Didn't think I could post a full movie on here, did ya?
Playing off of centuries of imagery from books, legends, and stage plays (among those figures conjured up by the Devil is an old man with a grimoire--aka a book of magic--presumably Faustus himself), The Devil's Castle has been noted for the bat transformation and the power of the crucifix, leading the vignette to not only be labeled as the first horror film in history, but as the first vampire film as well. It should be noted however that these tropes, evil being associated with bats and shrinking form religious icons, were not exclusively associated with vampires until the publication of Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, a year later.
The director and star of the film was a man well-studied by film students and movie buffs alike, George Méliès. He is regarded as the father of the cinema fantastique. The Lumiere Brothers, Auguste and Louis, were the fathers of the cinema of documentary realism, and their experimentation in the movies developed through technical interest in photography. They thought there was little future in film beyond a passing fad, but Méliès was a showman by nature, a trickster in an era where illusionists were top-of-the-bill attractions. Trick photography was viewed as an aid to magic. In his films, Méliès used multiple exposures, dissolves, perspective tricks, and elaborate props and stage make-up to accomplish what were basically vaudeville acts on film. There is no grand story to The Devil's Castle, it is just a parade of tricks with a flourishing exit.
Between 1896 and 1914, Méliès directed over five hundred movies. He did not confine himself to fantasy, either, making stabs as the animated "French postcard" genre with After the Ball (1897), historical epics with Joan of Arc (1899), religious spectacle with Christ Walking on Water (1899), topical political drama with The Dreyfus Affair (1899), literary adaptations with The Queen's Musketeers (1903) and even parodic newsreels, one in particular about the coronation of King Edward VII that even the monarch himself thought genuine. Before his own rather distinct style caught on, Méliès was among cinema's first rip-off artists, capitalizing on the Lumiere brothers film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) by filming other trains at other stations.
The 60-second film that changed history
But it is for the magic that we remember Méliès.
After The Devil's Castle, Méliès delivered many films along the same lines, often in the same generally demonic or dark persona, sometimes building whole movies around a single illusion, as in The Man with the Indiarubber Head (1902) where he inflates his own head to giant size until it bursts like a balloon. He took his act from the stage to the screen, and lived up to the title of one of his many 1899 films, A Turn-of-the-Century Illusionist.
Over time, Méliès's films grew longer and more ambitious. Among his literary adaptations--which were often highlights rather than the whole story--were the screen debuts of Rider Haggard's She: The Pillar of Fire (1899), the charlatan of Cogliostro's Mirror (1899), Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (1901), the grizzled pirate Bluebeard in Barbe-Bleue (1901) and the Wandering Jew in the eponymous of 1904. Méliès often returned to Faust and Mephistopeheles, but his filmography is littered with titles that suggest horror sub-genres in the making: The Bewitched Inn (1897), Cave of Demons (1898), Murder Will Out (1899), Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb (1899), The Doctor and the Monkey (1900), The Dangerous Lunatic (1900), Beelzebub's Daughters (1903), and The Witch (1906).
His greatest success, and most often seen and/or heard of work was A Trip to the Moon (1901), which has a loose plot circling around a lunar trip that was made popular in books by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Méliès was encouraged to make more "impossible voyages" to places such as the sun, under the sea, and to the North Pole. He set out to amaze and chuckled when his nervous patrons were terrified by phantoms, skeletons, and devils. Yet for all this Méliès was not truly in the "horror business" and was not interested in cinema as a medium for telling stories. Nevertheless, he invented the tricks and first put on moving film the images of the genre that would recur again and again.
This one's a real feature film, kids, about 13 minutes
In the early years of the 20 century, movies took hold around the world and there was already competition between nations. In America, pioneers like Edwin S. Porter paved the way for geniuses like D.W. Griffith, and in Italy there were feature-length epic spectaculars in the second decade, the tale of ancient muscle hero Maciste in Cabiria (1914). In Germany, the heirs of E.T.A. Hoffman began to play with shadows and in Britain one-and-two-reel melodramas began to proliferate, like the commercially successful A Fight With Sledge-Hammers (1902).
