A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema 9781477315521

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A Place of Darkness

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A Place of Darkness T H E R H E TOR IC OF HOR ROR I N E A R LY A M ER IC A N CI N E M A

Kendall R. Phillips

University of Texas Press

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Austin

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Copyright © 2018 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2018 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). LIBR A RY OF CONGR E SS CATA LOGI NG-I N-PU BLICAT ION DATA Names: Phillips, Kendall R., author. Title: A place of darkness : the rhetoric of horror in early American cinema / Kendall R. Phillips. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017036484| ISBN 978-1-4773-1550-7 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1551-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1552-1 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1553-8 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Horror films—United States—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H6 P438 2018 | DDC 791.43/6164—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036484 doi:10.7560/315507

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For Catherine, who keeps the darkness away.

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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INTRODUCTION. Cinema, Genre, Nation 1 CH APTER 1. Superstition and the Shock of Attraction: Horrific Elements in Early Cinema 26 CH APTER 2. Weird and Gloomy Tales: Uncanny Narratives and Foreign Others 61 CH APTER 3. Superstitious Joe and the Rise of the American Uncanny 87 CH APTER 4. Literary Monsters and Uplifting Horrors 110 CH APTER 5. Mysteries in Old Dark Houses 147 CONCLUSION

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Notes

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Index

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Illustrations

1. Theater promotion for Frankenstein (1931)

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2. Still from Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel (1900)

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3. Still from Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902) 4. Still from The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901) 5. Still from The Haunted Castle (1896)

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6. Still from The Hindoo Dagger (1909)

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7. Still from An Evil Power (1911)

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8. Still from The Ghost Breaker (1914)

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9. Still from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)

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10. Still from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) 11. Still from The Phantom of the Opera (1925) 12. Still from The Cat and the Canary (1927) 13. Still from Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) 14. Promotional photo from Dracula (1931)

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164 165 184

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Acknowledgments

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HE FIR ST OMEN TH AT THIS PROJECT MIGHT BE ON the right track came to me in Austin, Texas. I had arrived there for the first day of several weeks of research at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. As I stood at the front desk awaiting the orientation, a staff member stepped out from the reading room to ask if I would be able to wait a few more minutes. A bat had found its way into the reading room, and they were awaiting the arrival of someone to remove it. Although the rescued bat was safely released back into the wilds of central Texas, its spirit remains in this book. Images of flapping bats appear throughout the breadth of the cinematic history I map out, from Georges Méliès’s 1896 short film La Manoir du Diable to Tod Browning’s 1931 feature film Dracula. Its menacing presence hovers over various film treatments of the horrific and supernatural—a reminder that the eerie nocturnal world can sometimes intrude into our everyday lives. As is often the case in stories featuring bats, this meandering journey led me away from familiar surroundings and deep into another realm. This was a realm of dusty papers and lost films, a realm that was both similar to and starkly different from the bright world of contemporary cinema where I have spent much of my academic career. My journey into early film history, and the journey back, was facilitated by many individuals and institutions. First were those numerous outstanding scholars of early film history, whose work fills the endnotes. Without their guidance, warnings, and admonitions, this project would have been impossible. Second were the many scholars who, like me, work in the growing area of horror studies and whose passionate interest in the

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cultural dynamics surrounding horror films continues to inspire and inform my own work. Perhaps the most important people for my journey into the earliest years of projected moving pictures were the amazing, gracious, and patient staff at the many archives I visited during the research for this book. I vividly recall arriving in Los Angeles for an extended stay and turning up at the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library. Ned Comstock, a senior library assistant, greeted me, and after going through the basic procedures he asked if I could be a bit more specific about my research interests. On the request form I had submitted weeks in advance, I had simply listed “early horror films.” Sheepishly, I confessed to Ned that this was probably as clear as I could be. I was, in many ways, the archivist’s worst nightmare—a clueless academic on a fishing expedition. Fortunately, Ned and the many other archivists I would rely upon rose to the challenge and offered helpful suggestions and resources throughout my stay. Whatever useful insights might appear on these pages are due largely to these archives and the tireless work of their staff members. I have been fortunate to visit many outstanding archives. Portions of the project were made possible by the Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California; the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library; the UCLA Film and Television Archive; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Margaret Herrick Library; the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center; the George Eastman Museum; the New York Public Library; the Museum of Modern Art; the Library of Congress; the British Film Institute; and Nga¯ Taonga Sound and Vision, the New Zealand Archive of Film, TV and Sound. I also take my hat off to the amazing work by the online Media History Digital Library. The time and resources required to visit these many archives, sometimes for weeks at a time, would not have been available were it not for another group of kind supporters. Syracuse University granted me a yearlong research leave to accomplish much of the archival work. I want to personally thank Ann Clarke, former dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, who has been a benefactor and friend throughout much of my career. I also want to acknowledge my colleagues at Syracuse University and several classes of patient “Rhetoric of Film” students who have listened to me ramble on about the importance of early cinematic practices. I am particularly indebted to the patient counsel of several colleagues, specifically Charles E. Morris III, Erin Rand, Lindsey Decker, Matt Fee, and Roger Hallas. xii

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One other important part of my Syracuse University family has been the many supportive alumni who have offered suggestions and support. A few deserve special recognition. Kevin and Lauren Kern gave me much appreciated support and friendship during my time in Los Angeles and helped me navigate the world of California film archives. I also want to acknowledge Marylyn and Chuck Ginsburg Klaus, supportive Syracuse alumni who have become dear friends. I will always cherish the memories of dinners with them, during which Chuck and I talked about horror films and Marylyn tried to change the subject. I could not have completed this project without their generous support. Bits and pieces of this project have been shared in various forums over the past few years. I am particularly grateful to the engaged audiences at the University of Denver, Pennsylvania State University, and Penn State Berks for their thoughtful engagement with early versions of these arguments. Additionally, a portion of the argument in chapter 3 was presented at a panel at the 2016 National Communication Association Convention in Philadelphia. Beyond formal presentations, I have benefited greatly from many colleagues throughout the discipline who have provided guidance and encouragement, including Tom Benson, Bernadette Calafell, Cara Finnegan, Joshua Gunn, Casey Ryan Kelly, Claire Sisco King, Scott Poole, Michelle Ramsey, and Paul Stob. Given that the journey of this book began with a cantankerous bat in Austin, Texas, it seems fitting that that is also where it should end. I am deeply thankful to the great folks at the University of Texas Press for their support and guidance. Jim Burr has been a model of patience and wisdom throughout this process, and I have enjoyed working with him and all the staff to bring this book to fruition. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers who gave numerous helpful suggestions. Finally, I must acknowledge the person to whom this book is dedicated: Catherine Thomas. Without her love and support—and patience as I trekked around the planet searching out old films and crumbling documents—this project would not have been possible, and my world would be a much darker place.

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A Place of Darkness

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Introduction CI N E M A, GE N R E , NAT ION

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HOUGH OFTEN R EVILED OR DISMISSED, HOR ROR remains one of the most enduringly popular genres in cinema history. Even in the era of big-budget, effects-driven blockbusters, small-budget horror films can draw large audiences. In 2014, for instance, a low-budget horror film titled Annabelle, about a possessed doll, grossed more than $252 million in worldwide sales. There are many similar examples.¹ The precursor to Annabelle, The Conjuring (2013), grossed $320 million globally.² And there is also the hugely successful Paranormal Activity (2009), which grossed more than $100 million in the United States alone with an estimated production budget of only $15,000; its sequel, Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), grossed nearly $85 million.³ Beyond impressive box-office numbers, however, many intelligent, independent productions and filmmakers have also garnered critical acclaim. David Sims described Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out as “an atmospheric, restrained, extremely effective work of horror with a clear point of view” and declared it “one of the wryest, funniest, most relevant films of the year.”4 A. O. Scott wrote in the New York Times that the Australian horror film The Babadook (2014) was “brilliant” and described it as “tenderness, longing, resentment and all kinds of other emotional baggage . . . folded . . . into a highly effective little ghost story.”5 And Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times praised the Iranian-born filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour’s vampire tale A Girl Walks Alone at Night (2014) as “a mesmerizing taste of Amirpour’s work, filled with enough creative invention to whet the appetite for more.”6 Put simply, the current state of horror films is strong. Indeed, when considering the history of horror films, at least within the American context, truly weak moments among the genre are relatively few and 1

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far between. Surely there are times when the innovative nature of horror films seems to have run its course. Yet each time the genre falls into a rut, a new film comes along to redefine the genre, transgress audience expectations, and create a new model to energize the next generation of filmmakers. Occasional moments of languor aside, the horror genre has remained vibrant, provocative, and popular since at least 1931, the watershed year for horror filmmaking, with each new era finding its own vision of fear. The Gothic monsters of the 1930s were redefined by the creature features of the 1950s, which in turn were redefined by the brutal nihilism of the 1960s, then the slashers of the 1980s, and so on.7 The history of the horror film—from Dracula (1931) to Get Out—has been traced by many scholars, including me, in pursuit of genealogical similarities and deviations. Often, these tracings have begun with the premieres of Dracula and Frankenstein, also released in 1931. The popularity of these two films spawned a generation of what are now often termed the “Universal monsters”—the Mummy, Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon—but also led Variety at the time to declare the beginning of the “horror cycle.”8 Although the term horror had been occasionally used in relation to films before 1931, it gained almost immediate acceptance as the label attached to Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and their cohort of Gothic monster characters and has remained the language to identify and frame the numerous and widely divergent films that followed.9 Given the popularity of the horror film and the elasticity of the genre, it is worth pausing at the moment when the genre, or at least its language, emerged. There is an interesting hinge moment—which I return to in the conclusion of this book—between the February release of Dracula and the November premiere of Frankenstein. In gearing up the promotion for its vampire film, the publicity machine at Universal Studios clearly struggled with language to describe the filmic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s popular novel (or to be more accurate, a filmic adaptation of the popular Hamilton Deane and John Balderston stage play).¹0 In the end, although entertaining promotional phrases such as “CHILLING HORRORS OF THE NIGHT” and simply “HORRORS!” worked well enough, they settled on something more ambiguous: “The story of the strangest passion the world has ever known!”¹¹ Just two months later, Variety would describe the popular vampire film and the forthcoming monster tale as the beginning of the “horror cycle,” and the new language would be quickly adopted. Six months later, as the same publicity machine was gearing up for Frankenstein, the language of horror had become much more comfortable. On promotional material outside theaters, a banner 2

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FIGUR E 1. Promotion for Universal’s Frankenstein (released November 1931). Photo: Duke Wellington Photographs, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.

declared Frankenstein to be “THE CHILLING HORROR AND ICY MYSTERY OF A HUNDRED THRILLING TALES FROZEN INTO A SUPERB EPIC OF TERROR” (fig. 1). One of the film’s promotional posters declared it to be “the original horror show.”¹² The language of horror introduced during the period in between these two films became intimately linked to the many films that would follow—shaping the creative visions of directors, even those who intentionally sought to transgress the parameters of the genre, and the expectations of audiences ever since. Prior to 1931, at least when seen through a discursive frame, there were no horror films—the language of horror had not yet solidified into a definable genre. With the introduction of this language the genre of horror can be seen as coming into existence. Ultimately, we could not talk about the enduring popularity or transgressive nature of horror films without the emergence of this language in 1931. Although the language of the horror film can be reliably said to have emerged, or at least gained popular usage, in 1931, the elements that constitute much of what we call “horror” were already present. Indeed, 3

