The Gothic Tradition
The term 'horror' first comes into play with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, full of supernatural shocks and mysterious melodrama. Although rather a stilted tale, it started a craze, spawning many imitators in what we today call the gothic mode of writing. Better writers than Walpole, such as Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk) took the form to new heights of thrills and suspense. For half a century, gothic novels reigned supreme. As the Age of Enlightenment gave way to the new thinking of the early nineteenth century, Romantic poets of the stature of Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel) and Goethe (The Erlking) reflected the strong emotions of the movement through a glass darkly, recognising that fear and awe aren't so very different sensations. The first great horror classic (Frankenstein 1818) was written by a Romantic at the heart of the movement - Mary Shelley.
Nineteenth Century Masters
Some of the greatest mid- nineteenth century novelists (on both sides of the Atlantic) tried their hand at horror fiction, paying tribute to the dying traditions of the gothic. Emily Bronte steeped her magnus opus, Wuthering Heights in gothic situations and sensibilities while Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories (the best perhaps being The Signalman, the best known A Christmas Carol). Herman Melville incorporated many supernatural elements intoMoby Dick, as did Nathaniel Hawthorne with The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. As the century advanced, many writers turned to the short story or novella form to spook their readers - J S Le Fanu, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson and of course, Edgar Allen Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe
Reviled for many years as an alcoholic hack, Poe is now gaining his rightful place in the literary canon; his terse yet suggestive prose style carries him through several volumes of startlingly original short stories and some heartbreaking poetry. He is credited with inventing the modern detective story (The Murders in the Rue Morgue -1841) and with being the first writer to explore psychoanalysis within a literary format. The funereal landscapes and grotesque characters he wove into his stories have become staple tropes of the horror genre. Reading him now, it is hard to imagine how innovative and creative his work was in the 1830s and 1840s. Sadly, he was ahead of his time, and struggled his whole life with poverty and lack of recognition. Much ink has been expended on the mysterious circumstances of his death - he was found badly beaten and raving in Baltimore, and died in hospital before recovering his faculties.
The End Of The Century
As a Viennese academic called Sigmund Freud was beginning his explorations into the recesses of the human consciousness, literature too took on a more psychological bent, with many writers trading freely in madness (building on the work of Poe), and the horror that lies beyond the boundary we call sanity. These stories deal not with events, but with the slow unraveling of minds; the reader is left to decide whether the causes are supernatural or psychological. Henry James played with the mind of a nanny in The Turn of The Screw in 1898, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman weaves a diatribe against patriarchy ('You see, he does not believe I am sick!") Into The Yellow Wallpaper (1899). And of course Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) spiced up the psychological with the sexual, creating an anti-hero in the Count whose appeal shows no sign of diminishing over a century later. H G Wells developed the concept speculative fiction further with his science themed novels The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man, The Time Machine andWar of The Worlds, all of which utilize elements of horror as well as fantasy.
And then came the Great War, and with it horrors that not one of these literary minds could have conceived
The First Horror Movies
Silent film offered the early pioneers a wonderful medium in which to examine terror. Early horror films are surreal, dark pieces, owing their visual appearance to the expressionist painters and their narrative style to the stories played out by the Grand Guignol Theatre Company. Darkness and shadows, such important features of modern horror, were impossible to show on the film stock available at the time, so the sequences, for example in Nosferatu, where we see a vampire leaping amongst gravestones in what appears to be broad daylight, seem doubly surreal to us now. Nonetheless, these early entries to the genre established many of the codes and conventions still identifiable today. They draw upon the folklore and legends of Europe, and render monsters into physical form. Sadly, the fragility of early film stock means that many of these early attempts at horror have been lost to us, but these three classics are currently available on DVD.
The Golem (1915/1920)
There were several versions of this, dubbed 'the first monster movie'. Paul Wegener directed and starred in the screen version of the Jewish legend, set in medieval Prague. A Golem (a solidly built clay man) is fashioned to save the ghetto, but when his job is done he refuses to cease existing, and runs amok through expressionist sets, eventually to be confronted and defeated by a little girl. The legend influenced Mary Shelley during her creation of a monster a century earlier, and a decade or so later, the cinematic golem influenced Whale's and Karloff's depiction of a false creation lumbering menacingly through the streets.
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1919)
Often cited as the 'granddaddy of all horror films', this is an eerie exploration of the mind of a madman, pitting an evil doctor against a hero falsely incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. Through a clever framing device the audience is never quite clear on who is mad and who is sane, and viewing the film's skewed take on reality is a disturbing experience, heightened by the jagged asymmetry of the mise en scene. Although modern viewers might find the pace slow, with long takes and little cutting between scenes, "The Cabinet..." is stylish, imaginative, and never less than haunting.
This is largely because the diegetic world is wholly artificial, a complete re-imagining of a Northern German town. The audience views the tale throught the twisted vision of the narrator, where roads, hills, houses and even trees take on a menacing new shape. This is not reality, and the stylised performances reflect that, with the players moving as symbols through the surreal landscape, their stark make up adding to the dreamlike sensation. This contrasted dramatically with the documentary style of film making prevalent in Europe at the time, and proved that film could be a poetic, stylised medium as well as a reflective one. Much has been written on the politics of The Cabinet..., representing as it does puppet humans controlled by a sadistic madman. It certainly struck a chord with German audiences of the time, suffering as they were from the economic consequences of war reparations, helpless in the face of spiralling inflation.
A 1996 reissue, complete with art deco titles, makes perfect sense of a film that has had a profound influence on subsequent horror.
Nosferatu (1922)
Nosferatu is the very first vampire movie, baldly plagiarising the Dracula story to present Count Orlok, the grotesquely made-up 'Max Schreck', curling his long fingernails round the limbs of a series of hapless victims. Described as the vampire movie that actually believes in vampires,Nosferatu gives us a far more frightening bloodsucker than any of its successors; Shreck is simply inhuman. Murnau demonstrated an early mastery over light and shadow which was to distinguish his subsequent work in Hollywood, such as Sunrise (1927), as well as sheer inventiveness with the photographic image, in the microscope sequences and the stop motion special effects. He also clashed with Bram Stoker's widow over the rights to the Dracula story, which had proved very popular as a stageplay. He changed the names of the central characters, but did not alter the story, and the subsequent legal wrangling meant that prints of the movie were destroyed, Murnau lost control of the film, and it is only recently that a version approximating to the original has become available to the viewing public.
