Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film

INTRODUCTION

HORROR FILM IS BIGGER THAN EVER. IT’S BOTH WILDLY POPULAR AND critically esteemed. It is universal; it leaps over cultural barriers.

We need to be scared. We need to test ourselves, to blanch, scream, and clutch. We need to get through the fear and come out on the other side, blinking, but still in one piece.

Horror is rebellion. Horror is subversion. It questions our most casual and fundamental assumptions. It asserts that there is no safe hiding place. Using fear as a focal point, it bends reality into a misshapen but illuminating mass.

Horror is a universal guilty pleasure. As an experiment over the past year, at every social occasion and public interaction, I decided to bring up horror movies, casually, as quickly as I could. In every situation, it took only a moment for people’s eyes to light up as they began debating horror-film favorites, and giving me recommendations. It’s in moviegoers’ blood.

When I was very young, I found myself curled up on the basement floor in front of the TV every Saturday night watching Creature Features. This was the local incarnation of Shock Theater—the legendary syndicated package of fifty-two classic (and not-so-classic) horror films that my generation grew up on. My favorite reading material? Forrest J. Ackerman’s lovingly garish monthly magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Later on, horror films helped me squirm closer to my dates in darkened theaters. When I reached what I laughingly refer to as adulthood, my interest in horror films, like that in comic books, model airplanes, and tetherball, waned.

But, to my surprise, as I continued to age, I found that my steady diet of grown-up culture stalled. I yearned for simpler, more visceral thrills. And, wouldn’t you know, the horror films, comics, and fanzines our parents despised and forced us to smuggle like forbidden Soviet samizdat were now deemed high art themselves, and the formerly suspect delights of fright flicks drew me back.

The scholarly and popular writing on the history of the horror film, in whole or in parts, is vast and illuminating. Yet few seem to bridge that gap between esoteric study and fanboy fervency. This book aims to provide a solid and comprehensive general introduction to the student, a guide for the curious, and a rousing good time for the casual reader.

My working definition of horror is pretty straightforward. For me, it’s anything that deals with our darker impulses—whether fear, hate, dread, despair, bloodlust, or evil. Underneath our civilized veneers, there are howling, terrified animals that, under the right circumstances, can feel as though they’re in the grip of something that is going to kill them. And eat them. The live-or-die thrill that results is the adrenaline rush the horror junkie is after.

Horror has two essential elements—it deals with factors outside normal experience (within us and/or outside of us), and it is threatening. This makes horror a kind of perverse anti-faith. THERE’S SOMETHING THERE, AND IT’S AFTER US! Take away the supernatural element and you have the crime film, the thriller, the dark psychological drama. Take away the malevolent element, and you have the fantasy film.

The best horror films want to rip off the tops of our heads and make us peer within at the suppressed impulses we harbor. They want us to contemplate a universe in which death, decay, and corruption have a role. The horror genre, despite limitations and clichés, allows us to say things about life we think or believe that we rarely articulate: that innocence is doomed, that retribution is sure, that death is nigh. Sometimes we need to inundate ourselves with the abnormal in order to reconceive what constitutes normality. Through horror, we can safely ponder chaos and dissolution. Through it, we integrate our darknesses into ourselves. We need the catharsis.

In that horror film tells us that everything is not perfect, it is an enemy of repressive societies, political tyrants, and bourgeois authorities. Consequently, it is frequently censored and/or banned. But societies need horror films, too. Through them, together we can look at the monsters and ghosts that populate our collective consciousness. Different eras and cultures produce horror cinema that is unique and appropriate to their psychic needs. This text examines the major facets of this ongoing worldwide phenomenon.

Sometimes horror films offer us redemption, and sometimes the gate clangs shut at the end, trapping us in madness and doom. We challenge ourselves with horror films, lost in the dark for a time. Through them we face the unfaceable and live through it, blinking, happy, and alive again, outside the theater.

LOST IN THE DARK

Chapter One

HORROR BEFORE FILM

HORROR IS AS OLD AS DEATH AND THE UNKNOWN. AS CIVILIZED AS WE may pretend to be, we are instantly vulnerable to the uncontrollable impulse of fear.

Fear energizes the system, and the fight-flight-or-freeze response has kept the human race alive—so far. That fear, linked to speculation, curiosity, and the simple love of a good story, has propelled the telling of monster narratives and ghost stories since long before written culture ambled along.

