1930s & 1940s: The gothic subgenre

It was in the early 1930s that American film producers, particularly Universal Pictures Co. Inc., popularized the horror film genre, bringing to the screen a series of successful gothic-steeped features including Dracula (1931), and The Mummy (1932), as well as science fiction films with horror overtones, such as James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933).

These films, while designed to thrill, also incorporated more serious elements, and were influenced by the German expressionist films of the 1920s. Some actors began to build entire careers around the genre, most notably Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

Other studios of the day had less spectacular success with horror, but Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount, 1931) and Michael Curtiz's The Mystery of the Wax Museum (Warner Brothers, 1933) were both important films in the genre.

Universal's horror films would continue into the 1940s with The Wolf Man 1941, not the first werewolf film, but certainly the most influential. Throughout the decade Universal also continued to produce more sequels in the Frankenstein series, as well as a number of films teaming up several of their monsters. Also in that decade Val Lewton would produce a series of influential and atmospheric B-pictures for RKO, including Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Body Snatcher (1945).

In 1939, audiences embraced what is surely the best loved fantasy film of all time, The Wizard of Oz. The 1940s saw the full color fantasy films produced by Alexander Korda, The Thief of Bagdad and Jungle Book (1942). Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in Sinbad the Sailor feels like a fantasy film, though it does not actually have any fantastic elements.