1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920- dir. Robert Wiene)
Horror’s start was atypically demure, dipping its talons into the cinematic waters with a few notable shorts during the 1910s. Adaptations of future warhorses like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde established the genre’s essential conventions: experimental special effects, gruesome makeup, shadowy atmosphere, bizarrely mannered acting.
The next decade had barely begun when former theater actor Robert Wiene united these elements with shocking audacity in horror’s first major feature. As is so often the case with horror, the plot is a wispy hanger for the draping of the filmmakers' startling visuals. Told as a framed flashback, as early features films so often were, Caligari presents one of our first mad doctors (Werner Krauss), a top-hatted creep who splits his time between running an asylum and working carnivals as a hypnotist. His prize subject is Cesare (Conrad Veidt), a lanky giant who does the doctor’s dirty work while under a somnambulistic trance.
Like a cartoon populated by living actors, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) eschews reality completely to embrace the director’s every whim. Few films that followed—horror or otherwise—are this encompassing in their weirdness. The sets, the acting, the iris transitions, even the intertitles, are distorted, bizarre. Caligari established German Expressionism as the stylistic essence of imaginative horror, and it would never be this undiluted again. The doctor’s diabolical thrall over his murderous somnambulist sets the pieces in place for many mad scientist/monster pairings to follow, and it may be no great coincidence that the stiff-walking, flat-topped, black-eyed Cesare has much in common with a certain doctor-made monster Boris Karloff would play the following decade.
In the first year of the new horror era, Robert Wiene really seemed to be marking out his territory as the first king of feature-length horror. He followed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with another but decidedly different creep fest. Genuine is a priestess who abhors cruelty above all else. During a tribal war, she is kidnapped, dehumanized, and sold into slavery. A slime ball named Lord Melo (Ernst Gronau) purchases her and keeps her imprisoned in a nightmare abode boasting such mod cons as a skeleton with a clock for a face and peppermint- striped trees for climbing. There Melo also keeps an African enslaved person (Louis Brody), though Genuine does not seem to recognize any kinship with her fellow oppressed person.
A victim of war, slavery, and lecherous patriarchal control, Genuine justifiably loses her distaste for cruelty and essentially wages war against men. She manipulates a suitor named Florian (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) to murder the wretched slave owner before encouraging Florian to commit suicide to prove his love for her. Florian spreads tales that Genuine is a witch, and she is then hunted by the kind of pitchfork-toting mob that would soon become a standard horror trope.
Genuine is at least as bizarre as Caligari. Every aspect of the film from its sets to its costumes to the actors’ hairstyles to their spidery physicality is grotesquely, intoxicatingly stylized. It plays as a veritable ballet devoid of dance. Fern Andra makes a major impression as the mesmerizing yet vampiric title character, who gets one of the all-time great introductions when she literally steps out of a painting. It’s also the only moment that justifies the film’s otherwise pointless framing device in which an artist dreams Genuine’s story.
Unfortunately for Robert Wiene, Genuine was not the hit that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was, and he immediately took a break from horror to direct a series of dramas and fantasies, though he would return to the genre again with his 1924 version of The Hands of Orlac.
This adaptation of Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel melds mysticism and a most memorable monster to pioneer dark-fantasy cinema. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How It Came Into the World) would be notable for no other reason than its clay creature conjured by a rabbi sorcerer to combat anti-Semitic persecutors in a medieval Jewish ghetto. As has often been written, this may be another film that held sway over James Whale, Jack Pierce, and Karloff when they collectively brought the Frankenstein Monster to life. The Golem’s encounter with a little girl is nearly impossible to watch without stringing it to the Monster’s similar scene in Whale's Frankenstein. No doubt the equally brutish and sensitive Golem is among the first great movie monsters, but it is the intoxicating imagery conjured by directing duo Paul Wegener (who also plays the title role) and Carl Boese and cinematographer Karl Freund that makes this film magical. The creation sequence is stunning. Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) encircles himself in fire and choreographs little flames that dance through the air. Then it all turns ominous with images of a smoke-breathing demon, foreshadowing the chaos to follow. Freund would take a somewhat less celestial but more chilling tack a dozen years later when animating another major monster: the Mummy. Wegner, unfortunately, would stick around and continue working in Hitler’s Germany, even appearing in a few propaganda films. This is ironic considering the storyline of Der Golem but not the somewhat anti-Semitic characterizations of the sinister rabbi, his femme fatale daughter Mirjam (Lyda Salmonova), and her ineffectual suitor Rabbi Famulus (Ernst Deutsch), or the fact that it takes a non-Jewish child to bring an end to the Golem’s rampage.
