Let’s establish something up front: I am not an impartial journalist on this topic. I have opinions. Strong ones. I grew up watching films where the monster was a thing you could touch. Something that existed in a room with the actors, something that bled fake blood across a real floor. I am constitutionally incapable of treating the CGI in Van Helsing (2004) as a neutral artistic choice, instead of a crime against cinema. Those creatures looked like they were rendered on a laptop someone left in a hot car, and no amount of time or therapy is going to make me pretend otherwise.
But we’ll get there.
The story of practical effects in horror is not just a technical history, it’s a moral one. It’s about what we owe the audience. What a filmmaker risks versus what they outsource. And what happens, every single time, when the industry forgets that fear lives in the body, not the browser.
The Golden Age: Blood, Latex, and Absolute Madness (1970s–80s)
Before the discourse, there was just the craft.
The seventies and eighties produced a generation of effects artists who belonged in the same sentence as any director they worked for. Tom Savini. Rick Baker. Stan Winston. Rob Bottin. These weren’t technicians, they were auteurs with foam latex and corn syrup instead of cameras. Savini put it plainly: “[Effects] were the stars of the movies. When you watched Friday the 13th, you really didn’t remember anybody that was in the movie. You just remembered the great kills.” He wasn’t wrong. Jason Voorhees was a cultural event. The kills were the mythology.
Rick Baker’s An American Werewolf in London (1981) won the first-ever Academy Award for Best Makeup. A category that only existed because Baker’s work was too extraordinary to ignore. Seven wins followed over a career that Baker eventually ended on his own terms, having grown tired of an industry demanding speed over quality. His exit line: “I like to do things right, and they wanted cheap and fast.” Read that again. Memorize it. You’ll need it later.
This is the golden rule that the next era promptly forgot.
The Fall: The CGI Gold Rush and Its Discontents (1990s–2000s)
Here’s where I have to be fair, which I resent.
CGI was, genuinely, a miracle. Jurassic Park (1993) changed cinema in ways that were not hyperbole. The T-Rex moved like an animal. The velociraptors had weight. Spielberg’s team combined practical and digital work so seamlessly that audiences couldn’t find the seam, and that was the point. The technology arrived as a collaborator, not a replacement.
Then Hollywood noticed the profit margins.
Digital effects were faster and, once you absorbed the software costs, cheaper to scale than building a creature rig that required a team of twelve puppeteers and a refrigerator full of glycerin. Studios started treating CGI less like a tool and more like a permission slip. Permission to skip the craft, rush the schedule, and let post-production fix everything. Horror, a genre that had always thrived on physical immediacy, was suddenly full of creatures that looked like video game cutscenes having a rough day.
The discourse around this is well-documented, but the poster child is Van Helsing (2004), a film so bloated with digital effects that its monsters, Dracula, Frankenstein’s creation, a werewolf, looked like they were projected onto the screen from a separate dimension where physics didn’t apply. Critics weren’t being snobbish. The CGI simply wasn’t finished yet. Early-aughts digital effects aged faster than milk left in a parking lot, and horror paid a specific price for it. You cannot be scared of something that doesn’t appear to exist.
As we have talked about before, even beloved practical-era productions had their catastrophes. However, those failures were human failures, which is somehow more forgivable. A latex arm that didn’t articulate right is embarrassing. A CGI monster that looks like a screensaver is alienating. One pulls you out of a film; the other makes you question why you bought a ticket.
CGI’s advantages are real and worth naming honestly: it allows filmmakers to shoot things that cannot be built. It scales. It can be revised. For scope, cityscapes, cosmic horror, armies of the supernatural, digital is not just useful, it’s necessary. The mistake wasn’t using CGI. It was using it instead of practical effects rather than alongside them.
The Nadir: When Horror Forgot It Was Supposed to Feel Like Something (Mid-2000s–Early 2010s)
The lowest point arrived quietly. Horror didn’t go away, it just stopped feeling physical. The genre filled with digital blood that splashed wrong, CGI demons that flickered through scenes without disturbing the air, haunted houses full of digital apparitions that looked like they’d been added in post because the director couldn’t figure out where to put them. Audiences noticed, even when they couldn’t articulate why. Something about a computer-generated effect reads as safe to the human brain. We evolved to fear things that can touch us.
Rick Baker retired in 2015, citing exactly this cultural shift. He wasn’t alone. An entire generation of practical effects artists found their work deprioritized by studios that had decided digital was simply the future, full stop.
They were wrong.
The Return: The Genre Remembers Its Body (Mid-2010s–Present)
The new wave of gore creators doing their work online is part of a broader cultural reckoning. A generation raised on the golden age of practical horror who grew up and started making things with their hands. The alchemy was already happening in independent and arthouse horror long before studios caught on. The Witch (2015). Hereditary (2018). Midsommar (2019). Films that used practical effects not for nostalgia but because they understood a fundamental truth. When the camera is looking at something real, the actor responds to something real, and that transaction is visible on screen in ways no digital composite can replicate.
The argument crystallized in 2024 with The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s body horror masterpiece that deployed practical effects on a scale and intensity that recalled the best of the golden age. CineD’s breakdown of the in-camera effects work details a production with over 100 shooting days, prosthetics teams working across multiple units, and puppetry sequences requiring up to six operators underneath the set. Fargeat was unambiguous about why. “It’s really a movie about our bodies and about the reality of how we feel in our bodies,” she told Dread Central. “I needed to speak to the reality of the way our flesh can reflect our mental deformation, and I knew this had to exist for real.”
And it isn’t alone. In a Violent Nature 2 just dropped its first look, promising, per the production itself, “more kills, more blood, more iconic,” continuing the first film’s commitment to practical gore that left audiences simultaneously repulsed and in genuine awe. Director Mike Dougherty, who has navigated both approaches throughout his career, has acknowledged the tradeoff with characteristic bluntness: “With practical, you move 10 times slower. I think the effect is worth it.”
That’s it. That’s the whole argument, in one sentence.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Here’s what I actually believe, stripped of the tribalism that tends to attach itself to this debate: CGI and practical effects are not enemies. The best modern horror, Evil Dead Rise, Talk to Me, The Substance, uses them in tandem, letting digital work amplify and extend what was built practically, not replace it. The anchor is real. The weight is real. The digital layer serves the thing that was physically there.
The golden age artists understood something we keep having to relearn, horror is a physical experience. It is felt in the chest and the stomach and the back of the throat. Achieving that feeling requires the audience to believe, on some cellular level, that what they’re watching has mass and consequence.
You can render a monster in a computer. You cannot render the weight of something that actually existed in a room.