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many of these elements—monsters, ghosts, haunted houses, witches, and assorted evil—were remarkably widespread. As early as 1896, short, so-called trick films incorporated devils and demons and monsters with remarkable regularity. Films of the early 1900s were replete with haunted houses, haunted hotels, haunted shops, and haunted rooms, along with witches and mystics of all varieties. Edison Studios produced a version of Frankenstein in 1910. There were film versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.  Hyde as early as 1908 and of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1911. One can also note a critically acclaimed trio of German films—The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and Nosferatu (1922), among others—or the big-budget Universal versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Yet, despite these films’ prominence—numerically, culturally, cinematically—and their similarity to the films released after 1931, critics at the time did not characterize them as “horror” films. By and large, scholars of the horror film have dealt with these earlier films in one of two ways. Some more or less ignore the language issue and count these earlier films as part of the genre or, in a slightly more nuanced way, as part of a kind of proto-genre. Bruce Kawin, for instance, engages a variety of films, including those produced before the popular usage of the term horror film, by utilizing a more conceptual definition: “the horror film is defined by its recurring elements . . . by its attitudes towards those elements . . . and by its goal: to frighten and revolt the audience.”¹³ This choice focuses on the constitutive elements of the genre—the appearance of ghosts or witches, the motif of the haunted house, the creepy mise-en-scène, and the like—rather than on its language. This approach mirrors what Rick Altman describes as the “semiotic” approach to genre, which seeks essential and ahistorical elements of the narrative construction as the defining qualities of any genre. It also follows Altman’s “syntactic” approach, which describes the core relationship between elements—in this case a relationship marked by fear and revulsion.¹4 A second strategy, one I have used in previous scholarship, has been to highlight instead the discursive frame for the genre. As James Naremore suggests, genre can be thought of as “a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings, helping to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies.”¹5 Crucial here is the language used for framing these arguments and readings—or as Andrew Tudor puts it, “genre is a conception existing in the culture of any particular group or society; it is not a way in which a critic classifies film for methodological purposes, but the much looser way in which an audience classifies its 4

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films.”¹6 Although the question of genre will be discussed more thoroughly in a later section of this introduction, what is useful here is to note the simple discursive definition of genre: if we call a film a “horror film,” then it is; if not, then it is not. For horror scholars pursuing (even tacitly) this definition of the genre, the horror genre begins in 1931 with the emergence of the discursive framework and its concomitant aesthetic and narrative choices and expectations. This approach is evident in Roy Kinnard’s insistence that “the horror genre was officially born in the early sound era, on November 16, 1931,” with the release of Frankenstein. Prior to this, Kinnard contends, “there were not horror movies as the public thinks of them today.”¹7 My purpose in this book is to pursue the middle ground between these broad and crudely rendered stances. On one hand, there were a surprising number of films released between 1896 and 1931 that dealt with elements that would later constitute the horror film: castles, cobwebs, monsters, maniacal killers, magical curses, avenging ghosts, and undead creatures. On the other hand, these films were not described, defined, or constituted by the language of horror. They were, in a discursive sense, not horror films. Given that both these statements are true, what were they called? If Frankenstein in 1931 and Dr. Jekyll and Mr.  Hyde in 1932 were truly horror films, what about Frankenstein in 1910 and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1908 (or even 1920)? This is the question that I try to answer in this book. In some ways, this book can be understood as a kind of prehistory of the horror film or, perhaps more accurately, as a genealogy. What were the ancestors whose odd comingling and interactions set the stage for the birth of horror films in 1931? In part, this means asking how the elements that would later constitute horror films, which I will often refer to as “horrific elements,” were treated within these films. But it also means exploring how horrific elements and the films that utilized them were discussed at the time. Rhona Berenstein, for instance, argues that generic elements circulated within films during the first decades of cinema but did not fall within a “generic label.”¹8 So if the language of genre had not stabilized, what were the discursive frames for horrific elements prior to the establishment of the language of “horror”? What did such frames mean, and how did they change between 1896 and 1931? One of the conceits used here is that the way in which horrific elements were treated in early cinema is a question not merely of film history or even of genre but also of national culture. There is a clear linkage between the contours of cinema and the ongoing development of national identity. This is, in short, an approach to national cinema that 5

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focuses on the way cinematic texts—by which I mean both the films themselves and the way those films were discursively framed in public—help to elaborate, instigate, or interrogate a sense of national identity. Augmenting my interest in national cinema is my sense (shared by numerous other scholars) that tales of horror and terror are intimately bound up in questions of nationhood and national identity. Adam Lowenstein, for example, provides a compelling and insightful analysis of the way art-horror films have operated along the edges of historic traumas and national identity.¹9 Similarly, Linnie Blake contends that “horror cinema is ideally positioned to expose the psychological, social[,] and cultural ramifications of the ideological expedient will to ‘bind up the nation’s wounds.’”²0 Even more broadly, various scholars have justified their interest in horror film in part because of its general connection to points of social tension, conflict, and fear. Paul Wells captures this founding assumption, noting that “the history of the horror film is essentially a history of anxiety in the twentieth century.”²¹ This book seeks to explore the history of fear, trauma, and anxiety as reflected in films containing horrific elements prior to 1931 in order to better understand the cinematic and discursive frames within which these elements were presented and understood. Such an approach attends to the existence of specific constituent elements—similar to the proto-genre approach outlined above. But in attempting to navigate the middle ground between the proto-genre and discursive approaches, I pursue this genealogy not solely in terms of filmic elements but also in terms of the complex interplay between these films and the language used to describe, categorize, and frame them. I ask, in other words, quite literally: What were these early films, which employed the elements we would later understand to be part of horror but were not identified as horror films? How were they talked and written about? And how did these presentations and understandings relate to the broader cultural history of their filmmakers and audiences? Navigating this ground will not be easy. Such an effort is prone to fall into anachronistic thinking, to project backward the elements and expectations of a genre that would not actually emerge for decades. How can one be sure, a critic might ask, that audiences in 1907 would have understood a witch as a character evoking fear and a sense of the supernatural or even as substantively different from a cowboy, a damsel in distress, or a firefighter? Numerous historians of early cinema have warned against precisely this kind of anachronistic genre-construction and recommend treating early films not as proto-genres for later cinema but, instead, as a unique 6

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cultural phenomenon. Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, for instance, have powerfully argued for the recognition of an early “cinema of attractions” that is not to be identified with later cinematic practices but, rather, exists as its own unique cultural form separate from (though related to) what would later become cinema proper. In this formulation it is tempting to subsume these early filmic depictions of ghosts and monsters within the broad cine-genres of the trick films—what Gunning calls the “genre of discontinuity”—or comedies. In chapter 1 (“Superstition and the Shock of Attraction”), I suggest that trick films dealing with horrific figures had unique qualities that differentiated them from other films of discontinuity and, in turn, had a unique relationship to broader issues in American culture at the time. Discussions of the supernatural and of superstition in general were widespread in the late nineteenth century, and the early trick films dealing with ghosts and witches can be seen as deeply engaged with the broader cultural dynamics around credulity and the attraction to what contemporaries called the “marvelous.”²² I seek to interrogate how these horrific elements were discussed and what kinds of cultural work they were understood to be performing. In chapter 2 (“Weird and Gloomy Tales”), I observe a growing tendency to conflate the appearance of supernatural and horrific elements with foreignness through the use of the term weird. Although that word has a long association with the uncanny aspects of fate, its use in the early 1900s can be seen as associating tales of the supernatural with a kind of Old World, foreign, and backward type of thinking that stood in contrast to a growing sense of American national character as rational, empirical, and progressive. Just as American filmmakers and commentators began pushing, around 1907, for the development of truly American films and narratives, the supernatural and marvelous elements common in earlier years became associated with a style of filmmaking that was deemed decisively un-American. Chapter 3 (“Superstitious Joe and the Rise of the American Uncanny”) explores the way American filmmakers took up horrific elements through what I call the “American uncanny.” Here I am borrowing Tzvetan Todorov’s notion of the literary form of the uncanny, a narrative form in which the apparently supernatural is eventually explained away as an illusion or trick. In the American films produced in the 1910s, the uncanny narrative operated not simply through the pleasure of resolving the seemingly fantastic but also with the pleasure of viewing the foolishness of the individual who mistook the natural for the supernatural. Throughout 7

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numerous films and across various generic frames, a theme (the “folly of superstition”) operated to reinforce a rational, pragmatic American mind-set and to suggest what types of individuals—women, the poor, the rural, people of color—were not capable of achieving this rational national character. Although often positioned as foolishness, Americans continued to be interested in horrific elements throughout the early decades of film. Chapter 4 (“Literary Monsters”) explores one of the dominant frames through which horrific elements were presented: the literary adaptation. As early as Edison’s 1910 adaptation Frankenstein, film producers framed their use of the horrific within the parameters of “great literature.” This trend continued into the 1920s, with numerous prominent films drawn from important novels: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Adapting great works of literature provided a rhetorical justification for the inclusion of horrific and increasingly gruesome elements and also helped to establish cinema as an artistic endeavor in and of itself. The increasing complexity of cinematic narratives gave rise not only to these epics but also to a popular variation on the superstitious genre: the mystery thriller. These films are the focus of chapter 5 (“Mysteries in Old Dark Houses”). In films such as The Cat and The Canary (1927) and Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), the mystery thriller—often set in some dark old mansion—would provide the vehicle through which horrific elements became more explicitly frightening and grotesque. The mystery thrillers thereby represented a crucial shift in the American cinematic depiction of the horrific. No longer were audiences merely observing the apparently marvelous elements of the screen; now the audience was actively engaged in the mystery of these elements and the pleasure of seeking to discern the reality or unreality of the mysterious happenings depicted on-screen. Although these films maintained the stance of incredulity, their Gothic settings, mysterious happenings, and horrifying creatures began to push the boundaries of the skeptical American cinematic frame, especially as filmmakers began introducing sound technology. The discussion concludes at the moment the horror film genre begins in 1931: the premieres of Dracula and Frankenstein. The popularity of these films led some commentators and officials of the Production Code Administration (PCA) to worry about the growing trend of “gruesome pictures” and about Universal’s horror cycle. These concerns may have been warranted. The enthusiastic public response to these films caused a fundamental transformation in the way horrific el8

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ements would be culturally understood. Once the rhetorical frame of the horror film was introduced to a nation of consumers, it was almost universally embraced and explains how American audiences have come to understand horrific cinematic elements. From my perspective, the key to the current project is to understand it not as an exercise in early film history—something already done far more expertly by others—but as an effort in rhetorical studies. Although often understood either in its most traditional rendering as public speeches by political figures or in the pejorative sense as “empty talk,” I understand the art of rhetoric to be engaged in the complex interplay between text and context. Rhetorical criticism provides a means of exploring public discussions and the complex ways in which ideas are forwarded, critiqued, and transformed. To borrow Donald Bryant’s notion, rhetoric is a question of how we “adjust ideas to people and people to ideas.”²³ Bryant’s focus on the processes of adjustment is useful, though his assumption of some intentional agent who is doing the “adjusting” is, perhaps, misleading. The complex processes by which we come to understand films, to view them in particular ways, to talk about them, to categorize them, and to evaluate them are driven not by one group or another but by the interplay between many actors and networks. My focus is not on only one participant in this process but, instead, on the dynamic intersection between the films, the artists who made them, the audiences who viewed them, and the broader cultural moments in which these interactions occurred. For me, the best way to approach this complex process is through the lens of rhetoric. Numerous scholars have engaged the broader project of exploring the rhetoric of film. As David Blakesley notes, these projects have worked along diverse lines exploring the constitution of film meaning, including: the unique language of cinematic practice; the ideological meanings within filmic texts; and the unique intersection between particular films and the rhetorical situation within which they attain meaning. Summarizing these diverse projects, Blakesely contends: “Film rhetoric—the visual and verbal signs and strategies that shape film experience—directs our attention in countless ways, but always with the aim of fostering identification and all that that complex phenomenon implies.” In some ways, the current project seeks to pursue these strands of rhetorical research by exploring the construction of the cinematic language of the horrific, recognizing the way this construction engaged broad and shifting ideological dimensions of American culture, and the ways this shifting culture created the unique rhetorical situation within which horrific cinematic elements shifted and changed.²4 9