4. The Phantom Carriage (1921- dir. Victor Sjöström)
5. Nosferatu (1922- dir. F.W. Murnau)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula had been in print for 25 years when the first feature- length adaptation of the key vampire novel materialized. Stoker had been in his grave for ten years, but his wife Florence maintained tight control over the work that was her only significant source of ongoing income. So, it is hardly unreasonable that she took issue with F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of Dracula. Despite efforts to mask its source material by fiddling with title, setting, and character names, Nosferatu was not only unmistakable as Stoker’s vampiric tale, but in the sprawling pantheon of adaptations that would follow, it is one of the more faithful. Still, Florence Stoker’s methods of dealing with the infringement against her husband’s book were extreme. Without having even seen Murnau’s film, she commanded all prints be destroyed. Thankfully, her largely successful campaign was not completely successful (and unwarranted. As it turns out, Dracula had actually been in the public domain all along because of a paperwork error).
Before the 1920s came to a close, prints of Nosferatu resurfaced with the uncanny resolve of its undead title creature. Murnau presented his supernatural material with an unprecedented seriousness, tempering Robert Wiene and Wegener/Boese’s outré tendencies to create a more mildly expressionist film, though one that solidified horror’s conventions. Experimentation is still fully present in the vampire’s unsettling perfect-posture rise from his coffin and the independently animated shadows (a device Francis Ford Coppola would overuse in his own Dracula adaptation 70 years later). Like The Phantom Carriage, Nosferatu is less concerned with rewriting the cinematic rulebook and more intent on creeping under the skin. This is the first horror film that could really be called scary, or at least the first one that remains so. Much of its fright-power resides with the ratty appearance and disquieting, marionette-like movements of Max Schreck’s Dracula. But the barren, Gothic sets and impenetrable darkness in which Murnau surrounds him are equally potent. When it comes to eliciting true terror—as opposed to repulsion or shock—subtlety always triumphs. Murnau knew this well. He also recognized the importance of good source material, and no other work of horror literature would ever be adapted more often than Dracula. That none of the multitudinous adaptations that followed over the subsequent ten decades significantly improved on Nosferatu is a testament to that version’s greatness.
In its own way, Häxan is as wildly experimental as Caligari, yet in a more sophisticated and somewhat more conservative manner. Instead of expecting his audience to accept the film’s phantasmagoria at face value, Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen packages it in a documentary on all things witchy. The film works just fine as a history of supernatural witch lore and the actual persecution of women accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Unlike so many of the fictional witch tales that followed, Häxan recognizes the horrific, tragic injustices of the witch persecutions of the middle-ages, patronizing the victims at times, but recognizing that they were, indeed, victims, and not the evil, blasphemous monsters we'd see in later films like Horror Hotel and Witchcraft.
Of course, if Häxan were nothing more than a straightforward study of witchcraft through the ages, it would hardly deserve a place in this series. The film’s real draws are the illustrations of the superstitions the sober narration describes. Far less conservative than the documentary conceit are the shocking depictions of torture, demons cavorting in the buff, and baby sacrifices. Hell is portrayed as a Hieronymus Bosch orgy. Witches line up to kiss Satan’s bare ass. A coven of broomstick riders soars through the night sky. Christensen employs elaborate composite shots, reverse shots, make up, weird demon props and masks, and off- kilter sets to bring his nightmare vision to life. He even steals the show by personally portraying a towering, tongue-wagging Satan. In the sixties, Häxan was re-edited, narrated by junkie laureate William S. Burroughs, dubbed with a grating avant-jazz score, and marketed to the head set as Witchcraft Through the Ages, but the original cut is the definitive one.
7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923- dir. Wallace Worsley)
8. The Phantom of the Opera (1925- dir. Rupert Julian)
Hunchback of Notre Dame can only be regarded as a Universal Horror appetizer. The studio's first feast of fear was unquestionably The Phantom of the Opera. Based on the Gaston Leroux potboiler, Phantom is intent on doing what horror movies are supposed to do: scare the hell out of us, and as familiar as stills of Lon Chaney's face as Erik the Phantom are, the uninitiated may be rather surprised by how truly scary it is when moving on the screen. Frightening as Max Schreck was in Nosferatu, his appearance owed a lot to his naturally strange features. As he did in Hunchback, Lon Chaney transformed himself completely and brutally for his adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. Wiring up his nose so tightly that it spurted blood, Chaney suffered almost as much as audiences did when confronted with his skull-like face. The scene in which that ghastly face stares down the camera, stalking toward the viewer, pointing an accusatory finger, is still punishing.
Such moments are so powerful that they overshadow a sometimes indifferently realized film that presents too much of its action in wide shots. Though they show off the scenery well, those shots do not maximize suspense or action. Such lack of consistency is unsurprising considering that directing duties were secretly split between the workmanlike Rupert Julian and star Chaney, who handled his own scenes with such attention to detail that he actually altered his makeup shot by shot to best emphasize his ghastly features.
Phantom was not the first horror feature made in the U.S.—John S. Robertson made his memorable version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barrymore five years earlier—but it’s the first true American horror film that looks like a full-blown, Hollywood production, trumpeting a cast of thousands and exquisite costumes and sets. The Phantom’s underground labyrinth deserves special note. Here the Universal era and the golden age of horror really begin. However, Hollywood’s instatement of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America’s (MPPDA) Will H. Hays’ censorious production code in 1927 would make the film’s depictions of “brutality” and “gruesomeness” increasingly rare in the years to come.
