Every genre of film has its starting point. For comedy, it was 1895’s L’Arroseur Arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled). In 1901, Fire! was the first drama (or at least the first to string together a series of shots into a narrative). The first surviving animated film came in 1906, with Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. 1920 saw actor Douglas Fairbanks take on the role of the iconic hero Zorro in The Mark of Zorro, the first film of the superhero genre. The genesis of the horror film would fall to a three-minute film released in 1896: Le Manoir du Diable, aka The House of the Devil, followed shortly afterwards by two other prominent ‘firsts’ in the horror genre: Dante’s Inferno, the first feature-length horror film, and The Terror, the first “all-talking” horror feature.
The Story of ‘The House of the Devil’
The House of the Devil was directed by Georges Méliès. Those interested in the history of cinema may know the film auteur best from 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, with its iconic shot of a space capsule hitting the Man in the Moon, square in the eye, a key visual in documentary footage. The House of the Devil begins with a large bat flying into a medieval castle, where it changes into the Devil. He conjures a cauldron and an assistant, who helps him conjure a woman from said cauldron. Two cavaliers enter the room, where the Devil’s assistant taunts them by teleporting to different areas in the room. The Devil reenters the room as a skeleton, who transforms into a bat, who transforms into Mephistopheles himself, but is vanquished by the sight of a large crucifix. The film is less scary and more a chance for Méliès to amaze viewers with his innovative camera trickery, like the illusion of transformations by having stopped filming, replacing a skeleton with a bat, and resuming filming (think Bewitched and the wacky results of Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) twitching her nose). The film, long thought lost until the last surviving copy was found in a junk shop in New Zealand, counts as horror, though, given the presence of bats, skeletons and, of course, the Devil.
A Long Time Coming: ‘Dante’s Inferno’
The House of the Devil, remember, was only three minutes long, and as a result the horror elements of the film, few as they were, lacked the screen time to be truly effective. The first horror film to be what we would consider feature length, at a whopping 71 minutes, is the Italian film L’Inferno, or Dante’s Inferno. Thanks to rapid advancements in technology, Dante’s Inferno is a good 55 minutes longer than its immediate horror predecessor, Edison Studio’s 16-minute Frankenstein, the first to adapt the classic Mary Shelley novel (with a monster that looks like Curly from the Three Stooges wearing the Cowardly Lion suit from The Wizard of Oz). The film adapts the first canticle of Dante Alighieri‘s Divine Comedy, “Inferno (Hell),” where Dante is lead through the Nine Circles of Hell by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. Visually, the film is a masterpiece, with fantastic sets depicting all nine of the concentric circles of eternal torment that make up Hell. It also features extreme violence and gore, like the Devil eating humans whole, harpies eating the corpses of suicide victims, and a man carrying his own severed head as just some highlights. And nudity. Never forget the nudity. The intent is clear: frighten the hell out of people and instill piety in its wake. The film came to fruition thanks to a trio of directors: Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro. The Italian film’s first screening took place on March 10th, 1911 at the Teatro Mercadante in Naples, and grew from there into an international success, grossing more than $2 million in the United States alone (and giving cinema owners a reason to raise ticket prices).
Horror Movies Should Be Seen and Heard: ‘The Terror’
The first talkie horror film, and the second all-talking film released by Warner Bros., is from 1928: The Terror. The setting is in an old English country house, which has been converted into an inn. The guest list includes spiritualist Mrs. Elvery (Louise Fazenda), detective Ferdinand Fane (Edward Everett Horton), and an unknown killer known only as “The Terror” (assumedly signing in under an alias), who packed with him strange noises, mysterious organ music, and murder. The London movie critics of the day savaged the film, with one calling it “so bad that it is almost suicidal“. We may never know ourselves, sadly, as two versions of the film – the all-talking and a silent version for theaters not yet equipped for sound – are both considered lost. The Vitaphone sound-on-disc soundtrack and a few stills from the film do exist, however, so The Terror‘s legacy has not been completely lost to the scornful whims of history. Despite the caustic London critic’s assessments (very clearly over the novelty and wonderment of the talkies at that point), The Terror is still a touchstone moment in the evolution of the horror film.
Pushing the Envelope
The mature, envelope-pushing, often hedonistic and violent content of these films and others (and the industry itself) would lead to the restrictive prohibitions that came with the introduction in 1930 of the Motion Picture Production Code, popularly known as the Hays Code. The Hays Code effectively neutered the horror film for years, imposing Draconian limits on profanity, nudity, crime, morality, and violence of graphic or realistic nature. That said, there were many films produced under the Hays Code that creatively skirted the limits, weakening its influence over time. Then came Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1960 masterpiece Psycho, the film that delivered the killing blow to the Hays Code, and in doing so became another first in the history of the horror genre: the first post-Code, modern horror film (technically, the code wouldn’t be replaced until 1968 with the MPAA rating system we know and love, but after Psycho it had really lost its teeth). And it is upon these pioneering firsts that the horror movies we enjoy today are built upon.
This content was originally published here.