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A rhetorical approach allows me to pursue the construction of the cinematic language of the horrific in both the films themselves and their reception. My attention to individual films, then, is driven not so much by interest in formal qualities or other theoretical frames but by the way they became meaningful to audiences at the time of their dissemination. In this way, as Casey Kelly puts it, “the rhetoric of film is less about film aesthetics and form than it is about how a film ‘makes sense’ in a particular cultural context.”²5 Conversely, though some of this sense-making is driven by textual elements within the films themselves, it is also driven by the broader discourses surrounding the films—ideologies, critical receptions, promotional materials, and so on. By also attending to these discourses, I am pursuing what Cara Finnegan suggests is a “rhetorical history” of viewing practices. In her masterful analysis of early photography, Finnegan attends to the way audiences viewed early photographs and negotiated the “implicit but distinct and readily available repertoire for talking about photography” and, in so doing, elaborates a “rhetorical history that considers how photography animated particular ways of seeing and habits of response among viewers.”²6 My efforts here are to construct a similar rhetorical history of the viewing practices prevalent during the emergence of cinema in the United States. I pursue this through the response to horrific elements, which, as I will seek to demonstrate, played an important role in inculcating a particular viewing ethic among American filmgoers. By focusing on the relation between horrific elements and the emergence of American cinema, I do not intend to only examine films produced by American companies; I also look at the way films produced elsewhere were promoted, discussed, and received by audiences within the American context. In this way, this book will need to move carefully between the rhetorical dimensions within individual films, the discourses surrounding their production and promotion, and the discourses surrounding their reception. My rhetorical approach to the problem of the prehistory of the horror film places the emphasis on the texts as the primary evidence for the arguments I will seek to advance. This is not to suggest that more recent theoretical treatments of horror, Gothic, film, and the like do not inform my work but to say that they typically function in the background—providing critical tools by which I examine the historical circulation of films and filmic elements. My goal, in other words, is not so much to find new ways of understanding the depiction of horrific elements in early films but, instead, to discern the ways they were un10

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derstood within their context. My hope, of course, is that this analysis of the historical rhetoric surrounding these films may provide some useful implications for those seeking to offer broader theoretical treatments of the genre and its elements. Pursuing what might be called the rhetorical problem of horror’s prehistory requires engaging in several complex areas within film studies. In the remainder of this chapter, I will sketch out three of these areas and rehearse some of the major arguments and insights from their respective literatures in an effort to craft a reasonable theoretical and critical approach for this work: First, how can we effectively approach early cinema history without overly exoticizing it or anachronistically projecting our understanding or expectations upon it? Second, even if we can develop a reasonable method for approaching distant cinematic texts, how can we seek the elements of a genre that did not yet exist? And third, even if we can develop a reasonable genealogy of the ancestors that would later form the horror genre, what relationship does this exercise in genre prehistory have to broader questions of national and cultural identity? These three broader academic conversations, about history, genre, and nation, serve as the framework for this project and establish the broad parameters within which I will seek to trace the ancestry of the horror film.

Approaching Early Film History Since the groundbreaking 1978 Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film Conference in Brighton, England, interest in early cinema has increased. Although there were numerous prominent scholars working on issues related to early cinema prior to this event, as Charles Musser notes, “many of these scholars were working in isolation.”²7 Simon Popple and Joe Kember argue that the Brighton event was “the birth of early film history as a substantial academic discipline.” They contend that the conference began a “process of re-evaluation or revision” of how early cinema should be approached, its relationship to modern cinematic practices, and the relationship among archives, historical research, criticism, and theory.²8 The growing scholarship in the area of early film history has moved beyond attention to technological or biographical issues and sought to push the boundaries of how we approach early cinematic practices through recognition of the complex intersections of technology, artistry, politics, economics, and culture within which cinema emerged. André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning 11

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insist that those studying early cinema recognize that “above all, cinema is a complex sociocultural phenomenon rather than something one ‘invents.’”²9 Perhaps the most central lesson arising out of the attention to the unique aspects of early cinema has been the admonition to avoid anachronistic thinking. When I screen early films for my students, they are often quick to point out the similarities between early film practices, narratives, and themes and more recent films. In this way, one is tempted, at least at first glance, to view early films as protean or primitive versions of the films that would follow. In a way, something similar to this form of thinking has guided those who approach the appearance and treatment of horrific elements in early films as not yet fully formed versions of the genre that was to come. In this logic, the short one-reel films of Georges Méliès were simply awaiting the arrival of multiplereel technology and then the arrival of sound technology to grow fully into the Universal monster films they were seeking to become. There is, of course, no evidence to suggest that Méliès was struggling in anticipation of technology to come or that audiences watching those original short films at vaudeville shows or carnivals were biding their time waiting for the arrival of the nickelodeon or the movie palace or surround sound. Although I have taken this line of thinking to an absurd level, I mean to underscore the importance of approaching different historical periods with sensitivity to the cinematic art as it was practiced and not in contrast to what would follow. Gunning forcefully makes the point: “The essential gesture of recent reexamination of the history of early film lies in a rejection of linear models. Rejecting biological schemes of infancy and maturity that were abandoned long ago in the history of other art forms, researchers avoided viewing cinema’s first decades as embryonic forms of later practices or stuttering attempts at later achievements.” Instead, Gunning urges attention not to an imagined continuity but instead to a recognition of “a jagged rhythm of competing practices . . . practices whose modes and models were not necessarily sketches or approximations of later cinema.”³0 Pursuing this jagged rhythm requires a careful attention to the shifting nature of cinematic practices as influenced by technology, cultural tastes, exhibition practices, narrative conceits, and a host of other variables, which Barbara Klinger has suggested as a kind of “histoire totale,” providing a “panoramic view of the contexts most associated with cinema’s social and historical conditions of existence.”³¹ The scope of this volume includes numerous periods in the history 12

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of early cinema, and a truly nuanced and detailed “total history” of these periods would require several volumes and has already been extensively studied by others.³² The present work, then, has the advantage of standing upon the shoulders of these earlier scholarly works and using them as guides to trace not the total history of cinema itself but rather a particular set of elements as they are utilized, revised, and transformed across these periods of time. As suggested earlier, horrific elements have been a fairly constant part of cinematic practices since at least 1896. Roy Kinnard, in his comprehensive filmography of these periods, counts 1,130 “horror” films between 1896 and 1929, with numerous films appearing in each year during this span. Horrific elements also appear consistently from the very earliest days of the public projection of moving images, which Gaudreault and Gunning termed the “cinema of attractions.” This period, prior to the rise of movie theaters, saw cinematic projections largely occurring in vaudeville shows or at carnivals, and, as Gunning notes, the focus was often on “early cinema’s fascination with novelty and its foregrounding of the act of display.” These early films—actualities from everyday life, sporting events, dancers or acrobats performing, and even short magical trick films—had relatively little emphasis on narrative development. The events shown on the screen were “absorbed by a cinematic gesture of presentation, and it was this technological means of representation that constituted the initial fascination with cinema.”³³ Crucially, audiences often described their experience with these first projected images in the language of the supernatural (see chapter  1). Maxim Gorky famously described his experience with the Lumière films: “It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows. Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep, come to mind.”³4 Alice Rix described her first experience of moving pictures as reminiscent of “a long-forgotten childish terror,” the images emerging “from the mysterious beyond where awful shadows lived and moved with a frightful rapidity and made no sounds at all.”³5 Even these early films, of people walking out of a factory or of boxers pantomiming a match, were the cause of some level of discomfort, and while this disease would fade away with the growing popularity of moving pictures, the connection to the shadowy world of the supernatural would continue. Early filmmakers soon moved beyond the actuality to produce a variety of early narrative films. Among the popular early genres were slapstick comedies, often including a chase, and others borrowed more directly from live theater, such as brief scenes from popular plays or trick 13

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films depicting stage magicians practicing their acts of legerdemain. More germane to the present topic was the rise of magical trick films, which utilized special effects such as stop-camera tricks and splices to create fantastic illusions (see chapter 1). Although the trick films of the era utilized a variety of narrative frameworks, many were developed along lines of superstitious folklore and spiritualist beliefs. By 1903, films were becoming longer and often contained multiple shots. This shift led to what Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer describe as “a shift in the balance in individual films between attractions and the framework of narrative.”³6 It also began to shift the locus of artistic and narrative choices. Early one-reel films could be combined and recombined by exhibitors who decided in what order and how much of any given one-scene attraction was shown. As films grew longer and entailed several, interrelated shots, the organization and editing of films fell increasingly under the power of the filmmakers. The popularity of these longer films supported the introduction and rapid expansion of theaters devoted largely, and eventually exclusively, to screening moving pictures. By 1905 there was such a rapid expansion of these small, often storefront, theaters—typically charging a nickel for their slate of films—that it is often referred to as the “nickelodeon boom,” and it was this boom that would bring major changes to the production, distribution, and exhibition of moving pictures. The nickelodeon boom created a great new hunger for film production and also sparked a kind of moral panic. Nickelodeon theaters were largely associated with poor, urban, and often immigrant neighborhoods. Writing in 1911, midway through the moving picture’s second decade, Michael Marks Davis captured much of this anxiety when he described the nickelodeon theater as “a place of darkness, physical and moral.”³7 Nickelodeons were commonly depicted as dirty places filled with uneducated workers and children, and many of the moral reformers of the day railed against not only the often unsanitary and dangerous conditions of these theaters—the flammability of early celluloid made theater fires a constant concern—but also the perception that the films screened were further degrading the unfortunates who frequented them. Writing in 1908, John Collier famously described the nickelodeon theater as a “carnival of vulgarity, suggestiveness, and violence.”³8 Reformers’ outrage aside, the popularity of moving pictures continued to grow, and during the first several years of the 1900s the industry went through various shifts. And for a period American screens were dominated by films produced overseas, many of them from France, 14

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where Pathé Frères and other companies became associated with innovative, high-quality films. By 1908, the American film industry began to solidify around a consortium claiming patent rights to projector mechanisms, officially called the Motion Picture Patents Company but popularly known as the “Trust.” The Trust, as one of its founders, Thomas Armat, would later recount, primarily benefited “the Edison Company, the Biograph Company, and the Armat Moving Pictures Company,” but it soon faced competition from both the French companies and rival American companies, most notably the Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), led by Carl Laemmle Sr., founder of Universal Studios.³9 Over the next several years, American film producers and commentators would begin a sustained push for American films for American audiences, and by 1910 American film companies would dominate American screens (see chapter 2). This push for American dominance would function not only economically but also culturally as American filmmakers and audiences struggled to define what would constitute “American films.” The effort to create a uniquely American cinematic form paralleled the broader effort to establish cinema as a unique art form in its own right. During these early years, moving pictures still relied heavily on other mediums for their content and structure—mediums such as novels, plays, and folklore. As Rick Altman contends, “Until around 1910, what we today call cinema found itself in this thoroughly intermedial situation. Torn between several media, all of them wishing to appropriate its technological novelty, cinema emerged from intermediality only after having been definitively separated from all these other media.”40 Gaudreault has argued that cinema as a proper institution did not exist prior to 1910. During this earlier period, which Gaudreault called “kinematography,” the projection of moving pictures was still a nebulous cultural practice, one in which there was no clear sense of what it meant to produce a moving picture or to view one. It was only around 1910 that the “institution” of cinema, as Gaudreault puts it, began to emerge; a growing, though not entirely stable, sense of cultural rules and guidelines for interpretation became established. It was around this time that periodicals devoted to moving pictures would appear (Moving Picture World debuted in 1907 in the United States), and soon there would be an increasingly clear sense of how to understand a film—techniques such as fade-ins or inserts—and also of the place of the cinematic arts in American popular culture. The idea of movie stars, for instance, emerged out of inquiries to these magazines about the various actors associated with particular studios. It did not 15

