The studios were too busy incorporating technical changes such as widespread colour production and trying to meet the challenge posed by TV to have much truck with making quality horror pictures.
The 1950s are the era when horror films get relegated well and truly to the B-movie category. The protagonist is a final sacrifice rather than a Final Girl. Were these movies subliminal warnings to women, an exhortation to behave, or suffer the consequences? These ghost stories depend on more than an ambiguous spectral presence for their thrills they throb with psychosexual tension, and take a sadistic satisfaction (Hitchcock made it fashionable) in the suffering of the beautiful heroine. These screen stories reflect a preoccupation with change, with women on the frontlines, the first (and often the only ones) to be destroyed by the erosion of the old order. When the protagonist resists or complains, the causes of her terror can be explained away by a (it's usually a man) kindly doctor or other authority figure in Act Two, but the forces of madness – whether internal or external – always triumph by the end. Can the hero believe what he/she (it's usually a woman) is seeing? Reality unravels in textbook (Freudian) style, as familiar, safe mise en scène disintegrate, revealing aspects of another dimension. The characters do not believe that they are being affected by supernatural forces until too late (if at all) and the horror lies in the journey the protagonist takes between sanity and psychosis. They are simple stories that only require the audience to suspend disbelief in increments, and often, as in The Haunting (1963) operate from a position of skepticism. These films can be seen as a reaction against the elaborate creature features of the late 1950s. A number of ghost stories hit the screen in the early 1960s that still have the power to startle today, transcending their black and white photography and minimal special effects.
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