L’Inferno is Italy’s first full length feature. The film’s production spanned three years. Even by today’s standards the vision of Hell presented is graphic and disturbing. The images in the film closely echo the engravings of Gustave Doré, a French artist who illustrated the 19th Century’s most popular version of Dante’s Inferno.
The gore-drenched artistry, including a man holding his own screaming head in his outstretched arm, is hard to shake. Notably, L’Inferno is the first mainstream film to feature female nudity. L’Inferno was a financial success both in Italy and the United States.
Der Golem (1915) – Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen
Der Golem is the first of many German creature features, a genre that would become entwined with the fledgling German Expressionist movement. Expressionism values subjective emotional experience over reality. Der Golem was released in 1915. A second film, The Golem and the Dancing Girl was released in 1917. The directors completed the trilogy with The Golem: How He Came into the World in 1920. Only the third film currently survives.
The Golem is a clay statue transformed by a rabbi into a fearsome monster in order to protect Jewish lives. Director Paul Wegener plays the Golem in all three movies. While based on Jewish folklore, the film is actually derived from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
The third film in the series is noticeably expressionistic, featuring the curved and canted scenery that is associated with the movement. The films were not anti-Semitic. The Golem: How He Came into the World was advertised in Yiddish language newspapers during its New York City run.
Along with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (also 1920), The Golem: How He Came into the World – is one of the pivotal works of the expressionist movement.
Homunculus is a six-part science fiction horror serial by German director Otto Rippert. Fritz Lang scripted Homunculus. He would later direct the German Expressionist masterpiece Metropolis (1927) and the thriller M (1931) starring Peter Lorre as a whistling child-killer.
Lang, of Jewish heritage, fled Germany when the Nazis came to power. After expatriating he was contacted by Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels, apparently unaware of Lang’s lineage, invited the director to be the head of UFA (Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft), Germany’s largest film studio. Lang declined. Instead he came to Hollywood.
Homunculus is about mad scientists, robots, and tragically evil man-made creatures. It is an important precursor to the Universal Monster movies. Like many silent films, the surviving prints deteriorated over time, and it has been rarely screened over the last fifty years. A 2014 restoration utilizing a print recovered in Moscow is now available.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) – Robert Wiene
Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the most important horror work of the German Expressionist Movement. In Caligari, an evil hypnotist exploits a somnambulist (played by Conrad Veidt, the villainous Major Strasser in Casablanca) to commit murders.
Caligari is narratively complex. The film examines themes of insanity, tyranny, and duality. Critics and theorists still argue over Caligari’s implicit meaning. The film is primarily presented in flashback, and is an early example of the frame story, similar to the original text of Frankenstein.
The visual style of the film is fully representative of the characters’ psyches. There is no objective physical reality. Critic Roger Ebert describes the setting as, “a jagged landscape of sharp angles and tilted walls and windows, staircases climbing crazy diagonals, trees with spiky leaves, grass that looks like knives.” The background landscapes are painted on a canvas backdrop. The shadows and rays of light are painted onto the set.
Even the title cards are stylized and misshapen. Reality is distorted. Buildings literally bend into one another like a cubist nightmare. Characters are out of proportion to the settings. For example, the opening framing device features an asylum too small for the inmates.
In a contemporaneous review, the New York Times wrote, Caligari “gives dimensions and meaning to shape, making it an active part of the story, instead of merely the conventional and inert background.”
Some directors partial to realism were disgusted with the film. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein thought Caligari was a “combination of silent hysteria, partially coloured canvases, daubed flats, painted faces, and the unnatural broken gestures and action of monstrous chimaeras.”
However, René Clair, the French director of comedies and light fantasy, put it best, stating that Caligari redefined cinema, the film “overthrew the realist dogma.”
The Phantom Carriage (1921) – Victor Sjöström
The Phantom Carriage is central to the development of the modern film narrative. This film was Ingmar Bergman’s favorite. Bergman later cast director Victor Sjöström as the lead in his similarly themed Wild Strawberries (1957). The Phantom Carriage is based on a novel by Nobel Prize winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf.
The film had an arduous production. The extensive special effects were quite difficult to create. The ghosts were a product of multiple exposures. In the early twenties, multiple exposures had to be created in camera. To capture the illusion of the ghosts interacting in three dimensions necessitated numerous, sometimes as many as four, layers of exposure. Since the film was shot on a hand-cranked camera each layer had to be cranked at exactly the same speed.