Murnau used the hoary parable of Faust selling his soul to Old Scratch as a leaping-off point for some of his most striking images. Forget the proselytizing and focus on puppet demons galloping through the cosmos on horseback, a demonic contract flaming into existence without pen ever touching parchment, and a Godzilla-sized Satan looming over the village he is about to plague with the plague. Even some of the religious imagery, such as a radiant archangel with giant wings, is mighty enough to impress secular viewers. But it is the visions of evil and horror that ignite this film, and considering how completely Murnau jettisoned Stoker’s Christian symbolism from Nosferatu, one can reasonably suspect that the filmmaker mounted Faust with phantasmagoria higher on his agenda than piety. At the same time, this version of Faust is more explicitly religious than the German folk myth and Goethe’s play on which it was based.
The director’s intentions may be debatable, but his results are not. Faust has not had the cultural impact of Nosferatu or The Last Laugh or Sunrise, but it may be Murnau’s masterpiece. And don’t be fooled by the numerous critics who’ve taken issue with Emil Janning’s broad performance as evil Mephisto; the actor’s non- stop leering and scenery munching are nearly as fun to watch as Murnau’s ever inventive imagery.
The canary is Cyrus West, the rich old guardian of the “famous West diamonds” who died twenty years ago today. The cats are West’s greedy relatives who stand to inherit the loot. But wait! There’s another cat on the loose: an escaped murderer haunting West’s castle where everyone has gathered for a very belated will reading. Who’s the canary now? Who cares! Director Paul Leni is a lot more concerned with wild film techniques than plot in his adaptation of John Willard’s hit play The Cat and the Canary. Surreal superimpositions of clawing cats and chattering skulls, faces that elongate as if reflected in a fun house mirror, shots from the perspective of West’s tumbling portrait, ones that prowl down corridors or zoom-in with cheetah speed. Even the intertitles are zany: quivering, dropping in reverse, exploding with animated comic-strip expletives. Universal’s first old dark house flick is also a treasury of hokey clichés: furry claws reach out of sliding panels and swiveling bookcases, eyes are eerily lit with pin lights, a spooked goofball stammers “G-g-g-ghosts?”, a monster-impersonating huckster who would have gotten away with his evil scheme if not for some meddling kids. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine there’d be a Scooby Doo if not for The Cat and the Canary.
11. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928- dir. Jean Epstein)
Though short on plot, “The Fall of the House of Usher” has always been one of the most regularly adapted Edgar Allan Poe stories. Two versions were filmed in 1928 alone, one a short piece by American avant gardists James Watson and Melville Webber, and one a feature by Jean Epstein of France. Perhaps it is that very lack of plot-mechanics that has made “Usher” so popular among filmmakers. Poe’s story is like a spicy bouillon cube from which a complexly flavorful soup may be brewed. Epstein and his co-writer Luis Buñuel, who was just in the midst of making Un Chien Andalou with Salvador Dali, take greater liberties with that cube than some subsequent chefs would. Roderick and Madeline Usher are now married rather than siblings, which neutralizes the incestuous themes of Poe’s tale. No matter. There is still much to disturb in this version.
Epstein and Buñuel’s film may not be as faithful as many subsequent adaptations (and that includes Roger Corman’s 1960 version), but perhaps no film channels the dreadful dreaminess of Poe’s prose better. The grotesqueness and queasy beauty. The dank elegance, the hallucinatory madness, the sheer morbidity. Gothic well beyond anything even Murnau imagined, La chute de la maison Ushercasts a bewitching spell via disorienting visuals. The camerawork is shockingly modern, eschewing the staginess of so many early films for manic first and second person perspective shots. Epstein superimposes candles and billowing shrouds over Madeline’s funeral procession to ratchet up the dread. He magnifies the beauty of Roderick’s music by intercutting his guitar-strumming hands with scenes of nature. He underlines Roderick’s madness with weird imagery both obviously metaphorical (guitar strings spontaneously snap) and purely surreal (frogs copulate). Madeline’s crypt is a phantasmagoric haunted garden worthy of Lewis Carroll. Her return from the grave is as insidiously chilling as Chaney’s unmasking in Phantom of the Opera is shocking. La chute de la maison Usher brought European silent horror to a crazed peak.
As the decade neared its climax, Hollywood would greedily claim a new era of sound monster movies for its own. Filmmakers of the fantastic such as Benjamin Christensen and F.W. Murnau had already been lured to the booming U.S. industry by the mid twenties. As Hitler rose to power in the next decade, others would either do the same (Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene), or sadly, assimilate to the new regime (Paul Wegener). Though horror would not remain quite so international during the 1930s, its impact would still be... well... universal.
Creep on to the '30s…