Activity was so hectic in the new field that oft-told tales would make their debuts and be done over again within a few months. William Selig's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908), a film of the stage play that had been touring during Robert Louis Stevenson's lifetime, is largely considered the first American horror movie. It was rapidly followed by a British remake, The Duality of Man (1910), a Danish version starring Alwin Neuss, Den Skaebnesvangre Opfindelse (1910), and another American version starring James Cruze and Harry Benham in the title roles, an interesting approach that has been rarely reused. In 1913, a German version vied with two American films both called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one starring King Baggot and produced by Carl Laemmle (who would later become the patriarch of Universal Pictures, where the horror movie really began and boomed), and the other a primitive color process. Then, things went quiet until 1920 when three new versions of the twinned tale arrived simultaneously: John S. Robertson's lavish star vehicle for John Barrymore (whose steeple-headed, spider-fingered Hyde pre-empts Max Schreck's similar looking vampire by two years), a quickie imitation with Sheldon Lewis, and F.W. Murnau's Dr Jekyll, a tragically lost adaptation with Conrad Veidt as the transforming doctor who, in this version, metamorphosizes under the magical influence of a two-faced bust rather than mad science. Bela Lugosi also played the doctor's butler in this version. Even the first parody of the story surfaced around this time, with Horrible Hyde (1915), though the more remembered version is the feature with Stan Laurel in 1925, Dr. Pickle and Mr. Pride.
Though Jekyll and Hyde was the most adapted horror story of the silent film era, other famous monsters also made their debuts. Edison's Frankenstein (1910), with Charles Ogle as the wild-haired creature whipped up in a vat like instant soup, was followed by Life Without Soul (1915), in which Dr. Frankenstein becomes "William Frawley" and the Monster is "the Brute Man." Then there was what is, perhaps, the first Italian horror film, The Frankenstein Monster (1920), whereas The Picture of Dorian Gray was first filmed in Denmark as Dorian Gray's Portrait (1910), with other versions from Russia following in 1915, America in 1916 (this version starred Henry Victor, the strongman of Tod Browning's classic 1932 film Freaks), Germany in 1917, and Hungary in 1918 (Lugosi played Dorian's mentor Sir Henry in this version). Sherlock Holmes made his screen debut as early as 1900 in Sherlock Holmes Baffled, featuring an invisible man, while Sherlock Holmes in the Great Murder Mystery (1908) was another crossover: here, Holmes's solves Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," feeling of the collar of the killer gorilla. The sleuth's creepiest adventure was first filmed in Denmark, the source of a surprising number of early gothics, as The Grey Lady (1903), with a spectral woman instead of a Hound of Hell. Germany not only turned out a faithful Hound of the Baskervilles (1914) but followed it with six sequels in which Holmes pursues the novel's dog-training villain. There were also, at this time, multiple early versions of staples like She, Trilby, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sweeney Todd, Maria Marten, Faust or Dr. Faustus, "The Monkey's Paw," and Fu-Manchu.
"Dude, I'm totally seeing two of you right now"
Poe was often adapted in France and America and D.W. Griffith first took a frequently reused tack by combining several Poe stories into one episodic narrative for The Avenging Conscience (1914). The first feature-length British horror film, The Avenging Hand (1915), was like an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Jewel of Seven Stars with a revived ancient Egyptian princess and a severed hand. It was among a run of mummy-themed films popular at the time: The Mummy (1911), The Dust of Egypt (1915), The Eyes of the Mummy (1919). The Vampire (1913) was about an East Indian snake lady, whereas The Werewolf (1913) was an American Indian shapeshifter. A cycle of films about monkey-gland translates (evidently a medical fad of the day) and Darwinian theory stretched into a French 1913 adaptation of Gaston Leroux's novel about a humanized gorilla, Baloo. The film was remade as The Wizard in 1927 and as Dr. Renault's Secret in 1942.
