It seems that the violence-and-terror lull within entertainment has officially ended. This summer, two years after 9/11, the film industry released a surfeit of horror flicks, beginning with “Wrong Turn” and “Jason Vs. Freddy” and ending in the next few weekends with the director’s cut of “Alien” and the Halle Berry big-time thriller “Gothika.”

But it doesn’t really matter whether this momentary macabre dominion is a revolt against our cold-turkey American moralist yearnings after a national tragedy or whether it is just a fluke. It made for a beautiful leader into the Halloween season.

It doesn’t matter that Halloween is the second-largest consumer holiday (after Christmas) — drop your copy of Ad Busters and go with the flow. Embellish and enjoy. I’ll be right there with you on State Street, brandishing my official Freddy Krueger sweatshirt, faux-metal glove and enough esoteric horror-film references to make most normal people feel uncomfortable.

Or maybe you want to become a scary-movie aficionado as well. Let’s kick it off with the origins. Horror films have been a staple of cinema since the medium’s invention. In 1895, Thomas Edison was playing “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” (basically a dummy being beheaded) on his kinetoscope to critical acclaim. A year later, Georges Melies’ two-minute “Le Manoir du Diable” became the first-ever vampire movie.

Soon to follow in the ’20s would be a wave of expressionist horror cinema, including Robert Weine’s masterpiece “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu.” In the ’30s, these trends morphed into the lovable outcasts, the Universal Monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, etc.), and MGM released Tod Browning’s monumentally harrowing “Freaks” in 1932.

But horror stories have always existed. We can trace the genre back to Oscar Metenier’s slop-shop gore shows at the Theatre le Grand Guignot in the Montmartre quarter of Paris in the late 19th century. Back to the gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, among others. Back to Milton, Bacon and Dante.

All the way back to Greece in 456 B.C. when Aeschylus’s “Prometheus Bound” was staged with a mounted mannequin of Prometheus repeatedly having his heart and liver ingested by vultures. It stretches past all these points and becomes a constant human expression.

The modern scary story reflects societal apprehensions and fears. In the early 20th century, it was the fear of the outsider, the loner that inspired vampire and Wolfman movies. Horror in the ’50s reacted to Cold War trepidations with alien invasions and unstoppable scientific mutations. Vietnam, Nixon and the end of the ’60s conceded to slasher films with a nihilistic tendency to kill everything in scorched-earth attacks on the audience’s psyche.

Psychology also plays heavily in the horror film. Freud’s “The Uncanny” develops the idea of the unheimlich (unhomely) and that debasement of the familiar creates fear. He separates the unheimlich into three categories: the doppelganger, cyborg, ghost or spirit; castration anxieties (fear of dismembered body parts, blindness and the female genitals) and the familiar/unfamiliar (losing one’s way, haunted houses and womb fantasies).

Feminist reactions to horror films have refuted some of Frued’s claims and have developed the idea that audiences cheer on the “final girl,” (especially in the slasher films of the last three decades) who eventually destroys (or “castrates”) the monster.

But who cares about history and philosophy? After three beers and a Jell-o shot you won’t be deconstructing Mario Bava flicks or analyzing the relationship between sexual content and violence against females in your favorite “Friday the 13th” sequel. You will be looking for shocks, screams, guts and nudity.

Start out with George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” the greatest zombie flick of all time. Sure, Romero’s mall filled with wandering cadavers smartly critiques American consumerism and conformity, but it’ll rock your house party with a multitude of brain-splashing, intestine-chomping sequences.

More zombie bliss can be found in “Return of the Living Dead” parts one and three and the horribly goofy Italian “Zombi” films. “Halloween,” “Scream” or “Nightmare on Elm Street” have become too cliché for Hallow’s Eve keggers, so try something new — maybe some decent ’80s slashers like “April Fool’s Day,” “Fright Night” and “Happy Birthday To Me.”

Or impress the ladies with the Hitchcockian, porn-and-blood landscape of Brian De Palma’s “Body Double,” the movie Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” anti-hero Patrick Bateman compulsively obsesses over.

For a more art-school, indie-rocker approach, pop in Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” and make clamorous statements about modern society’s media over-saturation. Or enjoy the intrinsic beauty of Dario Argento’s opera-inspired (intentional overacting and exaggerated movements) masterpiece, “Suspiria.”

Also check out “Phantasm,” “Near Dark,” David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

Enjoy and remember — “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you.”