A rollicking good time
Then, in 1895, two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, developed the Cinematographe. This device could take moving pictures (like the Kinetograph) and project them onto a screen. On December 28, 1895, the brothers held the first film show for a paying audience in history. Held in the basement of the Grand Cafe in Paris, they screened brief snippets taken during the year that have since became famous among film students and scholars. Most of the short films were accounts of everyday activities, such as Exiting the Factory (1895), which depicted workers at the Lumiere factory clocking out for the day, while others were staged--The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1895), in which a boy plays a trick on a gardener, possibly the first action film--but the hit of the evening was the first true sensation of the power of cinema, a couple-second film known as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895). Having never seen a motion picture before that night, many Parisian patrons could not quite tell the difference between a silent, black-and-white image of a locomotive steaming towards the camera and a real train crashing through the basement wall and threatening to plough them down.
For about ten years, the Kinetoscope and the Cinematographe co-existed, seemingly not in competition, but it was the Lumiere vision of cinema as a theatrical attraction that caught on around the world, drawing masses of people and inspiring film's earliest pioneers. Edison's gadget, meanwhile, was primarily used for "what the butler saw" type peepshows. By the early days of the 20th century, Edison had moved to the projected-on-a-screen variety of cinema as well. Among his best known productions from this time was the very first film version of Frankenstein (1910). Ironically, by then, the Lumiere brothers were out of business and Edison was raking in the cash thanks to a near-stronghold on American film production. Edison had patented the sprocket holes, the perforations that allowed film to run through the projector. This hold would only be broken by film enthusiasts who fled the Edison-dominated New York film scene to found a new movie stronghold in California--Hollywood.
So that is cinema. But where was horror? Formats that would become movie genres were fairly well-defined in other media well before Edison and the Lumiere brothers came to prominence. Adventure and detective stories were universally developed in prose while the musical was a staple of the theater. Cheap novels were the home of Westerns, and the love story seeped into every form of narrative art. The religious spectacular was familiar in painting, while the great epic had been with us all since antiquity. Even science fiction had coalesced into something recognizable by the late 19th century thanks to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
H.G. Wells--Father of Science Fiction, Sexy-Ass Mofo
Yet for all these distinct genre arenas, no one living in 1890 would have any idea what you meant if you called something a "horror story." This is not to say, exactly, that such stories did not exist, it was just that horror was just now coming together through the efforts of a disparate bunch of creative minds, much like cinema itself.
Horror as a genre had been a long time coming, folks. The earliest known narrative in human history, The Epic of Gilgamesh, has gruesome and fantastical elements strewn throughout. Heroes fight monsters in Graeco-Roman and Norse mythology with astonishing regularity, and this trend continued up through its peak with the eighth century Old English epic poem Beowulf. In a typical horror scenario, some dark and strange force is raiding the hall of King Hrothgar every night, leaving dead and mutilated corpses behind. The hero traces the trail of trouble to the monster Grendel, whom he kills in battle. The story even contains its own sequel (the great stain of the horror genre), as Beowulf must then confront the dead beast's vengeful mother (almost like a weird, backwards version of Friday the 13th)
Countless other myths, stories, and epic cycles conform to the structure of the horror story. With the right slant on things, they could all be made or remade as horror films with ease. In the Bible alone you've got the plagues of Egypt, which were the inspiration for the influential The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), the trials and tribulations of Job, perhaps the first great "conte cruel" or "cruel tale," and the apocalyptic vision of the Revelation to John as the source for such Antichrist yarns as Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Omen (1976), and numerous other "Christian" horror tales. Even classical drama is full of bloody business. I mean, Oedipus blinds himself when he realizes how dreadfully he has transgressed into a world of hate, murder, and revenge.
See what I'm getting at here?
Different bursts of activity on the horror front even helped give rise to horror's many sub-genres. During the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, English audiences thronged to theaters to see "revenge tragedies," which drew on classical models but played up ghosts, grim, and gore. Hamlet had its vengeful specter in the night, an exhumed skull, multiple stabbings, poisonings, and Ophelia's mad scene. And the doom-haunted tone of Macbeth is set in the very first scene by the three witches chanting their wicked prophecy. Shakespeare went balls to the wall for the kind of shock value that 1970's Italian filmmakers would later relish with Titus Andronicus, the source for the lengthy sequence in Theater of Blood (1974) in which rape victim Lavinia has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out so she can't identify her attackers, but foils them by writing down the guilty names with her bloody stumps. But Shakespeare is tame compared to Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Dr Faustus (the archetypal deal-with-the-Devil story) or Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy (which opens with the stage direction, "Enter Vindice, holding a skull). These plays and others would demand increasingly elaborate stage effects, such as hidden bladders of pig's blood prickled by daggers for John Webster's The White Devil, fake heads branched after offstage decapitations for The Duchess of Malfi, or the Duke of Gloucester's bloodied eye-sockets in Shakespeare's King Lear.