Already, some filmmakers were specializing in the macabre, and a few actors were building reputations on the strength of horror roles. Paul Wegener, a German director/actor cut a hefty figure as Balduin in The Student of Prague (1913), adapted from H.H. Ewers's Poe-like noel of a deal with the Devil and a deadly doppleganger, but achieved fame under a clay wig and built-up costume in and as The Golem (1915), the legendary living statue of the Prague ghetto, revived to rampage in modern times. This was such a success that Wegener delivered a parodic sequel, The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917) and a fairly elaborate prequel, The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920). Wegener also took on several bizarre roles in his career, as when he played a warlock modeled on the then-scandalous Aleister Crowley in Rex Ingram's French-American film The Magician (1926), or the title part in Svengali (1927). His last bow in horror was in the multi-episode The Living Dead (1932), written and directed by his rival Richard Oswald, who had come to the genre with a couple of Hounds of the Baskerville sequels and stuck around to deliver adaptations of Hoffman, including a talkie version of Alraune (1930) with Brigitte Helm re-creating her silent role as the artificially fashioned femme fatale.
Wegener and Oswald were principally adaptors of others' work--their films have pictorial virtues and an obvious feel for the material, but little sense of the developing potential of cinema. Others came at horror from a different direction, not just hoping to trade on well-known material but seeing ways to expand the boundaries of film as art. The key title here is the incredibly influential and famous The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Weine. Equally important was the work of scenarists Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, art directors Walter Rohrig and Hermann Warm (who devised the stylized sets, painted shadows and other visual trickster in the film) and even Fritz Lang, who was signed up to direct but moved on to something else after devising the frame story that reveals the whole action to be taking place in the mind of a lunatic. Lang's bookends turned what might have been a confounding art movie into a gimmick picture. The revelation meant patrons disturbed by the imagery could leave the theater thinking they now "understood" what they had seen, the visualized ravings of a distorted mind. Mayer and Janowitz despised this angle, having intended to depict a world that was cruel and insane rather than simply a protagonist who was having bad dreams. The breakout performers were Werner Krauss, as the top-hatted mountebank and mesmerist Caligari, and Conrad Veidt, as the leotard-clad, hollow-cheeked somnambulist/murderer Cesare. Both would join Wegener among the elect group of proto-horror stars: Vedit, whom Universal considered casting as Dracula in 1930, played The Count of Cagliostro (1921), the rumored diabolist-violinist Paganini (1923), the pianist with a murderer's hands in Hands of Orlac (1924), Ivan the Terrible in Waxworks (1924), and the titular characters in Rasputin (1930) and The Wandering Jew (1933). Krauss would later play Iago in Othello (1922), Jack the Ripper in Waxworks (1924), and the Devil in The Student of Prague (1926).
Werner Krauss as sinister doc, Caligari,
and Conrad Veidt as sleepwalking Cesare. Cute couple.
F.W. Murnau cast Vedit in The Head of Janus (1920), scripted by Caligari's Janowitz. Having got away with this full-length Stevenson adaptation by making some name changes (this, my friends, is the strange case of "Dr. Warren and Mr. O'Connor") and plot alterations, he made the mistake of assuming that Bram Stoker's widow would be as negligent as the Stevenson estate and turned Count Dracula into Count Orlok for Nosferatu (1922). Whereas The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's expressionist style was created entirely in the studio, Murnau took his vampire out on location, filming in Slovakian mountains and ruins. Nosferatu still stands as the only screen adaption of Dracula to be primarily interested in terror. Max Schreck's rat-featured, corseted stick insect of a monster has no undead glamor, nor even the melancholy that Klaus Kinski and Willem Defoe bring to variations in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Just as Dracula can serve as a template for the horror novel, Nosferatu, probably far more than The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, serves as a template for the horror film. Murnau added wrinkles to Stoker that have persisted, notably the vampire vanquished by the first light of day.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu aren't the whole Expressionist story, though. Throughout the 1920s, as German society spiraled out of control, German cinema was shadowed by figures as sinister as Caligari, Cesare, and Orlok. Fritz Lang turned out the epic Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), in which Rudolf Klein-Rogge (a bit player in Caligari) incarnates superhuman evil as a master criminal in the tradition of Fu-Manchu and Professor Moriarty. Mabuse is a founding text for all manner of far-fetched thrillers, including the Hitchcock japes of the 1930s, the film noirs of the 1940s, the super-spy pictures of the 1960s, and the paranoid conspiracy dramas of the 1970s. Lang brought Mabuse back, extending malign influence from an asylum cell and beyond the grave in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), but his most influential early talkie is the layered and haunting M (1931), the first great serial-murder film, with Peter Lorre as the pedophile killer stalked by cops (including Mabuse's nemesis, Inspector Lohmann) and criminals. Paul Leni, another interesting German director of the 1920s, put Jack the Ripper on screen in Waxworks (1924) before decamping for America. The missing link between Werner Krauss's tubby, trench-coated Ripper and Lorre's whistling, whining Franz Beckert is the mild-mannered, pathetic Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) of G.W. Pabst's masterly Pandora's Box (1928), killing the innocently fatal heroine Lulu (Louise Brooks) in a clinch under the mistletoe. Alfred Hitchcock had already taken note of what was going on in Germany, where he served an apprenticeship, and essayed his own Ripper story, the British Expressionist horror classic The Lodger (1927).
