What was the best era for horror movies that dealt with the supernatural occult !
Question: count Dracula, Christopher lee
Answers: count Dracula, Christopher lee
...if I possibly have a handle upon what you're asking, I would have to say, somewhere around the time of the mid-to-late psychedelic '60's (...or even the early '70's), with films like 1962's "Burn, Witch, Burn", 1970's "The Dunwich Horror", 1963's "The Haunted Palace", 1971's "Blood on Satan's Claw" and 1972's "Necromancy" & "Dracula A.D. 1972"; experimenting with mind-freeing drugs, and the sense of promiscuous freedom, at the time, sometimes DID give way to delving quite passionately into the occult, witchcraft, black magic and Wiccan practices. A lot of this devotion was definitely reflected in the horror films, of the time...
The 1930.s. Dracula, Frankenstein, etal.
The '20s/'30s were pretty awesome for horror movies...especially in Germany..."Nosferatu", "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", "Faust"...and American stuff like "Dracula", "Frankenstein", "The Phantom of the Opera", "The Wolf Man", "The Mummy"...some of those flicks still creep me out to this day.
After that, I don't think it really picked back up again until the early '80s (as far as "supernatural" goes), with stuff like "The Shining", "Poltergeist", more of George A. Romero's zombie flicks, and "The Evil Dead" trilogy...which is FULL of the occult. The '80s were really a great time for supernatural horror and the occult.
Slasher films like "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th" not counting...in my mind, they marked the decline of the genre that is still going on for the most part today.
I would have to agree with Fright Film Fan (again!) that the 1960s is the era you're looking for.
Before then, horror tended to stick mainly to the traditional monsters, or even to non-supernatural threats - things that were down to human villains, tricks and hoaxes, or scientific experiments and the like. The 1960s was when the occult, Satanism, witchcraft etc really exploded on the screen.
Night of the Demon (1958) may have been the precursor of this whole genre. It took off in a slew of British movies such as Night of the Eagle, Witchcraft, Horror Hotel etc. The Haunting and The Innocents probably fit in there somewhat, although they were more ghost stories than strictly occultic. Hammer's The Devil Rides Out (1968) was an important picture, but even then the "traditional" occultic themes were going out of fashion, and Rosemary's Baby (1968) filled the gap, making it all more explicit and modern. That probably set the tone for '70s pictures such as The Exorcist.
Take a look at the small series of films made during the 1940's at RKO by producer Val Lewton:
The Cat People
I Walked With a Zombie
The Body Snatcher
Bedlam
Isle of the Dead
The Seventh Victim
The Curse of the Cat People
The Leopard Man
This series of terror-oriented films rises head and shoulders above nearly any other series of scare films from any era in terms of real emotional content, excellent writing, direction, photography and editing and suspense and fear-related elements. Not all of the films in the series are specifically about the occult, but each of them go delving deep into the human experiences of the beyond-normal.