The Halloween Horror Month: Volume IV
By Darren Williams
24th October 2009

"There's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight."
- Lon Chaney

As the world entered a new decade, horror cinema really began to find its feet. Surprisingly, the first key horror film of the new decade came from post-war Germany, with Robert Weine's legendary The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The story itself is simple. Cesare is a somnambulist in Caligari's circus side-show. Caligari displays him in small towns as the man who has been sleeping for 23 years, before using hypnosis to send him on murderous night-time sprees. The art direction, with its bizarre twisted scenery designed to indicate Cesare's mental state, was every bit as important as the story itself. The film helped usher in the style of expressionist film-making that defined German horror of this period and Conrad Veidt became one of the first true horror stars as a result of his performance as Cesare. Fritz Lang was originally signed up to direct but moved on before filming started, but he would crop up in other horror-themed productions of the decade and if the coda of the film really was Lang's idea, it might be better that he didn't direct it. Weine would return to the genre later in the decade with The Hands of Orlac, but it wouldn't have the same impact as Caligari.

In addition to Caligari, during the 20s Germany produced several of the first true classics of the genre. Caligari was in essence a variation on the mad scientist theme. Boese and Wegener would also take on a variation of that theme with an adaptation of the Jewish legend of The Golem. The story of a Rabbi who creates a creature from clay to protect his community was both a throwback to the Frankenstein tale and had relevance to the horrific events that were coming in the real world. Like Caligari, and many other German horrors of the 20s, much of the film's power stems from its impressive set design and its astounding visuals. Lang himself would return to the horror genre for Der Mude Tod, where Death recounts a series of tragic tales. The film was one of the earliest examples of anthology horror films, a sub-genre that would become a major part of horror cinema, and while the stories aren't horror as such, the influence of Lang's work can't be denied. While not strictly horror, many of his contributions to cinema from the 20s would have horror themes. His Dr. Mabuse was to cast a long shadow over genre cinema, and is very much in the mad scientist/criminal mastermind tradition, and while Metropolis was more firmly sci-fi, it still took on many of the mad scientist themes.

Another one of the great directors, F.W. Murnau, turned in an unofficial Dracula adaptation with Nosferatu. This unauthorised version was nearly destroyed by Stoker's widow, but luckily copies survived of one of cinema's earliest classics. Max Shreck's Count Orlok became one of the great cinematic images of a vampire, shaven-headed, rat-faced, with the look of a corpse resurrected. Many years later E. Elias Merighe would make Shadow of the Vampire, a fiction based on the filming of Nosferatu that imagined Shreck as a real vampire. His presence in the film is so otherworldly it could almost make that conceit believable. Many find Nosferatu to be a little creaky these days, but the film still retains great power and a great many of the scenes have rightly become iconic. Later that decade, Murnau would take on the myth of Faust, in what many would argue to be the greatest screen adaptation of the story.

Another German director, Paul Leni, created Waxworks in 1924. Waxworks was an anthology film of a writer telling the stories of three of the most notorious figures in a wax museum - Ivan the Terrible, Harun al Raschid and Jack the Ripper. Like much German horror of the period, Waxworks is a stylistic masterpiece. Conrad Veidt had another horror role in this film and Leni would later go on to direct one of the earliest entries in the 'old dark house' subgenre in 1927 with The Cat and the Canary. The Cat and the Canary has been remade or reimagined many times over the years so the plot is incredibly familiar, an eccentric millionaire has died and his family are called to his isolated mansion for the reading of his will, there are rumours of a haunting and it begins to look like none of the family will survive the night. The story may seem cliched and in general the films in this style were a throwback to the bad old days of Mrs Radcliffe, but this version  had something none of the others did, a director as confident and talented as Leni at the helm. The following year would see Leni team with Conrad Veidt for an adaptation of Hugo's The Man Who Laughs. Although it's more of a melodrama than a horror, the style of the film and Veidt's performance would again prove influential on the development of the genre.

German cinema would end the decade with another masterpiece with Henrik Galeen's Alraune. Still little seen, this again had mad scientist themes as Alraune is the product of artificial insemination between a prostitute and the semen of an executed murderer. Alraune deals with one of the great concerns of horror, the fear of the deadly power of sex. In Alraune that fear is emphasised even more with the lead character being a sexually open and powerful female. Generally regarded as the finest of the many adaptations of the story, much of that acclaim has to go to Brigitte Helm's seductive lead performance.