Mankind has long sought to identify, isolate, ward off, cast off, and/or destroy its malevolent aspects—when it hasn’t sought to locate, evoke, embody, and exploit them. Horror lives at the borders between life and death, in the cracks between human and inhuman. By crashing through the normal, horror redraws those boundaries. Many times the enormous reservoir of human fear is, at its base, a fear of transformation, and the inevitable changes that death, time, loss, and an uncaring universe can impose. Experiencing the vicarious thrills of horror can help us confront, rehearse, and, finally, transcend our fears.

Horror film had plenty of material to draw on. The ancient mythoi of all cultures contain horrors. Fairy and folk tales in all countries bear horrific elements—Celtic, Norse, Arabian, and the sometimes brutal collectings of the Grimm brothers and their like. Even the fabulist Hans Christian Andersen, translated precisely, dishes up some grim and bloody stories.

All the archetypes are there at the beginning of mankind’s cultural history: visions of the man-made monster, the vengeful ghost, the unworldly predator, the insatiable killer, the persistent undead, the evil twin, the shape-shifting seducer. These creatures are embodiments of the dangers that lurk outside the borders of everyday experience. They are aberrations, manifestations of evil, the punishment of the gods.

Most belief groups have created their own unique hells, underworlds, and otherworlds, places of mythic punishment or imprisonment. Whether it’s The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, China’s fourth-century compendium In Search of the Supernatural, India’s Ramayana and Mahabharata, or the Bible—there are monsters and villains aplenty in their pages to be faced and slain.

The macabre has its place in the ancient world. King Saul consults with the ghost of the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 28: 1–20), and it is an article of faith that Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead after four days’ entombment (John 11: 1–44). The Greek god of medicine, Asclepius, was destroyed by Zeus for bringing Hippolytus back to life. Jason entered the labyrinth to defeat the monstrous Minotaur, half-man, half-bull. The compulsive Roman epistle-ero Pliny the Younger (61–113 CE) told the first haunted-house story.

Part of horror’s value to us comes from defining limits, from telling us what we are not, what we would not stoop to doing, and what we cannot countenance. In horror, transgression leads to transformation, but rarely to transcendence. In Judeo-Christian myth, the desire for forbidden knowledge triggers original sin, dooming humanity to a life of suffering. In Greek mythology, Prometheus brought the gift of fire to mankind, and for his troubles was chained to a rock and tormented eternally. Theologically, overreaching always ends in comeuppance. From Euripides’s Medea: For man should live with limit and measure; / That is a phrase we often use, / And it’s proved true: Going beyond, /Going too far, brings no advantage. / It only means, when the gods are angry, / They extract a higher price.¹

Medea, an early villainess with dark magical powers, is a kind of protomad scientist, using her powers to defy morality. She eggs herself on to kill her two children to wreak revenge on her unfaithful husband (again Euripides): Come then, Medea; use every means you know; / Move toward horror: this is the test of spirit. / … this evil is overwhelming. / I know what I intend to do is wrong, / But the rage of my heart is stronger than my reason— / That is the cause of all man’s foulest crimes.²

The history of religion, pagan and after, is littered with heaps of atrocities in the name of gods and their competitors. There are many references in early horror film to classical sources of fright such as the hellish visions of poets Dante (The Inferno, 1320) and John Milton (Paradise Lost, 1667). In such texts, Satan himself is a kind of crystallization of the concept of unholy rebellion—self-justifying and dangerously attractive. Shakespeare cranked out one certified gorefest (Titus Andronicus, 1594) and you can find plenty of bloody mayhem in Macbeth and others of his plays. His Jacobean successor, playwright John Webster (1580–1634), was famous for two gruesome revenge tragedies, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil.

The story of the man who sells his soul to the Devil originated with the sixth-century story of Theophilus of Adana, aka Saint Theophilus the Penitent (which he was, canceling the contract with Satan and destroying himself as a consequence). The medieval legend of Faust, who makes a deal with the Devil for youth, riches, power, and pleasure in exchange for his soul, was transformed first into drama by Christopher Marlowe (The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, 1594) and then by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust, 1808/1832).

Marlowe’s Mephistopheles is an antihero in a sweeping, grand style: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it: / Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, / And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, / Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, / In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?³ Goethe’s Devil is more circumspect: Gone is the Nordic phantom that other ages saw; /You see no horns, no tail or claw.⁴ Goethe turns the mad Doctor Faustus into a kind of Romantic hero, and evens lets him off the hook at the end. Operatic adaptations by Hector Berlioz (Le Damnation de Faust, 1846), Charles Gounod (Faust, 1859), and Arrigo Boito (Mefistofele, 1868) followed. There’s a devil’s bargain in Carl Maria von Weber’s 1832 opera Der Freischutz. Even The Black Crook, the 1866 Broadway hit deemed the first musical comedy, has a plot revolving around a pact with the Devil.