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take long for the studios to realize the economic potential of promoting these stars. By 1910 Kalem Pictures was promoting its stars through posters featuring their photographs as well as their names.4¹ The increasing profitability of the motion picture industry by 1911 afforded studios the chance to begin hiring well-established stage actors, and, as Janet Staiger argues, “by 1912 the ‘star system’—with legitimate theatrical stars—arrived.”4² For present purposes the rise of this star system would lend legitimacy to a series of films throughout the 1920s, featuring the star most associated with the gruesome and macabre, Lon Chaney (see chapters 4 and 5). The 1910s also saw the emergence of what would become known as the “classical narrative” style, a style that would dominate most commercial filmmaking up to the present day. As Gunning notes in his influential study of the early films of D. W. Griffith, with whom this narrative turn is most often associated, the emergence of these classical narrative films “both responded to and affected a broad transformation of film in American culture.” The shift to the classical narrative meant a move away from the exhibition-focused cinema of attractions, in which the act of display was the primary focus of attention, and toward what Gunning describes as “the witnessing of a self-contained story within a coherent diegesis.”4³ The new narrative paradigm would emphasize a kind of rational linearity in film narratives and a diminution of the kind of anarchic, spectacular tricks that characterized the early years of cinematic attractions. As Rick Altman contends, the classical narrative “stressed omniscient narration, linear presentation, character-centered causality, and psychological motivation.”44 This shift in the cinematic language of film is evident in the discussion about the emergence of films focused on the folly of superstition, a theme that would remain relatively constant in American films until the premiere of Dracula (see chapter 3). Across this period, from roughly 1913 until 1931, the spectacle of the superstitious and supernatural would be largely framed within the linear, coherent narrative of American rationality and incredulity. The final major development in film history I would like to address here is the emergence of sound technology in the 1920s. Robert Spadoni argues that the emergence of sound technology was not so much a natural evolution of the moving picture for audiences at the time but rather a strange and unsettling addition to the way moving pictures were experienced. It is, of course, worth recalling that early motion pictures were rarely “silent,” as many would be accompanied by organs, soundeffect machines, and in the early years even lecturers who narrated 16

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the action. But the introduction of synchronized sound and speech, as Spadoni has demonstrated, defamiliarized the familiar experience of moviegoing and created an eerie and disconcerting atmosphere for audiences. The introduction of synchronous sound played an important role in films with horrific elements as early as 1928 (see chapter 5). The preceding sketch of film history is, of course, inadequate, and the reader interested in more details about these and the many other complex forces colliding to shape film history should seek out the excellent work of the historians cited throughout this volume. What I hope to have accomplished in this brief rehearsal is a sense of the many ways in which the experience of cinema has changed. In the pages that follow, I do not seek a singular, unified story of “what the pre-horror film meant” but rather to trace the various and shifting meanings projected horrific elements might have had for their audiences. I wish to seek, as Gaudreault puts it, both the “ruptures and continuities that make up history.”45 In this regard, a broad understanding of the different historical, cultural, and industrial forces is vital context for the genealogical work to follow.

Approaching Film Genre The difficulty of reaching back into the past to gain a sense of how groups of films were understood is compounded by my attempt to place a set of films into a grouping that is admittedly imposed decades after the fact. Although I believe I can show a good deal of evidence that, for example, the term weird came to be associated with a particular type of film and that there seemed to be connotations to this term, I have no evidence that anyone thought of the many films discussed as constituting a unique class of “weird” films (see chapter 2). My goal, however, is not to seek a genre where none existed but rather to explore a set of relationships. This problem is not entirely unique to this study. Gunning, for instance, notes that in spite of the popularity of genre as a concept in film studies, “almost no one agrees precisely on what the term denotes or in the manner in which genres are to be distinguished and determined.”46 This lack of clarity is compounded in a way by the fact that the genre whose genealogy I am seeking to trace was not named by audiences or producers during the period I am examining. In a way, this is always a problem with the study of genre, which, as Gunning also notes, “is inevitably a post facto construction.” Genres are often thought of as lists of films that share some set of 17

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qualities. Rick Altman observes two tendencies in the construction of such lists. At times, they are thought of as “inclusive” in that they seek a complete corpus of films that share a particular quality. At other times, an “exclusive” list is presented with a few primary exemplars that serve as a pantheon of titles against which all other films are measured.47 The problem with this thinking is that it can lead to a kind of platonic ideal in which there is a pure idea of the genre, against which any new example is judged as either living up to or failing. And, so, genre criticism often falls into debates about whether particular films fit into a genre, shift or transform a genre, or ought be thought of as ideal examples of a genre. All of these debates, of course, presuppose—or, perhaps better, impose upon a group of diverse filmic texts—the kind of post facto categorization noted by Gunning. The study of horror, I would venture, is particularly prone to this kind or thinking. Steffen Hantke has observed an overarching tendency among critics of the horror genre to declare the current era inadequate and to utilize this rhetoric of the genre’s decline to justify a return to some purer and more classical phase. Hantke chastises horror scholars for their tendency to eschew the contemporary and to choose instead a strategy of “withdrawal to a safe position of canonicity.”48 Joe Tompkins observes a similar anxiety evident in the tendency of horror scholars to lavish praise and critical attention on earlier classic works and auteurs. Whatever politically interesting or subversive work the horror film might be imagined to perform is left to the films of “a handful of canonical (in some cases, overtly political) auteurs,” with other, less interesting (and usually more recent) works doomed by their failure to measure up.49 In spite of the theoretical or critical problems associated with it, the notion of genre remains useful. By creating a set of expectations about a text, genres help, as Carolyn Miller notes, to make texts meaningful and establish some of “the conventions of discourse” that allow members of society to “act together.”50 In relation to film, Leo Baudry observes that genre becomes one of the crucial ways in which films connect with other traditions in the arts and, thus, invite audiences into “a seemingly familiar world, filled with reassuring stereotypes of character, action, and plot.”5¹ Of course, often this appearance of familiarity also provides the grounds upon which the audience experiences the pleasure of narrative transgression—a move that, as I have argued elsewhere, often characterizes successful horror films.5² Thought of in this way, genres provide some basic framework within which filmmakers, promoters, audiences, and critics can seek to interpret films in some 18

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relatively predictable fashion. As cinema became institutionalized, genres played an important role in the commercial marketing of films and became a concept increasingly familiar to audiences, who began to identify themselves, as they do now, as fans of particular genres of film. Engaging genres in a meaningful and conceptually nuanced way requires critics not to become too enamored with the particular parameters they imagine define the genre or with the pantheon of exemplars they think epitomize it. In his influential treatment of genre theory, Altman recommends approaching genres not as a fi xed system of ideals but as a fluid and corrigible set of historically situated meanings. In Altman’s theory, film genres should be studied for the interplay between their semantic elements (characters, settings, etc.) and the syntactic relationship between these elements.5³ Something similar to Altman’s approach is evident in Noël Carroll’s study of the concept of horror in which he defines the genre through two crucial elements. First, there must be a monster, which Carroll defines as a being whose existence violates natural categories such as living and dead. Second, the monster must be treated as threatening and frightening by those within the diegetic world of the narrative.54 Although Casper the Friendly Ghost is a living dead creature, and thus a monster, he is not treated as repulsive and threatening, at least not by the key participants in the narrative. In this way, the monster serves as the crucial semantic element for a horror narrative, and the sense of threat and fear serves as the crucial syntactic relation. Fear is one of the crucial syntactic relationships not only within the filmic text but also within the broader cultural language.55 There is clearly some affective dimension associated with the horror genre, but tracing this sense is remarkably difficult. In part, the difficulty arises in the shifting language of fear. After 1931, films seeking to attract audiences wanting to be frightened had the clear language of horror. Prior to this period, the language is less clear, encompassing terms such as weird, startling, thrilling, and mysterious. Beyond the shifts in rhetorical framing, the notion of fear itself is a broad concept. There are numerous ways in which audiences might feel fear, ranging from the shock of a sudden startle to the creation of an eerie atmosphere. So, the concept of fear itself will be seen as an evolving notion within this cinematic history. Even the well-worn concept of the uncanny, a kind of unease often associated with the mise-en-scène of the horror film, can be observed as shifting in tone and texture throughout the early portrayals of horrific elements. In chapter 1, for instance, I employ Ernst Jentsch’s 19

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sense of the uncanny as a problem of perception in order to explore the way early audiences often felt unsettled by projected moving images. As horrific elements became increasingly wrapped up in narrative structures (see chapter 2), I suggest that Sigmund Freud’s more celebrated sense of the uncanny as an outgrowth of repression is a helpful tool for exploring the sensation created by supernatural narratives. In my discussion of films that portray the folly of superstition (see chapter 3), I engage Tzvetan Todorov’s literary definition of the uncanny as a genre in which the seemingly fantastic is explained away in the end and “the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena” (see chapter 5).56 So, even the affective feelings of fear, unease, and the uncanny can be seen as shifting across the historical periods as cinematic style, cultural history, and audience tastes interact. Importantly, Altman urges that all these generic elements be understood in terms of the shifting of continuities and discontinuities across time. Gunning reinforces this concern, insisting that much of the attention to genre in film studies “is cut off from history.”57 Placing genres into their historical context means tracing the ways in which semantic elements and syntactic relations change over time in bodies of films and also, as Gunning puts it, “tracing the preconceptions and pragmatics by which those similarities were produced and recognized.”58 Tracing these preconceptions, of course, is not easy, particularly when there is not an easily identifiable set of terms with which to begin. In practical terms, my efforts began with two clues. First, I knew that there were films that would later be seen as precursors to the horror genre proper—films such as Nosferatu and The Phantom of the Opera. Second, I knew that there were certain elements that would be seen as central to the genre as it developed, the horrific elements mentioned earlier. With these two initial clues, I went to the archives and sought to trace them. I looked to the archival records, newspaper reports, and trade publications for the way these films were discussed, what language was used, and what elements were identified. I also looked for other films utilizing horrific elements and, again, sought to examine how they were framed within their specific periods. When possible, I viewed these early films, and throughout the pages that follow I will offer occasional detailed readings of sequences or motifs within particular films. Often, however, the films I identified were not available to me—usually because they are now lost. In these instances, I have relied on the descriptions available in the archival materials or published accounts (fortunately for me, early studios and trade-publication writers provided

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remarkably detailed descriptions of films). In this way, I was able to identify a widening circle of films that incorporated horrific elements and a clearer sense of the shifting vocabulary used to describe these films. This, in turn, allowed me to return to the archive and seek more examples that fit into these parameters until, in the end, I felt confident that I could identify certain tendencies and shifts within the framing of horrific elements. Of course, this method does not provide a clear linear historical trajectory or a set of completely discrete historical eras. Film history rarely moves in such precise ways, but I have sought to provide sufficient textual evidence to warrant consideration of the general tendencies I identify. There will, of course, be exceptions and divergences and any number of contrary examples. My hope is that my historical analysis of the rhetoric of horrific elements in film opens up new avenues for considering certain tendencies within the development of American cinema as well as the divergent examples and the paths not chosen. Pursuing this kind of genealogical prehistory of a genre is not simply an exercise in film history; it also promises to shed light on the broader culture through its “preconceptions and pragmatics.” Genres, it is worth noting, are not only about the relation of narrative elements but also invested with a broader worldview. The cultural framing of cinematic elements, in other words, is deeply influenced by the broader cultural frames that help us interpret other cultural and political messages as well. Richard Abel, to cite an example, has traced the rise of the western genre within American film around 1907 to the establishment of an increasingly white-supremacist ideology that grew out of fear and resentment toward immigrants.59 In this way, the history of genres can be understood also as a tracing of broader ideologies and serving, as Robin Wood puts it, as “different strategies for dealing with . . . ideological tensions.”60 Following this logic, a careful study of the shifting contours of a given genre should provide some insights into the shifting contours of those ideologies and ideological tensions that make up a broader cultural and national sense of identity.

