The History of Horror: The Cinema, Part I

Since its advent, the cinema has been the perfect venue to showcase our deepest fears and terrors. The very fact that one must sit in a darkened theater in order to watch the fantasy sequences played out on a blank screen poses psychological suggestions of the very way our own imaginations play out in our minds. While literary tropes of symbolism and imagery have been a part of the genre, filmed images use these analogies to equal effect, bringing to vision what we have long since imagined of our deeper nightmares in a shared experience. In these series of articles, I'll examine a brief overview of cinematic representations of horror.

Early Cinema

During the late 19th century, since the invention of the moving picture, through the 1920s, filmmakers have used horror as a storytelling device to shock and engage audiences through this nascent medium. European filmmakers were often the forerunners of horror movies, beginning with the first horror film to be shot by cinema pioneer George Melies, Le Manoir du Diable (1896) or The Devil's Castle, a three-minute short. During the German Expressionist period, filmmakers such as Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), used stylistic sets, lighting and camera movement to create a nightmarish dream world of vision and fantasy. In Nosferatu, which was based on Irish writer Bram Stoker's Dracula novel, the scene in which a coach is sent by Count Orlak to pick up Hutter, the film's hero and Jonathan Harker stand-in, is sped up, giving the image an otherworldly and frightening aspect.

In the United States, horror films were arguably respresented by Lon Chaney, Sr., who would star in such classic films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Known as the Master of Disguises, Chaney used makeup and prosthetics to disappear into his frightening characters. One classic scene of Chaney's filmwork occurs in The Phantom of the Opera, when the heroine rips off the phantom's mask as he is playing the organ, revealing the phantom's hideous countanance underneath.