Horror film, in the West at least, is nothing without the influence of Gothic fiction. This melodramatic mix of mystery, romance, and the supernatural was the child of Horace Walpole, an English earl. He aimed to meld the fantastic, imaginative elements of medieval narratives with the realism of the recently invented novel. His The Castle of Otranto of 1764 was, like many of its horror-novel descendants, both critically despised and a bestseller. Followers such as William Beckford (Vathek, 1786) Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk: A Romance, 1796) piled on bizarre, bloody, and supernatural incidents, creating a rip-roaring, transgressive reading experience, especially compared with the more staid, polite goings-on in the mainstream novels of the day.

In Vathek, we find again the cautionary aspect of the horror story. Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant, and to undertake that which surpasses his power, the titular antihero is warned. Ambrosio, the antihero of The Monk, is punished for his sins by Lucifer, who coolly casts him onto rocks to suffer and die in agony over the course of five days. So there you go.

Rebellious antiheroes were all the rage in the dawning Romantic era, which emphasized personal, subjective experience, individualism, and intense and extreme emotion. It also indulged in a fascination with humanity’s dark side: melancholy, insanity, the grotesque, the irrational, and the supernatural. As religious belief faded in the wake of the Enlightenment, the idea of monsters being sent by God (or Satan) began to fade as well. Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking 1818 horror novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus posited the compelling idea that mankind could take over the creative powers of the deity. Shelley’s mad scientist created life from soulless matter and hatched a vengeful, eloquent, moody, Romantic-Era-style monster in the process. On the same night and in the same place that Shelley birthed Frankenstein, John Polidori wrote the first vampire story in the English language.

Stories of the fantastic developed as the nineteenth century progressed, through the efforts of eccentric European writers such as E. T. A. Hoffman and Hans Christian Andersen. Mainstream authors began to produce memorable work that incorporated elements of the fantastic and supernatural—authors such as Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831), Honore de Balzac (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831), Alexander Pushkin (The Queen of Spades, 1834), and Nikolai Gogol (Viy and other folk/horror tales).

In America, the dark side of Romanticism manifested itself in the person of the protean Edgar Allan Poe. The writer, poet, journalist, and literary critic (1809–1849) had a profound effect on horror worldwide with his short stories and poems, many of them master works of grotesque and arabesque. Stories such as The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tell-Tale Heart profoundly influenced all horror that was to come. No one has been able to match him, and film has constantly returned to his writings as potent source material.

The moral miasma of modernity was first articulated by writers such as the French poet Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil, 1857). Baudelaire loved Poe, and translated much of his work into French. Baudelaire’s bold verse on forbidden topics was vilified and banned, even though he claimed to have restrained himself. Since I was terrified myself of the horror I should inspire, I cut out a third from the proofs, he said.⁵

Oscar Wilde, who wrote the horror novella The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, and other fin de siècle figures such as the decadent playwrights Frank Wedekind (Spring Awakening, 1891; Pandora’s Box, 1904) and Arthur Schnitzler (Reigen, 1897) contributed to the earthy, cynical tone of the day. Morals, taboos, and inhibitions were all slipping. The penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century—cheap serial publications that focused on the sensational, escapism, and adventure—produced such popular horror characters as Varney the Vampire and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

By the turn of the last century, terror loomed large in Western literary fiction. Writers such as Bram Stoker (Dracula, 1897; The Jewel of the Seven Stars, 1903; The Lair of the White Worm, 1911), Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886; The Body Snatcher; The Bottle Imp), Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla and many other ghost stories), Elizabeth Gaskell (Gothic Tales), Arthur Machen (notably The Great God Pan, 1894), H. G. Wells (The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1896; The Invisible Man, 1897), and M. R. James (Casting the Runes and many others) contributed to the pile of horror stories and frightening concepts that would be gleaned and refashioned for film.

In England, the popularity of melodrama led to the rise of flamboyant villains on the page. The fantastic and the gruesome took the spotlight on the stage. English theatrical great Henry Irving’s 1871 production of The Bells, featuring murder, hallucination, and mesmerism, gave him a leading role he played to great acclaim for thirty-four years. (Stoker, Irving’s personal assistant and business manager, based the personality of his Dracula on Irving’s, an odd kind of immortality to bestow.)