Approaching National Cinema The third broad theoretical construct animating this study is the notion of national cinema, which on the surface might seem to be the least problematic. The idea of associating cinematic texts with the

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country of their origin, as Marcia Butzel and Ana López observe, has created “the perennial and deceptively self-evident status of the ‘national cinema’ as a category for understanding these media and their histories.”6¹ There are clear examples of this connection, such as when cinema is deployed for particular propagandistic purposes, such as the US Office of War Information’s role in shaping Hollywood films during World War II. Beyond these clear examples, however, the self-evidence of an intrinsic connection between particular cinematic texts and particular nations is not as clear. For the most part, the films of the first decade of moving pictures moved relatively freely across borders without substantial connection to their nation of origin. Similarly, modern film scholars have recognized a transnational cinema driven in part by the growing complexity of the multinational corporations creating modern media texts. Thus, in cinema’s earliest years as well as its most recent iterations, the relationship between nation and cinema is less evident than it at first appears. Alan Williams observes that the concepts of “nation” and “cinema” are “both comparatively recent phenomena in the grand scheme of history” and suggests that they have always shared “shifting, problematic functions with regard to one another and to the larger arena of world culture.”6² In spite of these complexities, the notion of national cinema remains an important part of theorizing film production, circulation, and reception, especially with regard to the way cinematic texts relate to national identity. Williams suggests that while films, even the most propagandistic, are not capable of creating a sense of national identity, they may work to “reflect and keep in circulation values and behaviors associated with a particular nation.”6³ The emergence of cinema, or perhaps more accurately kinematography, in the late 1800s occurred at a particularly important time in the development of American national identity.64 As I will elaborate more fully (see chapter 1), the decades following the Civil War were crucial for the slow and tumultuous process of discerning what a uniquely American culture would look like and what, and who, would count as part of the national character. Early cinema would participate in these struggles, and it was perhaps because of this simultaneous emergence— of an American national myth and the cultural practice of cinema— that cinema and American culture seem, at times, inextricably linked. Paula Cohen argues that early cinema “consolidated and rendered believable the American myth that had circulated in truncated, scattered, and inchoate form in the nineteenth century. It gave birth to a new kind of consciousness, centered on the dynamic image, that would have 22

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far-reaching effects on our future as a nation and on the shape of the world.”65 Approaching the concept of national cinema in this way means focusing less on the question of national production and more on the question of how cinematic texts help to propagate the “imagined community of the nation.”66 The often-used concept of the imagined community of the nation is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s influential work, and while Anderson attends primarily to print language in the development of the concept of the nation-state in the nineteenth century, it is worth observing that the imagining of the national community is an ongoing process—a process that, as Altman notes, entails multiple media, including cinema.67 The present study follows along the lines of Andrew Higson’s suggestion of a “text-based approach to national cinema,” which inquires into a body of films as to whether they “share a common style or world-view” and “what sort of projections of the national character . . . they offer.”68 Higson recommends three areas of attention in this “inward-looking” approach to national cinema. First, films are interrogated as to “that which is represented (and particularly the construction of ‘the national character’), the dominant narrative discourses and dramatic themes, and the narrative traditions and other source materials on which they draw.” This will entail not only attention to the narrative conceits and motifs within particular films but also a tracing of the other media— theatrical plays, folklore, stage magic, and so on—from which these narrative elements are drawn. Second, there is a broader focus not only on the narrative elements but also on the “sensibility, or structure of feeling, or world-view expressed.” The third level of analysis attends to the cinematic style of these narratives and “their modes of address and constructions of subjectivity.”69 Pursuing this line of inquiry means seeking to trace a line that connects narrative traditions and the cinematic style of their presentation to the construction of (or, perhaps better, an “invitation to share” in) a particular subject position and worldview. I borrow this notion of cinematic texts “inviting” an audience to a particular point of view from Thomas Benson and Carolyn Anderson, as it affords a unique attention to the way the invitation is constructed within a given body of texts, as well as a recognition that not all invitations will be accepted or even recognized.70 Much of the scholarship surrounding the horror genre has pursued some relation between cinematic texts and national identity. As noted earlier, numerous modern scholars, such as Linnie Blake, Claire Sisco King, and Adam Lowenstein, have attended to the relationship be23

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tween recent horror films and national experiences with trauma. Historically, this critical trend can be traced at least as far back as Siegfried Kracauer’s foundational book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, which sought to trace particular dynamics of the national German psyche within the films preceding the rise of the Third Reich.7¹ Although most genres can be related to national issues, horror seems uniquely connected to issues of national trauma, anxiety, and tension and can be seen, as I have argued elsewhere, to serve as collectively “projected fears” allowing audiences to at times obliquely engage with real anxieties.7² The use of horror narratives in the interest of national or communal identity is not solely developed around issues of threat or repressed anxieties; it is also a means of distinguishing one community from others. Darryl Jones argues that “national identities are often formed oppositionally .  .  . that is in a Self-Other relationship” and explores the way early English Gothic literature, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), served to distinguish English Protestant culture as civilized by demonizing the Catholic cultures of Southern Europe. In these narratives the usually English protagonist encounters strange, archaic threats arising out of the often decidedly Catholic superstitions of other countries as a means of reinforcing the uniquely advanced English vision of civilization. Jones finds similar cultural work being done in the English literature attending to the “Celtic Gothic” in tales centered in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. As Jones argues, “In the ideological rhetoric of horror, Catholics, Welshmen, hillbillies and cannibals are all pretty much the same.”7³ As I will seek to demonstrate in the following pages, similar work can be seen occurring throughout the emergence of American national cinema. Moving pictures emerged in America at a particularly crucial time. The end of the nineteenth century was a period in which America was acutely struggling with the question of national character. Many Americans, especially cultural elites and public intellectuals, saw the nation as increasingly distinct from its roots in Europe and other regions and sought to forge a uniquely American national character. This new character was envisioned as rational and progressive and devoid of any lingering beliefs in Old World superstitions or excesses of credulity. The struggle to forge this new national character played an important role in the framing of horrific elements in early cinema, and, conversely, the depiction of horrific elements played an important role in this struggle.

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Horror and the Emergence of American Cinema In tracing the prehistory of horror, I engage all three of the areas briefly sketched out above and explore the confluence of cinematic history, genre, and national identity. I seek to explore the points of co-emergence of both cinema and nation by focusing on a particular grouping of films that utilized horrific elements and by engaging, as David Bordwell recommends, both “what processes brought [them] into being” and “what forces have mobilized [them] for various purposes.”74 Bordwell is an important figure in my thinking about film, and this study engages the kind of “historical poetics” he recommends.75 In Making Meaning, Bordwell urges the exploration of the actual interpretations of films, a study deeply grounded in the historical conditions and vocabularies of a particular period. This means expanding beyond the single film or even groups of films and into, as Bordwell suggests, “the film’s genre, its audience, its period, its ‘discursive regime.’”76 By focusing on the treatment of horrific elements, I pursue, to borrow a phrase from Gaudreault, “a ‘genealogy’ of cinematic forms.” Such a genealogy requires attention to the practices of filmmaking and viewing during particular periods in an effort to avoid imposing modern understandings upon past practices. As Gaudreault argues, “The movement we seek is not from the present to the past but rather from the past to the present—to bring into the present the fragrance of the past.”77 Evoking this “fragrance” will entail attention to cinematic texts in addition to the broader conditions of their production. It will also entail a great deal of attention to the kinds of written texts that circulated around these films—sales catalogs, newspaper reports, and trade journals. These and other written texts will help to ground the study of these films within not only the period but also, importantly, the period’s vocabulary. By attending to the way horrific, supernatural, and gruesome elements were portrayed in films and the way these portrayals were framed in the broader professional, cultural, and regulatory discourses, I hope to shed light on the complex emergence of our conception of horror, cinema, and American national culture.

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Introduction

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CH A P T ER ON E

Superstition and the Shock of Attraction HOR R I F IC E L E M E N T S I N E A R LY C I N E M A

Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colors—the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life. M A X I M GOR KY, 1896

V

IEWER S FIR ST ENCOU NTER ING THE PROJECTION of moving images were quick to comment on the uncanny nature of seemingly lifelike bodies and objects moving before them in what Maxim Gorky famously called the “kingdom of shadows.” “It is not life,” Gorky wrote, “but its shadow .  .  . it is not motion but its soundless spectre.”¹ The French journalist Jean Badreux declared that the Lumière brothers’ invention “will be able to bring those who are no longer in this world back to life before our very eyes. Science has triumphed over death.”² Indeed, much of the early fascination with the projected moving picture was provoked by its capacity to simulate life. The Daily Iowa Capital declared in 1896 that the Cinematographe projector “produced moving objects and the play of the human features with startling faithfulness to life.”³ Keith’s New Theatre in Boston promoted the Lumière Cinematographe as “living pictures” and proclaimed that the attraction “exercises a species of fascination over the patrons of the house altogether unprecedented” with its “absolute faithfulness to life.”4 A story recounting the first screening of the Cinematographe in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1897 declared that “the effect is absolutely marvelous. Street-cars, buggies, trucks and people move along city streets as in life.”5 26

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The marvel of the simulated living object was, of course, not unprecedented. Still photography had presented seemingly perfect simulations of objects for at least four decades, and while the invention and popularization of photography was largely hailed as a scientific triumph, there was also an unsettling aspect. As Tom Gunning notes, early photography was “experienced as an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identity of objects and people, endlessly reproducing the appearances of objects, creating a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the senses.”6 Gunning finds the roots of this unease with the reproduction of images in Freud’s notion of the uncanny and the anxiety created by the confrontation with a copy that, although identical, has its own unique existence. Freud’s original writing on the uncanny was, in part, a response to the earlier work of Ernst Jentsch. Here I want to suggest that the unease related to the visual reproductions of human beings and objects might be productively captured in Jentsch’s earlier sense of the uncanny outlined in his essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906). Whereas Freud attends to the symbolism of the uncanny object as representative of repressed wishes and fears, Jentsch focuses more directly on the relationship between perception and cognition. But, in attending to the earliest films, most of which focused more on the spectacle of appearance than on the symbolism of narration, I find Jentsch’s sense of the uncanny more helpful. In his essay, Jentsch resists offering a simple definition of the uncanny and instead urges attention to the conditions through which the “affective excitement of the uncanny arises.” Jentsch contends that each individual will have different conditions under which an uncanny sensation will be provoked yet suggests that at its root the experience of the uncanny involves “a lack of orientation” connected to the way a particular object or incident is perceived. This often occurs when an object that should be familiar seems suddenly alien and other; in this way “a lack of orientation is bound up with the impressions of the uncanniness of a thing or incident.”7 One of the most common forms of this impression gestures back to the uncanny experience Gunning identified in early photography and also seems evident in the marvel over early moving pictures. Jentsch describes it as a “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.”8 Jentsch uses the experience of visiting a wax museum as an example of the “unpleasant impression” through which “it is often especially difficult to distinguish a life-size wax or similar figure from 27

