever and then paralysis and a pronounced fear of water.

The implicated bats are believed to have been disturbed by nearby mining works.