Actor Richard Mansfield’s 1888 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a hit on Broadway. The actor recognized the bravura aspects of appearing as two sides of a divided soul, and his onstage transformation into Hyde was a marvel. Mansfield toured England with the show, where it initially flopped. Then the Jack the Ripper murders began during its run—and the play was suspended. Mansfield was so convincing as Hyde that he was himself a major suspect in the Ripper’s crimes for a time. (The Ripper would soon show up as a character in films such as Paul Leni’s Waxworks [1924], Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog [1927], and G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box [1929].)

In 1894, Oscar Metenier’s Theatre Grand du Guignol opened in Paris. It featured graphic, naturalistically played horror one-act plays, five or six a night, most written by the prolific Andre de Lorde, aka the Prince of Terror. They featured graphic disembowelments, strangulations, rape, torture, and more—transgressive brutality and perversion that was immensely popular, the live precursor of the splatter film. For years the Guignol was chic for the in-crowd who frequented it, but the horrors of World War II blunted the taste for a theatrical facsimile. The Guignol closed in 1962, outstripped by the outrages of reality.

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of the 1890s both tapped into and articulated the unsavory mechanisms of the mind. Science created methods and vocabularies for exploring and discussing the human psyche. The unconscious was discovered and plumbed—and found to contain much nastiness indeed. Western culture now had a way to conceive of identity that went past simple, black-and-white conceptions. Our exposed souls now resembled tangled landscapes, choked with psychic undergrowth.

Soon these principles of psychology would be applied to cultural products in Western society, revealing much. With its emphasis on dreams and their interpretation, it’s no wonder that this new science was soon applied to the study and discussion of film, especially horror film—nightmares projected in plain sight.

Chapter Two

SHADOWY SILENCE

Horror Before Sound

FILM IS A SPECTRAL MEDIUM. IT CASTS MOVING SHADOWS THAT TELL stories, and someone from the pre-film era might mistake a movie for a convention of ghosts.

Early horror film was dominated and defined by Western cultural archetypes and artefacts. It would take many decades for non-Western horror to learn how to articulate its own vocabularies.

The first film with identifiable horror content was Georges Melies’s The Haunted Castle, aka The House of the Devil, made in 1896. Melies was the first great director, progressing from stage magician to cinematic wizard with classic efforts such as A Trip to the Moon (1902). The Haunted Castle is typical of the shorts of the time. It uses a stage-bound, single-camera setup that features a lot of stop-motion trickery. A bat turns into Mephistopheles, who torments two gentlemen in period garb. There are witches, a skeleton, and pokes in the behind with a pitchfork from a dwarfish henchman. The Devil is eventually repelled by a wielded crucifix.

A careful examination of the development of silent horror film, such as that essayed by Roy Kinnard,¹ reveals that the feature horror film was built component by component. Of the 1,100-plus silent horror films he lists as made between 1896 and 1929, the majority are shorts. (And most of them are lost films, including gems such as 1915’s A Cry in the Night, which features a winged gorilla under the control of a mad scientist. This screams for a remake, does it not?)

Nearly every horror theme and twist of plot is prefigured in these one-reel, seven- to eight-minute experiments of early filmmakers. Here are the seeds of feature-length horror subjects to come—murder, madness, curses, black magic, vampires, ghosts, mummies, werewolves, monsters, giant insects, demons, telepathy, time travel, waxworks, chambers of horrors, and even the perils of hypnosis and mind control (George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, featuring the evil mesmerist Svengali, was a bestseller, and was adapted many times for film).

Battling death and the Devil: Georges Melies’s The Haunted Castle (1896) is the first surviving film to contain horror content.

Until 1912, most movies were being made in Europe, with France, England, Germany, Italy, and Denmark leading the way. In 1905, groundbreaking woman filmmaker Alice Guy-Blache directed the first Hunchback film adaptation, the short Esmerelda, in France. By 1908, the first Dr. Jekyll adaptation, sixteen minutes in length, was released. Other shorts retailed mayhem. In The Doll’s Revenge (1907), an angry toy grows large, then dismembers and eats its tormentor, while In the Bogie Man’s Cave (1908) features cannibalism.

Emile Cohl, the father of the film cartoon, made the first animated horror film, a short titled Le cauchemar de Fantoche (The Puppet’s Nightmare), in 1908. American fantasy and horror film of the day, when not cadging from European sources, adapted the spooky work of American writers such as Poe (The Pit and the Pendulum, 1913), Washington Irving (Rip van Winkle, 1903), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables, 1910; Feathertop, 1912).

