The Halloween Horror Month: Volume III
By Darren Williams
16th October 2009

"The blood is the life"
- Dracula, Bram Stoker.

Most sources date the first horror film to 1896 and how fitting it was directed by the great early fantasist, Georges Melies. In The Devil's Castle (Le Manoir du Diable), a bat flies into a haunted castle, changes into the devil and pulls various horrific figures from a cauldron. No plot, no character development, only 2 minutes long - right there was the birth of horror cinema. Melies would return to horror sources often throughout his career, even though he was never really a true horror director, and so much of the genre, so much of cinema in general, owe a huge debt of thanks to this great man. But despite Melies early example, the next quarter century of cinema would produce little in the way of genre classics. What the next 25 years did produce was a wave of literature classics that helped define the landscape of horror itself. Not just the writers who would helped make horror what it was, but in some of the characters that became iconic, you could almost say archetypal figures.

1896 would also see Wells publish his notorious 'The Island of Dr. Moreau', another mad scientist tale and quite possibly his masterpiece. It would be adapted several times over the years, but only once with any real success. The mad vivisectionist Dr. Moreau became such a staple of the genre that even South Park were able to produce a reasonable parody of Brando's version of the character.

1897 was a significant year for numerous reasons, but none of them immediately cinematic. In France the Grand Guignol opened in the Pigalle area of Paris. The horror plays of the Grand Guignol entered the public consciousness to such an extent that the name of the theatre has become synonymous with graphic and extreme horror. Plays like Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous, where a pretty young inmate of an insane asylum is blinded with scissors by older women thrilled and appalled audiences. In the early 20s there was an attempt to recreate some of the plays in Britain and there was even a series of short films based on them. Sadly the theatre closed its doors, but the spirit of Grand Guignol would live on in directors from H.G. Lewis to Eli Roth. This nonsense about 'torture porn' being the death of horror seems to come from people who have no concept of the roots of the genre. Extreme content has always been a part of it.

1897 was a great year for horror literature. Wells would publish another of his sci-fi/horror hybrids, another mad scientist tale, The Invisible Man. This introduced another of horror's most famous characters, one that would be revisited time and time again and imbed itself in the popular consciousness more than any other of Wells' creations. Richard Marsh published The Beetle, forgotten by today's standards by a sensation at the time. The Beetle was a melodramatic tale of an Egyptian priestess seeking revenge in London. Even more of a sensation, maybe the only horror novel that was more popular, was Bram Stoker's Dracula. While The Beetle is little read, Dracula has become one of the key novels in horror. The tale of a vampire Count searching for fresh victims in Britain captured the public imagination like few other works. Like many other horror classics, the films haven't been very faithful. Which is a good thing, the book is badly written and absurdly melodramatic and no film could really stick to the book's epistolary format. Like Carmilla before it, the repressed sexuality in Dracula shows the idea that romanticism/eroticism and vampires is a modern invention is nonsense. Vampire tales have always been powered by sex as much as by blood. Dracula has become one of the most often filmed of all novels, with every generation having their own Count, for better or worse. The Judge's House and The Squaw were better offerings from Stoker, but they had little to no impact.

The 19th century would produce two more great horror novels. The first came from Wells again, this time with his vision of an alien invasion in The War of the Worlds. For those who argue that a book like War of the Worlds is sci-fi and nothing but, ask yourself why Wells spends so much time trying to build a sense of terror in the reader, and why they are so focused on box ticking that they can't see or understand that something can cross genres and just because it has an alien it doesn't make it simply sci-fi.

The second came from one of literature's true greats, Henry James. James published one of the great ghost stories with The Turn of the Screw. A young governess takes a job looking after two children in a remote country house and becomes convinced that they are possessed by evil spirits. There's enough ambiguity in this chilling novella to suggest a tale of madness rather than true supernatural terror, but James himself considered it a ghost story and for once a classic story would be matched by a classic film adaptation with The Innocents. James would write other ghost stories, one, The Jolly Corner, would equal The Turn of the Screw in brilliance if not in widespread acclaim.

Artwork from WW.Jacobs' "the Monkey's Paw".

There were more superb short stories in the likes of Bernard Capes 'An Eddy on the Floor', Vernon Lee's 'The Doll', Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's 'The Seventh Man' and more, as the world entered a new century. In fact, the first three decades or so of the 20th century were a real golden age for the horror story. W.W. Jacobs published the oft-adapted favourite, 'The Monkey's Paw'. Perceval Landon's Thurnley Abbey, F. Marion Crawford's, For the Blood Is the Life, William F. Harvey's Across the Moors and August Heat are all considered classics. One of the greatest advances was the combination of great illustrations with stories. Aubrey Beardsley was a huge influence on the likes of Mahlon Blaine and Harry Clarke and this growing collaborations between painters and writers helped cement horror in the popular imagination.

