The history of horror films was described by author Siegbert Solomon Prawer as difficult to read as a linear path, with the genre changing through the decades, based on the state of cinema, audience tastes and contemporary world events.

Films before the 1930s, such as early German expressionist cinema and trick films, have been retrospectively described as horror films, since the genre did not become codified until the release of Dracula (1931). Dracula was a box office success, leading Universal and several other American film studios to develop and popularise horror films well into the 1940s. By the 1950s, horror was often made with science fiction themes, and towards the end of the decade horror was a more common genre of international productions.

The 1960s saw further developments, with material based on contemporary works instead of classic literature. The release of films such as Psycho, Black Sunday and Night of the Living Dead led to an increase in violence and erotic scenes within the genre. The 1970s would expand on these themes with films that would delve into gorier pictures, as well as films that were near or direct pornographic hybrids. Genre cycles in this era include the natural horror film, and the rise of slasher films which expanded in the early 1980s. Towards the 1990s, postmodernism entered horror, while some of the biggest hits of the decade included films from Japan such as the successful Ring (1998).

In the 21st century, streaming media popularised horror trends. These trends included torture porn influenced by the success of Saw; films using a "found footage" technique; and independent productions such as Get Out, Hereditary, and the Insidious series which were box office hits.

In his book Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (1980), author Siegbert Solomon Prawer stated that horror films cannot be interpreted as following a linear historical path. Historians and critics like Carlos Clarens noted that while some film audiences at the time took films made by Tod Browning that starred Bela Lugosi with utmost seriousness, other productions from other countries saw the material set for parody, as children's entertainment or nostalgic recollection. John Kenneth Muir in his books covering the history of horror films through the later decades of the 20th century echoed this statement, stating that horror films mirror the anxieties of "their age and their audience" concluding that "if horror isn't relevant to everyday life... it isn't horrifying".

Prior to the release of Dracula (1931), historian Gary Don Rhodes explained that the idea of the horror film did not exist yet as a codified genre and although critics have used the term "horror" to describe films in reviews prior to Dracula's release, the term has not truly developed by this time as the genre's name. The mystery film genre was in vogue and early information on Dracula being promoted as mystery film was common, despite the novel, play and film's story relying on the supernatural.

Forms of filmmaking that would become film genres were mostly defined in other media before Thomas Edison devised the Kinetograph in the late 1890s. Genres, such as adventure, detective stories, and Westerns were developed as written fiction while musical was a staple to theatre. Author and critic Kim Newman stated that if something was referred to as a horror film in 1890, no one would have understood what it meant as a specific genre, while following up that these types of films were being made but were not categorized as such at the time. Early sources of material that would influence horror films included gruesome or fantastical elements in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where heroes fight monsters, and the Bible, where plagues and apocalypses are discussed. Beliefs in ghosts, demons and the supernatural have long existed in folklore of many cultures and religions, that would go on to be integral elements of horror films. Zombies, for example, originated from Haitian folklore. In Asian Horror, Andy Richards suggests that there is a "widespread and engrained acceptance of supernatural forces" in many Asian cultures, and suggests this is related to animist, pantheist and karmic religious traditions, as in Buddhism and Shintoism; these would go on to strongly influence horror cinema from the region. Classical dramas also include elements later expanded upon by horror films, such as Hamlet, which includes vengeful spectres, exhumed skulls, multiple stabbings and characters succumbing to madness.

Early Gothic fiction such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) and works of Ann Radcliffe dealt with the stories involving seemingly supernatural doings and magnetic yet repulsive villains set in castles, but with their supernatural pretenses often explained in the end. The most famous of these gothic novels was Frankenstein (1818) which would be adapted into several film adaptations. American writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote several stories in the 1830s and 1840s that would be translated to the film screen in the future. These included "The Black Cat", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "The Masque of the Red Death". Poe's tales often presented women who were dead, dying or spectral and focus on the obsessions of their male protagonists.