By 1910, the first film had been made in Hollywood (D. W. Griffith’s In Old California), just as the first Frankenstein film, fourteen minutes long, came to life in the Edison Studios back in New York. INSTEAD OF A PERFECT HUMAN BEING THE EVIL IN FRANKENSTEIN’S MIND CREATES A MONSTER, proclaims one of the movie’s intertitles. The film is largely stage-bound, but there are a few good tricks in it, including showing the creation of the monster through the simple but effective technique of making a wax dummy of the creature, burning it, and then running the film backward. The Monster is defeated by being sucked into a mirror—a foreshadowing of the mystic use of mirrors in future films by the directors of macabre moments such as Jean Cocteau and Wes Craven.

Around 1912, film technique became confident industrywide in the United States. Early Hollywood film studios organized themselves. The production process streamlined itself, and an efficient web composed of studio-sponsored and independent film distribution companies grew and spanned the country. Moving picture houses opened up everywhere. Film lengths grew, and productions became more ambitious and complex. Twenty-five years of trial and error resulted in a film industry that produced a steady stream of viable full-length narratives. The studio era had begun.

Many of film’s future Golden Age directors—Maurice Tourneur, Cecil B. De Mille, Michael Curtiz, F. W. Murnau, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Ernst Lubitsch—got their start grinding out horror films. In fact, among the eight films Tourneur made in 1913, his first year as a director, one was Le systeme du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume (Dr. Goudron’s System), a horror short based on Poe’s story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, the original lunatics take over the asylum tale. (Tourneur’s director son, Jacques, would have a major impact on the horror film thirty years later.) The popular German serial Homunculus (1916), directed by Otto Rippert and written by Robert Reinert, centered on the story of the world’s first test-tube baby, who grows up to find he is immensely powerful but soulless, and swears revenge on humanity—a prototype of the supervillain if there ever was one.

The Germans triumphed at horror first. Paul Wegener, the first horror-film star, was a six-foot-six-inch tall, thick-bodied man with a rough-cut, high-cheekboned, almost Mongolian face, and intense, expressive eyes. After playing the lead in his first film, the devilish doppelganger story The Student of Prague, filmed on location in 1913 (and credited as the first true independent film), he became entranced with the legend of the Golem.

In the Golem legend, the chief rabbi of Prague crafts a superman of clay which he brings to life using Kabbalistic magic. Wegener wrote, directed, and starred as the Golem on film three times over the course of six years, with the final version, released in 1920 and cowritten by Henrik Galeen and codirected by Carl Boese, being the one remembered today.

A blend of fable, fantasy, and social commentary, The Golem: How He Came into the World gives us a Frankenstein prototype—a slow, shuffling hulk of a monster, arms askew, a morally neutral force that can be bent to the will of its master. The Golem saves a scoffing Holy Roman Emperor and his court, and wins the Jews of Prague reprieve from being driven out of the city. Then the rabbi’s assistant uses the Golem to attack his romantic rival and kidnap his beloved. But the monster stands over the captive girl, lustfully running his hand down her body. He fights off the assistant with a torch and sets the city ablaze, running amok. Only a child, unafraid and curious, is capable of getting close enough to him to accidentally remove the magic amulet that animates him, turning him to clay again.

Paul Wegener as The Golem (1920)—the ur-monster is unleashed by the unscrupulous, wreaking havoc.

Wegener would go on to play evil characters in films such as Richard Oswald’s Night Figures (1920), Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926), Gennaro Righelli’s Svengali (1927), and his collaborator Galeen’s Alraune (1928), and he would finally spoof his horror-icon status in his first sound film, Oswald’s 1932 Eerie Tales. (Galeen, no horror slouch himself, wrote the scripts for the first three screen versions of The Student of Prague, Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1922, and Leni’s Waxworks in 1924. He then directed the definitive version of The Student of Prague himself in 1926. It featured Conrad Veidt as the cursed student, in the role originated by Wegener.)

Golem, filmed in an epic style at the base of crowded, convoluted urban sets, bears all the hallmarks of the fright-inducing Expressionist style. That style had been cemented onscreen five months earlier than Golem when director Robert Wiene used the toolkit of Expressionism to illuminate the disturbing content of The Cabinet of Caligari (1920). This no-budget masterpiece of a nightmare features a sinister, insane hypnotist and his murderous sleepwalking slave, Cesare (Conrad Veidt). The movie attacks authority and questions reality, but