In 1764 English novelist Horace Walpole published what he claimed to be was a rediscovered medieval manuscript, The Count of Otranto. It was a saga of ghostly and criminal doings in an old Italian castle and became the first in a series of increasingly lurid "gothic" novels. Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, among others, became the most successful of the gothic novelists. She wrote of imperiled heroines facing magnetic yet repulsive villains, often in old Italian palaces with contested inheritances and secret passages a-plenty. All of the supernatural business was explained away with Scooby-Doo-like deduction and the ghost riders often always turned out to be bandits in disguise. By the time that Jane Austen paid homage to, while also parodying Radcliffe and her many imitators in Northanger Abbey, the gothic form was an established strange of popular culture. Parents were said to be concerned of the effect gothic novels might have on their children, while the rise in mock-medieval architecture indicated how pervasive the influence really was.
Mrs. Radcliffe's works were relatively genteel, however (at least the two or three I've read), but what might have given those cautious parents pause was Matthew Gregory Lewis's 1796 bestseller The Monk, which unashamedly plunges into the supernatural, with an enthusiastic catalogue of wild depravity thrown in for good measure. It is virulently anti-Catholic, as are most British gothic novels, and is a variant on the Faustus story. The Monk follows the saintly Ambrosio, who is visited by the demonic in the form of a young girl that tempts him into a succession of fleshly pleasures and crimes which escalate into matricide, incestuous rape, and worse. In the end, Ambrosio is torn to shreds by the Devil himself. Probably the only contemporary writer more extreme than Lewis was the French aristocrat Donatien Alphonse Francois, better known by his title, Marquis de Sade. In 1800, the marquis wrote that the gothic novel was the "necessary fruit of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe," and thus became one of the first critics to perceive a connection between the upheavals in society and fantastical fiction, a connection still widely examined today.
Dirty, dirty marquis, isn't he?
The later gothic period produced masterpieces like Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and the style lasted into the 19th century where it petered out among the longer novels of J. Sheridan LeFanu, Uncle Silas, The House by the Churchyard, and the much-filmed vampire tale Camilla. The gothic also somewhat evolved into the serialized penny dreadfuls that followed the exploits of such brooding figures as Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampyre, and Sweeney Todd.
Of course, the most famous and lasting horror novel of the gothic period is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818, though, at the time, Mary was not the respectable Mrs. Shelley, but the scandalous Mary Godwin, a teenage runaway adulteress and Romantic poetry groupie. The novel is supposedly the result of a tale-telling competition involving famed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, as depicted in the prologue of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and in other features like Gothic (1986) and Haunted Summer (1988). Frankenstein owes its convoluted structure of stories with stories to the gothic, but it does break new ground in its tale of the callous scientist Victor Frankenstein and the tragic yet malign Monster that he creates. The novel is a cornerstone not only of horror, but of science fiction, and has a complex moral structure. What is interesting about the novel is that Victor's crime is not making the Monster, but in being a bad parent--everything would have been all right if he'd taken care of his creature rather than rejecting it simply because it looked hideous.
Before the supposed contest that birthed horror literature's first true milestone, the Shelley-Byron troupe, which included Dr. John Polidori, who wrote the influential if whiny short story "The Vampyre," a caricature of Byron as well as the first vampire story in English, had been researching folk and horror tales translated from German. It is likely that they encountered the works of E.T.A. Hoffman, whose story "The Sand Man" is about a doll that comes to life and is precedent to Frankenstein.
"I shall write a book about a Monster. He shall not be in 99% of the book.
That will endear me to generations of future college students"
Edgar Allan Poe also acknowledged the influence of the Germanic gothic in his own work. His distinct horror tales, written during the 1830's and 1840's started working with the mechanics of the genre, but then broke away to creep into the minds of his deranged protagonists, presenting torments that were more physical and more spiritual than the typical gothic conflict.
It should be noted, however, that Poe was essentially too awesome to limit himself t one form. Besides horror, he practically invented the detective story. He also wrote important early science fiction, bizarre humor, journalistic hoaxes, puzzle stories, vicious and toadying reviews, and begging letters. It is his core of mystery and horror tales, however, that reveal his true imagination, and that have seen adaptation after adaptation, each one exploring and delving further into the mind of the story. This core includes "The Black Cat," "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "A Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Masque of the Red Death." Whereas gothics tended to revolved around a virtuous but imperiled heroine who would be saved at the end of the day (or night), Poe's tales present women who were dead, dying, or spectral. His stories concentrate on the kinks of male protagonists who are on the verge of madness or transcendent wisdom. They obsess on details to the exclusion of all else and think in a frenzy, made evident by dash-ridden sentences that spill from the author's pen like the ramblings of a drunken lunatic. It's easy to write Poe off as a neurotic who put his own failings into his tales. Just as his poems use complex meter and rhyme schemes, his prose his finely wrought to seem like madness while the author is in complete control of the effect.