Sjöström stars as David, a ne’er-do-well drunkard. He is fatally struck by a bottle on New Year’s Eve. David is picked up by death’s carriage, which is now being driven by his friend George, who died the prior year. As they visit the significant sites of David’s life, the film shows in flashback how David again and again shattered what could have been a happy life.
Sjöström opted to shoot the entire film on set to maximize controlled conditions. He rejected the obvious stage acting generally present in film, creating something more subtle, concentrating on the character’s inner torment. The Phantom Carriage is one of the few films that can be credited with creating a new filmic style and language.
In a famous scene, the protagonist uses an ax to break through wooden door to his family. Stanley Kubrick reprises this scene in The Shining (1980). This is a must watch.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) – F.W. Murnau
Nosferatu is the first great vampire film and one of the preeminent works of the German Expressionist movement. The film is an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The title is different because the studio could not obtain the rights to the book.
The imposing Murnau, at six foot eleven inches (although some modern sources credit him as 6’4.), cast an indelible shadow over both German and American film. His Hollywood film, Sunrise won the first Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Picture. Murnau studied Literature and Art History in Heidelberg. He initially intended to be an actor, however Murnau joined the German air force at the outbreak of World War I. He survived eight plane crashes.
Back in Germany, after the war, he established a reputation as a popular director. A homosexual, he was involved in Berlin’s decadent cabaret and nightclub scene.
Nosferatu was primarily shot in the port city of Wismar. The film starred Max Schreck as the bald, long-fingered vampire Count Orlock. Watch for the shot of Orlock, climbing the stairs, seen only in shadow. Fun fact: This movie started the trope of vampires burning in the sun.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) – Wallace Worsley
No horror list can be complete without Lon Chaney – The Man of a Thousand Faces. Chaney himself had acquired the rights to produce The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He had long wanted to play the role of Quasimodo. Chaney partnered with Irving Thalberg, who had risen from office secretary to defacto head of Universal Studios. Universal founder Carl Laemmele left the twenty year old Thalberg in charge of the studio in 1919, when Laemmele headed back to New York.
Chaney originally wanted Tod Browning, who will be discussed in detail later, to direct, but settled for Wallace Worsley who directed several of Chaney’s earlier films. At the time Universal was one of the smaller studios, lacking the glitz and star-wattage of MGM.
Laemmele was notoriously budget conscious, and Thalberg had to consistently fight to prevent Leaemmele from scaling back the film’s grand flourishes.
The final budget was over one million dollars. Unusually expensive for the time. Over seven hundred and fifty technicians worked on the film. It was a giant success for Universal, grossing over three times its budget. Sadly, all nitrate copies of the film have been destroyed. The only surviving prints are 16mm. Most of those have deteriorated.
The Unknown (1927) – Tod Browning
Tod Browning had originally worked with Lon Chaney in 1919 for the melodrama The Wicked Darling. Over the course of their careers, Chaney and Browning would make ten films together. Browning was born in Kentucky to an upper middle class family. From a young age he was fascinated with carnival life.
When he turned sixteen he ran off to join the circus. He started his career as a carnival barker: STEP RIGHT UP! STEP RIGHT UP! THE FIRST TIME IN AMERICA – THE WILDMAN OF BORNEO! Browning also performed in a live burial act. From the carnival, Browning entered vaudeville.
In New York, he met D.W. Griffith, who also happened to be from Kentucky. Griffith, of course, would later direct The Birth of A Nation (1915). Browning worked as an actor in Griffith’s single reel nickelodeons. Browning followed Griffith to Los Angeles. He would act in over fifty movies.
His acting career was not to last. In 1915 Browning crashed his car into a moving train. He was badly injured. His passenger was killed. As he convalesced, he worked as a screenwriter. Browning finally made his directorial debut in 1917.
In The Unknown, Lon Chaney plays an armless carnival knife thrower, who throws the knives with his feet, and becomes obsessed with a showgirl. Chaney had to collaborate with the actually armless stunt double Paul Desmuke, who really could manipulate the knives with his feet.
The audience sees Chaney’s upperbody and Desmuke’s legs. As with Browning’s other carnival-centric films, critics, at the time, were disgusted. The New York Evening Post wrote, “A visit to the dissecting room in a hospital would be quite as unpleasant, and at the same time more instructive.”
David Sporn is a professional filmmaker, historian of cinema, writer, political scientist, philosopher, and gentleman for all seasons.
David joined TGNR in 2016 serving as an Entertainment & Arts Contributor, and authors his film focused column CadreCinematique.
