The silent horror film is often regarded, if it is regarded at all, as a quaint legacy from a bygone age where the larger-than-life histrionics of its actors seem almost farcical and humorous. The horror film’s original intention of scaring its audience is lost as its flickering black and white images are passed by in favour of CGI enhanced spectacle and gore drenched violence. Yet those flickering images of monsters, villains and their screaming victims still cast a resonance that influences, whether directly or subconsciously, over what we watch today, be it in the dark streets and shadows of Sin City (2005) or in the blood and atmosphere of Coppola’s Dracula (1992). In hundreds of films made since the advent of sound the flickering images from our past continue to live on in our present.
Film evolved from a scientific novelty and fairground gimmick, where five minute reels were pitched alongside the bearded woman and the strongest man in the early years of the 20th Century, to become one of the world’s most powerful entertainment mediums. It is perhaps difficult to imagine now in age where image and sound can be accessed from almost anywhere, and from everything from a phone to huge screens in city centres. No longer does the ability to see people and things move hold any magic for the viewer, rather we have become complacent and jaded by our constant exposure to the moving image and its accompanying sound. In the early days of cinema however people were still awed by this new form of mass entertainment, and despite its lack of sound they were ready to be thrilled, moved and scared by what they saw.
As film developed as an art form during the 1910s so the tastes of its audiences grew more sophisticated and they came increasingly to expect both spectacle and escapism in equal measure. Films like D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), and Intolerance (1916) and, to a lesser degree, the emergence of the screen ‘vamps’ where man-eating femme fatales like Theda Bara and Pola Negri were wowing audiences in films like Cleopatra (1917), Salomé (1918) and Carmen (1918) were all paving the way for a darker kind of cinema. The horror film was about to rear its head.
Although there had of course between forays into horror over the preceding years, particularly in Europe, with films like Frankenstein (1910, Der Golem aka The Golem (1914) and Alraune (1918) it was to be a highly theatrical expressionist German film about a murderous sleepwalker called Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari aka The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) that began the process of establishing horror as a legitimate films genre. The film is the story of an asylum director who gets a white faced somnambulist to murder on his orders, the murderer clambering across roof tops caring the unconscious bodies of his victims. However, it was really the insane concoction of styles and sets arrayed in varying and often extreme levels of black and white that were, in to a degree still are, revolutionary. The net effect was both to brick the shackles of convention that still hampered film makers at the time, and to show cinema audiences that horror could be a creative and worthwhile genre.
Subsequently a number of horror films were produced to prove the style was innovative (x, y, z). All these films set new standards and broke old rules as their directors and producers strove to adapt a horror format that previously only existed in book form or been portrayed on stage to a totally new cinematic medium.
Throughout the rest of the 20’s the horror film grew both in quality and popularity, dispelling along the way any criticisms that it might be in any way a poor relation to other film genres. These films laid the foundation for the explosion in the popularity of horror films that was to follow in the 30’s and 40’s.