By the late 19th century, the gothics seemed quaint and bordering on comical, though trace elements still remained in the more labyrinthine constructions of Charles Dickens (Bleak House) and Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White). Poe was now remembered as much for his messy life as he was for his stories, which were more popular in France than in England or America. However, the decades immediately preceding and following the birth of cinema saw an unparalleled burst of horror writings. More key texts were written in a comparatively short time than in all the centuries before and, arguably, since. In about twenty years, the world was given Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Sir H. Rider Haggard's She (1887), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), Robert Chambers's The King in Yellow (1895), H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903), Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), M.R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), Algernon Blackwood's The Empty House (1904), Arthur Machen's House of Souls (1906), William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (1908), and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1911). And those are just the books that have lasted.
ALL THE BOOKS
While these books were hitting the shelves, along with a torrent of short stories, cinema was advancing from flickering experiments that were essentially moving snapshots to feature-length stories that could compete with the grandest stage productions. Most of the above batch began to be filmed over and over again, and have spun off so many sequels, imitations, homages, revisions, reworkings, and other variants that it's entirely possible a full 50% of the horror films ever made are, in some way or another, drawn from this brief two-and-a-half decades of literary production. Toss in Frankenstein and the works of Poe and that's a safe 3/4.
It may be that this outpouring of what would soon be called horror was linked to the contemporary accelerated development of cinema and other technologies of the time (think telephone, automobiles, and airplanes). When the world changes rapidly people are often both scared and excited. That collective societal thrill encourages storytellers to play on those emotions, which underlie much horror fiction and throb dangerously through many of the above-mentioned masterpieces.
The gothic novels all looked back, their settings either in the past or in a fantasized foreign country. Though they are now viewed through a London fog of gaslight nostalgia, the late-19th century horror cornerstones were up-to-the-moment. Stevenson, Stoker, and Leroux all included newspaper clippings in their works to add weight to their fantastical tales. Wells and Haggard traipsed off to the far corners of the globe only to bring stories home to oak-panelled drawing rooms. Hodgson, James, and Blackwood found ancient ghosts, curses, and sorceries nestling into an uncertain modern world.
Titillating, yet ghastly
In some of the early gothic novels the horror elements aren't even primary. Jekyll and Hyde is a twist at the end crime thriller whose last chapters, in 1886, would have been a jaw-dropper that made Mr. Hyde look like the Keyser Soze or Tyler Durden of his day. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a black satire and though Wells's novels are considered to be scientific romances he wrote better monsters than anyone else--cannibal Morlocks, beast-people, invisible maniacs, vampires from Mars. Heart of Darkness is considered "serious literature," but, you know, with severed heads stuck on poles. And then, Hound of the Baskervilles is a whodunit concerning the rationalized supernatural. But what is remembered, what lingers in pop culture through the years, are the set-pieces that have made them cinema staples: Dorian's portrait in the blue flame, aging to a withered corpse; Jekyll taking the potion and transforming into the "somehow deformed" Hyde; the Martians devastating everything from village to skyscraper; creepily angelic kids under malign, perhaps spectral influence; James's nastily physical little ghosts (side note, James is often labeled as the master of "subtle horror," but I think whoever made that decision missed his short story "Count Magnus" in which someone's face is sucked off the bone); and then, most of all, Dracula in his Transylvanian castle, climbing down the walls and creeping into the bedrooms of English ladies to drink blood and defy an array of heroes only to decay into nothing once his blackened heart is pierced.
If modern horror starts somewhere, Dracula is as good a place as any. It deploys exactly the strategies, learned from Collins and Stevenson, that still serve for Stephen King and almost every horror film, yet has a plot which isn't far removed from Beowulf. A credible, realistic setting--unlike those of the gothic novels or Dorian Gray--is established, which allows for suspension of disbelief when the monster is introduced. There is a mystery element as the normal characters, aided by the scholarly Dr. Van Helsing, puzzle over strange phenomenon and work out who and what the villain is, discovering the monster's powers, limitations, and weaknesses. In the climax, the hero and his heroine overcome the monster through applied knowledge and moral superiority and destroy it, though not without cost (SPOILER ALERT--Quincy dies).
King of the Vampires. And maybe also arthritis
And yet, a full year before the now famous count came to the printed page, the Devil made his movie debut….
Next in Horror History: Beastly Beginnings (1896-1929)
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