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a human person.” For Jentsch, this unpleasant impression is evoked by the unsettling of our perception, which allows our imagination to begin the production of “rampantly proliferating” fantasies whereby “reality becomes mixed up in a more or less conscious way.”9 Interestingly, Jentch acknowledges that the “unpleasant impression” of the uncanny is not entirely without its appeal. Delving into the use of the uncanny for poetic purposes, Jentsch observes that “horror is a thrill that with care and specialist knowledge can be used well to increase emotional effects” and that “one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him.”¹0 Jentsch’s sense of the uncanny thrill may help explain the particular “species of fascination” the early “living pictures” held for audiences as they marveled at the “faithfulness to life” of the shadowy simulations projected before them. Audiences were drawn by the thousands to fairgrounds, expositions, and vaudeville halls to witness the uncanny movement of projected images. In 1896 the Daily Iowa Capital had already observed intense popularity: “The vogue of the ‘moving photographs’ became pronounced, and thousands who had hitherto kept away from variety theaters crossed the doors of those places of amusement to behold the newest scientific achievement.”¹¹ Part of the marvel at this achievement was the capacity to project a photograph vividly enough for a large audience to see—a step forward from machines such as Edison’s Kinetoscope—but more profound was the addition of motion to these large projected images. Georges Méliès recalled his initial dismissal of the Lumière projection. Upon seeing the initial frame projected like a still photograph, Méliès said to his neighbor, “They got us all stirred for projections like this?” But, as the still photograph started into motion, Méliès changed his tune, recounting that “before this spectacle we sat with gaping mouths, struck with amazement, astonished beyond all expression.”¹² Méliès’s observation captures the shock many felt at the addition of a lifelike motion to previously still pictures. Moving images were not the only cause of uncanny fascination among Americans during the nineteenth century. Beginning around 1852, the American public became fascinated with a growing belief that spirits of the dead could be engaged in communication. The birth of the modern spiritualist movement can be traced to Hydesville, New York, where in 1848 the Fox sisters claimed that strange, otherworldly knocking sounds would answer their questions. After the Fox family took the sisters on

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the road to describe their strange experiences, the public’s appetite was whetted for more demonstrations of the supernatural, and soon thousands of spirit mediums were travelling across the country and setting up shops in various towns and cities to capitalize on the sudden widespread belief in ghosts and spirit communication. This is often ignored or dismissed as an odd moment in American history. But R. Laurence Moore contends that “scarcely another cultural phenomenon affected as many people or stimulated as much interest as did spiritualism in the ten years before the Civil War and, for that matter, through the subsequent decades of the nineteenth century.”¹³ Lynda Nead argues that, far from being merely coincident, the widespread fascination with motion and animation in visual culture and the growth of spiritualism were part of the same cultural moment. Nead utilizes the metaphor of the “haunted gallery” to capture the interplay between the cultural fascination with spirits, séances, and magic and the rapidly transforming field of visual culture during the period. The moving picture was born at this point of confluence between the advances of visual technologies, the aesthetic focus on motion and animation, the cultural currents of the spiritualist movement, and widespread discussions of superstition. As Nead argues, there was a distinctly “uncanny magic” within early moving pictures, and “film was also possessed by cultural demons and phantoms.”¹4 In this chapter, I explore the uncanny nature of early moving pictures through the haunted gallery identified by Nead. By attending to the connections between public discussions of spiritualism and superstition and popular forms of visual culture, I hope to examine the conditions under which horrific elements first entered into moving pictures. The uncanny nature of early films has, of course, been observed by others, but here I want to position early cinema within a broader current within American culture—namely, the culture debate concerning the place of superstition and Old World beliefs in America at the turn of the century. Although the post–Civil War era is often seen as one in which American modernity emerged through growing industrial, scientific, and bureaucratic structures, it was also a period in which these emerging trends clashed with earlier beliefs and attitudes. Faced with the growing pressures of modernity, American culture struggled with the question: What does it mean to be an American? In some ways, this question revolved around integrating previously distinct regional and local customs and practices into a homogenous national culture. In other ways,

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this was a question of how to address those residents previously disenfranchised from citizenship, including the country’s freed enslaved peoples and the growing number of immigrants. This core question was dramatically evident during the bloody years of the Civil War as the nation engaged in a struggle over whether America was to be a single nation or a loose confederation of regions. But the end of the war and the question of secession did not finalize the answer of what American culture was to be and how it would look. The numerous dynamic and disparate social movements—from civil rights to women’s rights to labor unions to anarchists—arising during this period evidence the tensions emerging around how the notion of American national identity was to be understood and who would be counted within it. America also saw dramatic growth in immigration and in the concentration of populations in urban areas. In many major cities, whole neighborhoods were made up largely of people from other countries, newer arrivals with different languages and traditions. At the same time, the rapid expansion of industry created substantial changes not only in economics but also in the everyday life of workers and citizens through the consistent introduction of new technologies. The period between 1865 and the beginning of the twentieth century saw change in almost every major category of American life. Although these dramatic shifts had political, economic, and social dimensions, another way of understanding the tensions is to think of them as a question of national epistemology: How do Americans understand the world around them? Almost by its very definition, and certainly in the way it was articulated, modernity promised a break from that which came before, and this breaking with the old had major ramifications for American culture in the late nineteenth century. Paul Stob contends that during this period “intellectual culture underwent a striking metamorphosis,” one in which “what counted as knowledge, what was necessary to produce knowledge, and who could use knowledge” were fundamentally altered.¹5 This transformation in public epistemology took decades, and while the movement of modernity can be observed throughout the West, the American experience was unique in part because of the relative youth of the nation and, in part, because of a deeply felt need for the young American nation “to gain a respected place in the international community of learned men.”¹6 Much of this epistemic transformation entailed shifts in academic culture and scientific paradigms, but there was also a remarkably prominent public discussion about the place of superstition in the newly 30

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emerging American culture. Put simply, with the advent of modernity, Americans were meant to think differently. They were encouraged to become more rational, more scientific, and more incredulous. Old beliefs and traditions were to be left behind in the face of a newly emerging rational American cultural perspective. Cultural critics, religious leaders, and academics widely discussed the need for this new national epistemology and criticized the persistence of beliefs in spirits, witchcraft, and hauntings. The marvels of the new age were to be derived not from Old World beliefs but, instead, from scientific progress, and Americans were increasingly encouraged to delight in the new technologies of industrial capitalism. Although others have noted the relationship between spiritualism and early cinema, especially in relation to the stage magicians who produced some of the earliest films, here I want to contextualize this relationship within the broader concerns over superstition and credulity. I pursue this by first exploring the concerns about superstition and belief in the supernatural during the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the first years of the twentieth century. I then attend to the way horrific elements operated in the practices of visual culture immediately preceding the emergence of cinema, what Charles Musser calls “precinema.”¹7 Next, I examine the use of horrific elements in the early cinema of attractions before turning to the works of the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès.

“Bewildered by visionary and extravagant notions” Frederick Hamilton Quitman, professor of divinity and president of the Lutheran clergy in New York state, writing in 1810, expressed his concern about lingering Old World superstitions: “As the present century is deemed to surpass all former ages in philosophical knowledge, so inhabitants of the United States of America are often styled in public print [as] the most enlightened nation on earth. . . . What must we think when we see that many thousands suffer themselves to be led away and bewildered by visionary and extravagant notions?”¹8 Sixty-four years later, a New York Times editorial concerning religious practices at the time declared: The future historian who may wish to arrive at a correct estimate of the civilization of the nineteenth century will find much to bewilder him. In no direction will his course be clear. . . . The ad31

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vance of science, and the application of numberless discoveries in that direction to the necessities of modern life, as well too, as the great progress that has been made in the field of abstract philosophy, are remarkably characteristic of the age, and they indicate a degree of culture that had never before been reached. But . . . it is quite clear that superstition and bigotry, both the results of ignorance long cultivated, are to be found as strongly marked now as they ever were, and with infinitely less excuse for their existence.¹9

The nineteenth century was filled with concerns about the persistence of superstition, and many of these condemnations of the superstitious masses began with an expression of surprise that such anachronistic beliefs could endure within an age of reason and science. After recounting several prominent public panics over witchcraft throughout the first half of the 1700s, Charles Mackay, writing in 1852, asserted that “many other instances of this lingering belief might be cited both in France and Great Britain, and indeed in every other country in Europe. So deeply rooted are some errors, that ages cannot remove them.”²0 The rise of American spiritualism in the early 1850s seemed to prove the point with a resurgence of belief in spirits and magic. George Cruikshank insisted in 1864 that “there is still existing, even amongst civilized people, a fearful amount of ignorance upon the subject of Ghosts, Witchcraft, Fortune-telling, and ‘ruling the Stars,’ besides a vast amount of this sort of imaginary and mischievous nonsense.”²¹ In addition to the prominent view among commentators that superstitious beliefs in magic and spirits were anachronistic in such a superior age and out of place in an “enlightened” nation such as America, critics portrayed these lingering beliefs as a genuine cultural danger. Writing in 1847, Anthony Todd Thomson worried that the spread of superstition might lead to a broad cultural subjugation, observing a historical pattern in superstitious cultures: “Seized with terror, the multitude have bent beneath the yoke of superstition, and the proudest man has touched the steps of the altar with his humbled brow.” Thomson noted that the appeal of superstition was driven by two interrelated tendencies. First, “reason is perplexed and the imagination filled with wonders” through what he calls “unrestrained credulity”; second, humans have an unending appetite for the marvelous. “All our senses are tributary to the empire of the marvelous; the eye is more so than the ear.”²² These two tendencies—general credulity and a love of the marvelous—were widely discussed during the nineteenth century, especially in relation to the rise of spiritualism. Both of these tendencies, 32

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and the attendant anxieties about them, had a profound influence on the popular visual culture of both precinema and early cinema. In 1875, the New York Times opined, “It is not easy to define exactly where superstition begins and ends. A great part of the world lives by preying on the credulity of the rest, and it would not be easy to say where credulity and superstition are to be distinguished.”²³ Numerous commentators bemoaned the age of credulity and the degree to which large numbers of people were drawn into stories of curses and spirits and well-known hoaxes, such as P. T. Barnum’s mermaid or the Cardiff Giant. Long before Harry Houdini famously sought to debunk spiritual mediums, handbooks revealing magic tricks were publicized as opening the eyes of the overly credulous. An 1834 handbook promising to explain ventriloquism, juggling, and legerdemain sought to combat the “most foolish and mischievous fears” arising around “tricks of the black art man.”²4 Similarly, Richard Alfred Daven, writing in 1837, promised to “give, under various heads, a sample of the manifold frauds which have, in all ages, been successfully employed to frighten and gull mankind.”²5 Modern Magic, a Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring, by “Professor Hoffman” and published in the early 1900s, was designed in part for those who were “inclined to believe in the professions of the medium,” with the aim to “open their eyes.” The justification for the handbook of magic tricks was, the author wrote, in part a response to the growing sense that “there are no bounds to human credulity and stupidity.”²6 As early as 1827, critics of the culture of credulity found numerous dangers arising from these “foolish and mischievous fears.” J.  S. Forsyth bemoaned “the dark ages of the world, that is, . . . times when men were mere yokels, and when the reins of tyranny, superstition and idolatry . . . were controlled by a few knowing ones.”²7 The nineteenth century was replete with public intellectuals who labored toward, as Rufus Blakeman put it in 1849, “the eradication of evils originating from credulity and superstition.”²8 These concerns were still being voiced in the twentieth century’s first decade. Writing against the widespread interest in spiritualism in 1902, T. Shekleton Henry warned against the “unrestricted dabbling of credulous and emotional people in such matters.”²9 Similarly, a 1905 handbook on magic tricks expressed concern for those “falling victim to the numerous charlatans and imposters of the day who pretend to occult powers, and so deceive the credulous.”³0 Susceptibility to unrestrained credulity was often identified with issues of class and the related notion of education. An 1834 handbook on magic and ventriloquism asserted that “it is extensively believed among 33

