Film Road to Halloween: Horror In Silent Cinema - Part 1

The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 83 days to go.

It can rightly be said that there were no silent horror films. In fact, there were no horror films -prior to the Universal films Dracula and Frankenstein (both 1931).

The word “horror” is a term Universal used in their marketing for their monster film cycle. In retrospect, they must be kicking themselves for not trademarking the term – just think how much that would be worth today! Before 1930, what we now call horror was called a “spook” feature – very much betraying its American roots, and ignoring the rest of the world’s contribution to silent horror cinema.

Indeed, there were many spook movies during the first 35 years of cinema. Two countries really dominated creating a few classics of the genre as well as the first recognised star of horror movies. However, before we get into the detail, let’s start with the very birth of cinema in France and its influence on fantasy cinema. To put this in perspective, we are talking about a time when people would run out of the first cinemas when film was projected showing a train arriving at a station! That would really have spooked them (sorry).

Quite quickly people became accustomed to the novelty of film, quickly moving to the next stage of development, the short feature. By short feature I would say a length of approx 2 – 3 minutes. Fantasy was the order of the day, and one of these was the very first horror film – Le Manoir Du Diable by Georges Melies, made in 1896. It goes under various titles, the literal translation is The House Of The Devil, whereas in America it was called the Haunted Castle and in the UK, The Devil’s Castle.

What limited plot it had for its brief running time involved the devil almost jokingly tormenting a pair of cavaliers. In fact at one point the devil turns into a bat, technically making this the first vampire movie – and don’t forget this was the year before the novel Dracula was published. Amazingly the film still exists and can be found below.

Other spook movies, made by other great French master film makers also survive. The Lumiere Brothers made such fantasy films as Le Squelette Joyeux (1897), translated as the Merry Skeleton. This is only 40 seconds long and shows a dancing skeleton falling apart and putting itself back together again.

While the French were early innovators, it wasn’t long before America took over as the main industry for film. America had the resources and as the people’s appetite for these features was voracious. They made thousands of all types, including spook. In the early days, this was limited to 15 minute features. Spook films were mostly based on classic novels, and not original ideas. Examples of this are Frankenstein (1910) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1912). Both of these films survive and are below.

Until a few years ago, the 1910 Frankenstein film was thought to be lost. It is a fascinating watch, mainly for the creation of the Frankenstein monster which shows some very early special effects, created by running the camera backwards. That said, it probably wouldn’t even scare small children these days.

Running parallel to this was another country who made spook films and it can be said that their influence on the genre proved to be the greater in the long run. That was Germany. It ended up in a unique position because of the war. In 1915 Germany banned any foreign films coming into the country, partially as a response to other countries not wanting to see anything German. Then after the war, no one outside of Germany wanted to see German films – partly as a backlash against Germany for the war, and partly because the country was so financially unstable, cinema owners in other countries thought they wouldn’t get paid.

So, under the Weimar Republic a strong internal German film industry developed and at the heart of that was the cinema of German expressionism. In the cinema version of expressionism everything seen on screen reflected the minds of the characters, for example it could be clothes, sets or lighting. Of course, given how dark a place the German people were in after World War One, it is no surprise that a large number of these films were bleak suspense or horror, sorry spook. In fact without that global conflict, our cinematic history would be very different.

How that influenced world cinema is also fascinating in a historical perspective. Firstly there were those directors who learnt their craft through the technique and when Hitler’s rise to power began, moved to other countries to make their films – usually America. An example is Fritz Lang, whose career began as a director in 1919, and who went on to use expressionism in such films as Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) before leaving for America. There he was one of the main creators of film noir, which is just another example of German expressionism and can be seen in such films as The Woman In The Window (1944) and The Big Heat (1953).

Then there were the directors who were sent to Germany to learn the expressionist craft – the main one being Alfred Hitchcock who was sent to Germany in 1924. Look at his films like The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929) and Psycho (1960). Without doubt Hitchcock has remained one of the most influential directors of all time and as a result some of those techniques survive today.

That continuation of German expressionism in modern cinema can be seen in the films of Tim Burton (Batman Returns is a fantastic example), Bladerunner and horror films like The Crow. Out of this initial German expressionist movement came two horror classics. Luckily both of these works are now out of copyright and can be seen in Part 2.