There were also great bodies of work forming. Lord Dunsany put out his Book of Wonder. Saki was publishing grisly little tales of black horror comedy like The Interlopers, The Open Window, and of course, Sredni Vashtar. Oliver Onions' Widdershins, including The Beckoning Fair One and The Cigarette Case, is one of the most frightening books you'll ever read. E.F. Benson wrote stories around recurring themes, including his memorable giant slugs, and created a body of work that stands among the greatest ever produced. Algernon Blackwood also produced a memorable selection of stories including The Empty House, The Willows, Ancient Sorceries, The Camp of the Dog, the John Silence mysteries, Secret Worship and The Wendigo. William Hope Hodgson wrote the deeply influential, The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and The Voice in the Night along with the stories of the psychic detective, Carnacki. But the great master of the  ghost story is M.R. James, and his turn of the century offerings stand out as possibly the most frightening ever written. His 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary' is one of those rare collections without a single dud story. The Ash Tree; Count Magnus; The Mezzotint; Number 13; Oh , Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad and The Treasure of Abbot Thomas all being part of just one collection. James's characters were, like himself, unmarried scholars. But these men did not know their limits or their boundaries and when the unexplained came to get them it was all the more horrifying for entering into such an ordered world. James came back at the end of the decade with The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral and continued on into the teens with classics like Casting the Runes, The Tractate Middoth, Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance and A School Story as he published his second collection, More Ghost Stories. His third collection, A Thin Ghost and Others, would follow in 1919 and would continue his run of classic stories. Even James' method of test-running his ghost stories at a Christmas Eve gathering with a selected group of Cambridge students has become a part of the horror tradition.

The rest of the world was creating classics as well. Conrad's Heart of Darkness was as true a depiction of the potential for horror that lurks within us all that you could hope to find. Over in Germany, Haans Heinz Ewers was putting out intense and original works like Alraune and The Spider and in France, Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre kicked off the Fantomas cycle. In Prague, Kafka put out The Judgement, In the Penal Colony, The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor. In 1903, Lafcadio Hearn published his Kwaidan: Stories and Studies Of Strange Things, Japanese tales from the perspective of a Greek outsider, they'd later be adapted into one of the greatest of all horror films.

Art work from a release of Arthur Conan Doyle's "the Hound of the Baskervilles".

Arthur Conan Doyle had already tackled horror-esque themes in short stories like The Speckled Band, but The Hound of the Baskervilles pushed his great detective flown-blown into the genre and created yet another genre icon in the spectral hound. G.K. Chesterton's nightmarish The Man Who Was Thursday brought paranoia into the mix and in 1909 another legendary figure was added when Gaston Leroux published The Phantom of the Opera. Sax Rohmer introduced the controversial but memorable Eastern peril of Fu Manchu. And at the end of the teens H.P. Lovecraft would start penning tales like Dagon, Beyond the Wall of Sleep and The White Ship, bringing the Great Old Ones to the genre.

But what of horror cinema? There was an adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr hyde, the first of several, by William Selig in 1908. There were around six more Hyde adaptations within the next five years. Another icon made his movie debut when Thomas Edison took on Frankenstein in 1910. Like Jekyll and Hyde, there would be several adaptations over the next few years. There were multiple adaptations of Dorian Gray, several takes on Sherlock Holmes and various Mummy films. Cinema also tackled Poe, In 1913 in Germany, Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener directed an adaptation of Poe's The Student of Prague. The following year D.W. Griffith tackled The Tell-Tale Heart with his film The Avenging Conscience. There were no real classics coming through though. If you really want to stretch the boundaries then Louis Feuillade produced several serials that while not horror themselves, did have an attitude and an atmosphere that would come to be influential on the genre in  Fantomas, Les Vampires and Judex. There were also a selection of films that although they became beloved among small pockets of fans, like Homunculus, Cabiria and Rapsodia Satanica, they didn't make the breakthrough to becoming acknowledged or influential classics. Richard Oswald's Weird Tales was a similarly wonderful film from Germany that rounded off the decade, but again it hasn't made the leap to genre classic.

So at the end of the first 25 years of horror cinema, the genre seemed pretty stagnant when it came to cinema but widespread and fertile when it came to literature. What these 25 years did achieve was set out some of the recurring ideas of horror cinema. The life-blood, if you will. Several iconic figures were introduced, ones that would be revisited time and time again. There was the extreme horror of the grand guignol, the subtle charms of M.R. James, vampirism and sex would mix and horror would cross-genres time and time again. The years 1910 – 1920 also set up the idea that sometimes the best films in this genre would be seen only by a select handful rather than being huge hits. Just around the corner was the 1920s when literature would continue to boom, but horror cinema would also start to come into its own. ,

Previous Instalments of this serial Column;
- The Halloween Horror Month: Volume One and Two