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the lower classes that ghosts do appear at times, even in our day.”³¹ Similarly, a polemic against spiritualists published around the late 1890s complained about the “little intelligence” possessed by those who “painstakingly exercised to adapt the wildest and most ridiculous conceptions of the weakest and most commonplace intellects, into something like a theory.”³² For some early critics of spiritualism, the adherents of the movement were characterized in the same way. English magician Signor Blitz estimated there were a million American spiritualists in 1871, “the greater portion of whom are invalids, or of a temperament better known as wanting in positive strength of mind; a class that are dreamy and inactive in their propensities.”³³ Others, however, began to note the spread of spiritual beliefs far beyond the stereotypical lower class and uneducated. Another magician, Alexander Herrman, worried in 1890 that “do we not find in the better class of society hundreds of credulous spirits, seduced by semi-lunatics. Educated people, ladies of intelligence, literary men, and persons of position, do they not run, time after time, to note the mysterious workings of a tipping table, to seek spiritual manifestations, and to wake the spirits of the dead?”³4 By 1900, E. H. Caylor not only estimated the number of spiritualists at 10 million but also claimed that “many men of means are engrossed in the movements and use their wealth freely for the purpose of disseminating its teachings.”³5 Ultimately, interest in the supernatural and a general credulity toward the fantastic claims of spiritualism could not be reduced to either failed intellect or a “weaker class” but were understood as something ingrained in the human psyche. In his 1895 history of magicians, William Goodwin attributed the persistence of superstition to a general tendency of the human nature, observing that “superstition is so congenial to the mind of man.”³6 Writing in 1847, Thomson identified a more specific cause of the ongoing tendency toward superstition and credulity: “an auxiliary which alone is sufficient to produce the evil [of superstition]—namely, Imagination.” The capacity for imagination was “by turns terrible and seducing, but always ready to confound us with unforeseen phenomena, and intoxicate us by fantastic marvels.”³7 If credulity represented an epistemological threat to American modernity, it was driven by the intoxication with fantastic marvels that to many characterized the age. Writing in 1853, Reverend H. Mattison observed the American “love of the marvelous, for which, as a nation, we are somewhat distinguished.” Twenty-seven years later, Reverend Thomas Mitchell would echo the same concern: “There is no other human sentiment so prolific of evil consequences to mankind as the love 34

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of the marvelous.”³8 Others worried that the attraction of the marvelous would perpetuate the kinds of social ills attributed to excess credulity. Blitz noted a general tendency for an individual to become a “lover of the marvelous, susceptible of conversion to every extreme policy that combines novelty and mystery,” and Blakeman observed, “It is to be regretted that, in this enlightened age, the propensity for the novel and the marvelous should be permitted so far to obscure reason and judgment.”³9 Whereas credulity was often portrayed as an antiquated orientation out of step with the current, modern age, the love of marvels was typically seen as a symptom of modernity. The regularity and ease of modern life had led the masses to hunger for the extraordinary and marvelous. An 1870 New York Times article titled “Modern Marvels” expressed the concern: “Doubtless it is due, in no small degree, to the unrelenting prosiness and humdrum of modern existence, that most people turn as willing an ear to every relation of the marvelous. Superstition and credulity can scarcely be regarded as salient features of our nineteenth century civilization, and yet few of us would like to confess how often we have given our faith to the supernatural.”40 Thus, in spite of the considerable advances in science and technology, Americans near the turn of the century seemed to actively seek out the marvelous as a response to the increasing efficiency and seeming stability of everyday life. The love of the marvelous led not so much to people being duped by the appearance of the supernatural but to a desire to be fooled. As the Times writer puts it, “If we are not actually deceived we are more than willing to be deceived.”4¹ Although most agree that spiritualist beliefs were fueled in part by the widespread grieving caused by the American Civil War, the preconditions for this interest in the marvels of the supernatural were likely fueled by the changing conditions of modern life. Historians surveying the rise of spiritualism at the turn of the century have tended to agree with the Times that attraction to the marvelous, especially spiritualism, during this period was driven by the unsettling emergence of modern life. Geoffrey K. Nelson traces the rise of spiritualism to a combination of rapid industrialization, increasing social mobility, and, importantly, the influx of immigrants. Whereas Nelson sees the rise of spiritualism and the attraction to illusion and marvels as a reaction to the emergence of modern, industrial life, Laurence Moore complicates this view by suggesting that the rapid spread of spiritualism emerged when Old World superstitious beliefs were merged with modern scientific investigations. Key here was the focus in nineteenth-century spiritual35

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ism on the visible. No longer were spirits simply presences to be felt or imagined; in the nineteenth century they were meant to be visible and knowable. Moore argues that spiritualism “appealed not to the inward illumination of mystic experience, but to the observable and verifiable objects of empirical science.”4² Commentators at the time were well aware of the connection between the lure of marvels and the attraction of the visible. In the introduction to his 1864 Spectropia, a book of optical illusions designed to create the illusion of ghostly presences, J.  H. Brown observed that “all the senses are more or less subject to deception but the eye is preeminently so.” Thomson agreed, proclaiming the visual as the key to what he referred to as the “empire of the marvelous”: “Optical illusions, though succeeding each other without a pause, never fail to keep up the attention of the individual eager after novel spectacles; their variety and their contrasts leave no space for reflection, nor cause any fatigue in beholding them.”4³ Thomson’s description of the visual culture of the “empire of the marvelous” almost perfectly described the sensational attraction to early moving pictures even though written some forty-eight years before the first such pictures would be projected. The historical tensions surrounding superstitions and spiritualism as they related to concerns about credulity and the attraction to the marvelous established a framework within which what I have termed “horrific elements”—the appearance of ghosts, witches, demons, and evil magic—circulated within American popular culture. Although superstition had long been part of popular culture in the form of folktales, in the nineteenth century the monsters and spirits of folklore increasingly took on visual form. This was in large part due to the expansion of visual culture during the late 1800s. As Gunning notes, “There is no question that in the nineteenth century we enter into a new realm of visuality.”44 In the next section, I sketch out the ways these horrific elements and their related cultural tensions circulated within popular American culture in the years immediately preceding the introduction of “living pictures” in preparation for the final sections of this chapter, which explore the way filmmakers took up the images and vocabulary of superstition and spiritualism in many of the earliest films.

“The exhibition of our art in its most striking exploits” Marcel Marceau describes the “theatre of marvels,” which includes operas, ballet, and other forms of stagecraft, as one that “trans36

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ports the spectator and overwhelms him with the wonderment of miracle.”45 For many historians, the wonderment of miracle most often associated with the earliest filmmakers was stage magic. Erik Barnouw’s seminal work The Magician and the Cinema traces the key role that stage magic played not only in the making of early fi lms but also in their reception among audiences. As Barnouw notes, “The first viewers . . . knew they were seeing things that could not be. We today, having come to accept such things are ‘reality,’ have lost the magic of them. They knew they were seeing magic.”46 More recently, Matthew Solomon explores the interaction between the practices of stage magic and early cinema among pioneering filmmakers such as Georges Méliès, contending that “magic and cinema were in fact overlapping sets of practices that renewed, incorporated, and responded to each other historically.”47 Part of this interaction, Solomon argues, was around the animosity many stage magicians had toward the fraudulent use of illusions by supposed spirit mediums. The antispiritual tendency in stage magic, according to Solomon, helped to inform early filmmakers who were “bound up with the magician’s specific tradition of skepticism.” This skepticism, as Solomon puts it, “was one of stage magic’s earliest and most important contributions to the history of cinema.”48 The most prominent and well-established connection between the horrific and the visual in relation to precinematic practices was in stage magic, and here we find much of the discussion dealing with both professional stage magicians and their less reputable kin: the spirit medium. As Moore notes, one of the reasons for the dramatic rise in spiritualism was the capacity of spirit mediums to adopt the theatricality of stage magic. Moore observes: “Professional mediums were really rather skillful at adopting common forms of public entertainment,” a capacity that likely led to much of the outrage from stage magicians, who found their tricks in trade employed for disreputable purposes.49 As early as 1810, well before the legendary 1848 “manifestations” with the Fox sisters of Hydesvillle, New York, Quitman described the use of fear and the horrific by conjurers during the period: The method in which conjurers generally proceed . . . bespeaks many traces of deceit. Night, the fertile parent of dreams and visions, is commonly the time appointed for their magical exhibitions. . . . The scene of action is designedly prepared to terrify the spectator. The walls are lined with black, human skulls and bones are displayed on the table, and all that are present are forbidden, under forfeiture of life, to utter a single word. There arises a hor37

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rible noise; the spectator is more dead than alive, and his strained imagination is prepared to receive every impression, which the conjurer wishes to imprint.50

Horrific figures featured prominently in the theatrical displays of the spirit medium, whose ghostly apparitions and ectoplasmic manifestations were often designed to provoke terror in the spectator. Almost a century later, in 1906, Giuseppe Lapponi described the experience of a séance as likely to “fill the spectator with fear and wonder” and, at times, to be “horrid and disgusting.”5¹ Similarly, David Abbott described a 1909 séance, which caused “a creepy feeling [to] pass over me as emotions were wrought up to such a pitch by the intense manner in which I had watched all the details of the experiment.” Mediums, of course, were not alone in trafficking in the terrifying. Although stage magicians walked a finer line in terms of frightening their paying audiences and had less need to instill momentary fear to obscure the spectator’s judgment, many also worked with the horrific. Barnouw notes the prominence of decapitations in early magic acts during which the decapitated victim, or at times the self-decapitated head of the magician, would continue its stage chatter. Eugene Burger observes that “magic frequently suggests danger, something we need to fear.”5² Although many stage magicians sought to debunk the seemingly mysterious powers of mediums, others trafficked in similarly horrifying tricks. An 1883 instruction manual urged performers to remember that “the exhibition of our art in its most striking exploits is really marvelous and attractive; for we certainly have the power of placing some astonishing phenomena before our audience.”5³ An instruction book for aspiring magicians from around 1900 urged performers to “remember, your object is to transmit the impression you are in possession of invisible mysterious powers,” and, as late as 1912, Louise Haley urged magicians to adopt a dramatic persona so that “his audience is afraid of him; therefore he gets the respect due him.” Haley also advised the aspiring stage magician to “be dramatic above his brother actors; and the marvelous must be intensely dramatic, or it will cease to be marvelous.”54 The 1883 manual also made explicit a desire to disconnect the love of the marvelous from the dangers of credulity: “The time is quite gone by when people will really believe that conjuring is to be done by supernatural agencies.”55 But the intricate connection between the display of the marvelous and anxiety over excessive credulity continued to circulate within the discourse surrounding stage magic throughout the

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late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Stage magicians were in a decidedly awkward position, needing to accentuate the marvelous nature of their feats and to distance themselves from the cultural critique of spiritualism and the fears of mass credulity. This complicated terrain is particularly visible in the many handbooks on magic tricks designed to help readers replicate stage magic within their own homes.56 As suggested earlier, many of these textbooks justified their publication by promising to both help readers perform their own marvels and instill in them an adequate incredulity as a guard against deception and fraud. Alexander Herrman argued that “instead of crying out against the fatal human tendency [of credulity], would it not be better to instruct so that all mankind can be great magicians?” A similar argument was forwarded in 1905 by a writer named Ansbach, who promised that “a little knowledge of the mysteries of magic prevents one from falling a victim to the numerous charlatans and imposters of the day who pretend to occult power and so deceive the credulous.”57 While carefully navigating the line between credulity and the marvelous, these handbooks listed numerous tricks that focused on horrific elements that were both ghastly and seemingly supernatural. The 1838 publication Parlour Magic offered “the spectral lamp,” a trick that, it promised, would change the coloration of those involved: “All the complexions of the several persons, whether old or young, fair or brunette, will be metamorphosed to a ghastly, death-like yellow.” A similar trick in The Art of Conjuring Made Easy utilized burning salts and spirits and promised to “make a party appear ghastly.”58 Seemingly influenced as much by spirit mediums as by popular stage magicians, these handbooks offered numerous tricks designed to appear supernatural, including: silent second-sight séance, table lifting, spirit communication, spirit writing between locked slates, and the spirit hand, as well as the dancing skeleton, the head of the decapitated speaking, and “how to give a person a supernatural appearance.”59 Settled in among routine sleight-of-hand tricks was an array of opportunities to simulate the seemingly supernatural presences promised by the spirit medium and to provide a macabre form of home entertainment. Magic tricks were not the only means by which horrific elements entered into popular home entertainment in the nineteenth century. J. H. Brown’s 1864 book of simple illustrations promised that prolonged staring would produce “ghosts everywhere, and of any colour.” Like the magic handbooks, Brown’s Spectropia offered ghoulish images of ghosts and spirits while simultaneously working to debunk the claims