Hollywood didn't yet have horror films, but it did have a horror star in Lon Chaney, master character actor and make-up artist. Chaney plays full-on monster roles as the ape-man in A Blind Bargain (1921), Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and the skull-faced Erik in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), plus a very funny and parodic mad scientist in The Monster (1925) and a (fake) vampire in London After Midnight (1927), but his most distinctive work comes in melodramas, usually directed by Tod Browning. Their joint masterpiece is The Unknown (1927), in which Chaney plays a murderer hiding his giveaway double-thumbs by binding his arms and posing as an amputee, performing a knife-throwing act with his feet. The heroine (a young Joan Crawford) affects to abhor a man's embrace, so "Alonzo the Armless" has his arms surgically removed to become her ideal lover--only to learn she's changed her position on hugging and is canoodling with the circus strong-man, whereupon Alonzo plots a revenge nasty enough for the EC Comics of the 1950s. The difference between Chaney's grotesques and the creatures of German Expressionism is that most of Chaney's brilliantly mimed, remarkably made-up freaks are just grumpy guys who don't get the girl (a theme Chaney raised to obsessive levels), rather than the incarnation of evil or insanity in semi-human form. Perhaps this is why his most horrific films, though illuminated by moments of masterful acting, wear less well. Chaney's best work, in Browning's The Unholy Three (1925) and Victor Sjostrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924) falls on the outskirts of the genre.
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Lon Chaney showing off his dentures in London After Midnight
When Universal Pictures, who backed The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, lost Chaney to MGM, they replaced him with Conrad Veidt as the Joker-grinning freak of The Man Who Laughs (1928). That was directed by Paul Leni, who had made the most important American horror film of the decade, The Cat and the Canary (1927). John Willard's 1922 Broadway play was a semi-spoof of the already-established genre of Old Dark House mystery, in which a group of people gather for a reading of a will in an isolated, spooky locale and are menaced by a monstrous figure who turns out to be the most cheerful, helpful suspect. Leni got the most out of clutching hands, secret passageways, and bodies tumbling from wardrobes. There were many similar efforts, among them The Bat (1925), directed by the talented Roland West, who later remade the film as a talkie, The Bat Whispers (1929); Seven Footprints to Satan, directed by Benjamin Christensen, who had handled the striking Danish semi-documentary Witchcraft Through the Ages (1921); multiple versions of Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917, 1925, 1929), a property thought worth rehashing as late as House of the Long Shadows (1983); The Ghost Breaker (1922), The Gorilla (1927), The Thirteenth Hour (1927), The Haunted House (1928), and the first all-talkie, The Terror (1928). Leni even got to do it again, in the Old Dark Theater tale The Last Warning (1929).
As talking pictures caught on, Murnau and Leni were in Hollywood, perfectly positioned to direct horror films. Dracula had been running on stage in Britain and America sine the mid-1920s, and the rights had legitimately been bought by Universal Pictures in the hope that Chaney would star. However, within a few years, Murnau, Leni, and Chaney were all dead through freak accidents or illnesses. The future of Dracula, and hence the entire horror genre, was up for grabs…
Next in Horror History: Exotic Monsters (The 1930's)
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