Alfred Hitchcock's "the Lodger" (1927)

The rest of Europe managed a few notable entries in the horror canon. The influence of German expressionism would carry to Britain when Hitchcock filmed his Jack the Ripper tale, The Lodger. In Italy, The Devil popped up to torment and tempt mortals in Maciste in Hell. In France, Jean Epstein would tackle Poe and create The Fall of the House of Usher, one of the most visually beautiful films of its period. The film took Poe into the avant-garde and the resulting film was one of the best adaptations of the great man's work, faithful in spirit if not in content. France also gave us the Bunuel and Dali collaboration, Un chien andalou. Was it really horror? A difficult question, but it certainly looked to cause horror and revulsion in its audience and even now one of the scenes regularly pops up in 'most disturbing moments' lists. In Sweden, Victor Sjostrom created the remarkable, The Phantom Chariot, at heart a morality tale with shades of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, it remains one of the most impressive films of the silent era. Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages was Danish director Benjamin Christensen's attempt to give a history of witchcraft, mixing documentary details with reproductions of woodcuttings and the like in the first section, it gets pushed into full blown horror territory when Christensen recreates a Satanic orgy. Filled with nudity and blasphemy, Christensen attacks the church and the witch hunts with glee, and you can tell he was having the time of his life when casting himself as The Devil in the witches' sabbat sequence.

American cinema was starting to find its feet as well. Boris Karloff would get an early role in the interesting, but not entirely successful, tale of murder and mesmerism, The Bells. But Karloff wouldn't become a star until the 1930s. If any one actor was the face of horror for the 1920s it wasn't Karloff, Conrad Veidt or even Max Shreck, it was Lon Chaney, the man of 1000 faces. Kicking off the decade with The Penalty, Chaney established himself as a great actor, a few years later he took on Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and raised his profile even further. But It was his take on Erik in The Phantom of the Opera that really made him a star name. Covered with so much make-up that Chaney had to rely on his expressive eyes and body-language to make the character believable, Chaney created one of the great sympathetic monsters. The film itself still ranks as the greatest adaptation of Leroux's novel and nobody has even approached Chaney's performance, it's one of the true iconic screen portrayals of a literary character, inside and out of horror. Amazingly, it wasn't even to be Chaney's greatest performance of the decade.

The creative partnership between Chaney and Tod Browning is something to be savoured, they were truly one of the greatest of all director/actor collaborations. The two made a series of films together including The Unholy Three, the legendary lost film, London After Midnight and The Unknown. The Unknown is the finest of the Browning/Chaney collaborations and features the greatest performance of Chaney's all-too-short career. The Unknown stars Chaney as a murderous circus knife-thrower, Alonzo the Armless. On the run from the police, he has a double-thumb that will easily identify him as a murderer. He's forced to hide the fact that he has arms and hide out in the small circus. In a remarkable display of physical prowess, Chaney uses his feet as his hands, learning to throw knives and do practically everything else with his feet. The Unknown is a dark and perverse tale that would be a distressing offering in any era. Chaney was also one of the great  make-up artists of his time, creating unique and memorable characters and basically breaking as much new ground in that field as he was with his acting. Just compare his Quasimodo to his Erik to Alonzo the Armless and you'll see what a versatile and creative genius he really was. Browning's non-Chaney films of the 20s, like The Show, while incredibly impressive, suffered somewhat from his absence. Chaney died in 1930, he was just 47 and if he'd lived longer then the entire history of horror could have been different. You can only begin to imagine what his Dracula or Frankenstein would have been like.

Literature wasn't neglected in the 20s either. A new star was born in the form of H.P. Lovecraft. He wouldn't achieve any real fame until much later but the 1920s saw him producing such classics as Nyarlathotep, From Beyond, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Outsider, Herbert West: Re-Animator, The Rats in the Walls, The Call of Cthulhu, Cool Air, Pickman's Model, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Colour Out of Space and The Dunwich Horror, along with the deeply influential, Supernatural Horror in Literature essay. The success of Lovecraft was thanks in large part to the magazine Weird Tales that began publication in 1923, Weird Tales became a genre landmark, introducing the world to many of the finest writers and artists who worked in the field and its reputation as one of the greatest horror magazines is well deserved. The more traditional ghost story was also still going strong. E.F. Benson and Walter de la Mere published incredible work like  Mrs Amworth and Seaton's Aunt and M.R. James was still publishing collections like A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories and Wailing Well, both of which contained several of his greatest works. The Japanese Poe, Edogawa Rampo published a series of disturbing gems and reflecting the strength of the horror story was the publication of Not At Night: Tales That Freeze the Blood, one of the first great anthology collections.

The 20s brought us German expressionism, the Cthulhu mythos, the films of the tragic Lon Chaney and one of the iconic depictions of a vampire, but horror was just learning to walk. The 30s were around the corner and with them they'd bring new stars, one of the great horror studios, and the first of the legendary horror radio shows.