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that such entities were real. Brown wrote, “One thing we hope in some measure to further in the following pages, is the extinction of the superstitious belief that apparitions are actual spirits, by showing some of the many ways in which our senses may be deceived.”60 Indeed, much of the introductory chapter was devoted to the anatomy of the eye and explanations of how various optical illusions, including afterimages, could mislead. A more theatrical version of the frightening home optical illusion was the shadow pantomime. Drawn from a similar stage technique in which a sheet is placed in front of the actors and backlighting is used to allow the audience to see their shadows upon the sheet, the shadow pantomime promised a variety of techniques to create dramatic, if shadowy, special effects. Among the effects were those portraying an amputation, a decapitation, and various supernatural activities such as disappearances and levitation. The Great Secret of Shadow Pantomimes, published in 1868, offered readers several supernaturally themed sketches, including “The Haunted House; or, The Frightened Traveler” and “Cribbage; or, The Devil among the Cards.”6¹ Horrific elements were also prominent in proper theatrical productions. In addition to the many plays drawing upon supernatural elements, the nineteenth century saw numerous innovations to create more realistic visual depictions of the supernatural. In 1862, the English engineer Henry Dircks introduced his “Dircksian Phantasmagoria,” a technique for projecting the image of an actor onto the stage using a pane of glass and specific lighting configurations. The effect, later known as “Pepper’s Ghost,” promised “spectres and illusions . . . in such perfect embodiment of real substance.”6² In his book-length explanation of the effect and assertion of his authorship of it, Dircks explicitly referenced the broader context of superstition and spiritualism: “Perhaps it would be a safe prediction, that the belief in ghosts will never die. There will always remain a sufficient number of a certain good, easy, simple-minded class of the community ready and willing recipients of any news from the spirit-world.”6³ Dircks’s explanation of his own theatrical invention was justified in part as a means of shedding “the efflugent light of science” upon superstitious beliefs and dispelling the superstitious beliefs that “lend terror to every shadow, and had a tendency more or less to disturb the intellect.”64 Still, while seeking to provide some cure to the dangers of widespread credulity toward superstitions, Dircks also sought to create entertainment drawing upon the horrific elements contained within them. The phantasmagoria

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promised to “produce grotesques” and “to treat the phantom so raised as a thing of mortal mould.” Dircks coined the phrase “Spectre Drama” to describe the “singular class of dramatic performances to be consummated by means of adapting my Optical Illusion to the production of an entirely new class of stage effects.”65 “Phantasmagoria” was also a more generic name for a particular type of magic-lantern projection. In his comprehensive history of precinema and early cinema, Musser argues that “cinema appears as a continuation and transformation of magic-lantern traditions in which showmen displayed images on a screen, accompanying them with voice, music, and sound effects.”66 Although there was a variety of themes and motifs performed during the popular magic-lantern shows, images of the horrific were prominent even in the medium’s earliest days in the seventeenth century. As X. Theodore Barber contends, “The original developers of the lantern had apparently already exploited its ‘magical’ potential, however, and the slides of phantoms, devils, and other macabre subjects had been screened in front of the first private audiences.” Barber further notes that the lantern developed by Christiaan Huygens, often credited with the device’s invention, was referred to as “the lantern of fright.”67 One of the more famous early operators of the phantasmagoria was Étienne Gaspar Robertson, whose “fantasmagoria” performances were popular in Paris around 1799. In one account of his comments from the stage before the production, Robertson explained: “This is a spectacle which man can use to instruct himself in the bizarre effects of imagination, when it combines with vigor and derangement: I speak of the terror inspired by the shadows, spirits, spells and occult work of the magician; terror that practically every man experienced in the young age of prejudice and which even a few still retain in the mature age of reason.”68 A guidebook published during the period proclaimed that Parisians and tourists were drawn to Robertson’s productions by the exciting presence of “the devil, spectres, and ghosts.”69 Phantasmagoria shows were also popular in the United States. An 1803 newspaper review described one such show as a “wonderful display of optical illusions. Which introduces the Phantoms, or Apparitions of the Dead and Absent, in a way more completely illusive than has ever been witnessed.” Fitting with the dominant cultural rhetoric of skepticism, however, the marvels of the show were framed as a means of educating its audience: “This Spectrology professes to expose the practices of artful imposters and exorcists, and to open the

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eyes of those who still foster an absurd belief in Ghosts or Disembodied Spirits.”70 L.  J. Marcy’s 1877 guidebook described earlier versions of the lantern show: “In ancient times, the images from the phantasmagoria were thrown on the smoke arising from a chafing dish in which odors and drugs were burning, and by means of which many surprising and apparently supernatural effects were produced.” While describing the many ways in which such optical effects could be terrifying, Marcy concluded that “we could hardly, in this enlightened age, attain the brilliant success of frightening a [young boy] out of his senses with ‘smoke and shadow.’” Yet, in spite of the apparent impossibility of producing the kind of uncanny fright of earlier years, Marcy’s catalog included presentations with apparently supernatural themes (called “views” at the time) like The Ghost of the First Wife and Magician and the Ghost.7¹ Another catalog recommended combining lantern projections with carefully designed sets and effects to create scenes such as a “dancing skeleton indulging in his wild terpsichorean revel in the bedroom scene of the haunted castle.”7² An 1893 magic-lantern manual described the theatrical use of slides with horrific elements: Professor Phillipstahl commenced his séance, by appearing on the dimly lighted stage with a small lighted lamp in his hand, saying “Hush de ghost, de ghost,” with the idea of adding all possible mystery to the proceedings, he would then put the lamp out and retire. The Curtain then quietly rose, and disclosed a mass of clouds, which slowly opened exposing a ghostly figure, which appeared gradually to increase in size, and advancing, as though about to come amongst the audience, it finally retired, clouds covering the phantom, other figures then took its place; some of a horrible character appearing and vanishing in like manner.7³

The magic lantern was not the only visual technology utilized to produce the marvelous attraction of the horrific. Photography was also drawn into these cultural patterns, and the prominence of “spirit photography” provided further indication of the way visual technology and the debates over superstition were intertwined. Gunning, for instance, argues “it is hardly surprising that Spiritualism would eventually intersect with photography.” The “wraith-like” appearance of partially exposed photographic images lent them a sense of capturing an unseen and supernatural world and helped to promote the possibility of spirit photography. Further, Gunning notes the way nineteenth-century spir-

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itualism sought to frame itself in relation to the visible, or the marvelous, giving the movement a means for “even greater theatricality.”74 Spirit photography has received a great deal of attention from other scholars.75 For my purposes, it is worth noting three ways in which spirit photography resonated with the same cultural dynamics that would animate early cinematic treatments of the horrific and supernatural. First, the popularity of spirit photography can be traced to the cultural trauma of the Civil War. As Cara Finnegan notes in her impressive analysis of early photography in American culture, early photography promised not only a way of remembering the departed but also a way of re-creating their presence. Finnegan notes, “In the Civil War era, grieving families, war widows, and other[s] with dead or missing loved ones embraced photography’s capacity to offer presence in the midst of profound and often permanent absence.”76 Spirit photographs, then, much like early moving pictures, were imbued with a deeply uncanny quality, though, as Finnegan notes, not necessarily an unpleasant experience. Second, for both spirit photography and early moving pictures, the creation of the uncanny sense of the presence of that which is absent was achieved through the marvel of new technology. Indeed, most of the visual culture discussed thus far operated along the complex boundaries between technological innovation and the marvelous. As Nead argues, “The development of the haunted gallery as a space of cultural fantasy and the history of machines for creating optical illusions continuously traverse each other during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”77 In a way, the advances in visual technologies throughout the nineteenth century were haunted by the uncanny and horrific marvels of much earlier legends and superstitions. Third, a key cultural issue was at stake in the blurring of the marvelous and the technological: the need to craft an incredulous gaze, which could pierce the surface of illusion and see through to the technological heart of the marvelous. This cultural tension around credulity was also evident in the reception of early spirit photography. Finnegan notes that this general concern for credulity emphasized the creation of new viewing strategies among people who were now faced with the twin specters of cultural trauma and technological innovations. As Finnegan puts it, “To be deceived by one’s imagination was perhaps inevitable in the increasingly complex world of appearances, where a photograph’s capacity to produce presence mingled in messy ways with the desires of imagination.”78 The need to discipline these “desires of imagination”

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would become a cultural imperative during the early years of moving pictures and have a dramatic impact on the way the horrific and supernatural were depicted.

“A ghost appears in that room every night” The visual culture of the nineteenth century, filled with spirit photographers, phantasmagoria shows, stage magicians, spiritual mediums, and even amateur performers in their own homes, drew heavily upon the public’s knowledge of and interest in the monsters of superstition and folklore. Not surprisingly, shortly after the first “living pictures” fascinated audiences with the uncanny marvel of simulated moving objects, numerous filmmakers turned to horrific elements to continue escalating the shock of their new cinema of attractions. As noted in the introduction, Gunning and Gaudreault recommend the concept of a “cinema of attractions” to recover early cinema from a sense that they were merely primitive precursors to what would later emerge as “fully fledged” cinematic practice. Gunning observes that the concept seeks to foreground two aspects of early cinema: “The term denoted early cinema’s fascination with novelty and its foregrounding of the act of display.”79 These early films were seen not in a context in which they were the central attraction but often, rather, as part of a series of novel views and thus should be understood in the broader context of screen practices and popular visual displays. In this regard, the novelty of early moving pictures was more akin to the visual marvels discussed above than to current cinematic practices. One of the ways in which these early films were markedly different from our modern understanding of cinema was that they foregrounded the act of display itself over the development of narratives or themes. As Gaudreault observes, “The attraction is there, before the viewer, in order to be seen. Strictly speaking it exists only in order to display its visibility.”80 Gaudreault suggests that these earliest films demonstrate the tension between narration and what he terms “monstration,” or the act of showing itself. The earliest years of moving-picture projection were dominated by what Gunning and Gaudreault refer to as the “system of monstrative attractions,” a paradigm in which the act of showing and the attraction of the visible dominated. As Gaudreault puts it, “Within the system of monstrative attractions, film narration was of course completely secondary. In this system, filmic monstration and the

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attraction reigned.”8¹ This early focus on the system of monstration fits squarely within the broader visual culture of the marvelous and the attraction of the spectacular and novel in nineteenth-century culture. It can also be seen as symptomatic of the broader concerns over credulity and the marvelous. Filmmakers needed to continue escalating the level of marvelous spectacle while still creating images and tableaux that were in some ways believable. Two elements of this early system of monstrative attractions are particularly relevant to tracing the ways horrific elements became part of early cinema. First, the system of monstrative attractions was an inflationary system. By this I mean that the focus on visual attraction required an increasing level of spectacle. Once the marvelous became familiar, it ceased to be marvelous. This emphasis on the shock of early cinema has been widely discussed by both Gunning and Gaudreault. Gunning defines early cinema’s unique viewing pleasure as largely driven by the sudden and unpredictable shifts in the visual tableau: “The sudden flash (or equally sudden curtailing) of an erotic spectacle, the burst into motion of a terroristic locomotive, or the rhythm of appearance, transformation, and sudden disappearance that rules a magic film all invoke a spectator whose delight comes from the unpredictability of the instant, a succession of excitements and frustrations whose order cannot be predicted by narrative logic and whose pleasures are never sure of being prolonged.”8² Gunning suggests that this rapid sequence of display crafted a different form of temporality not dominated by narrative sequencing but focused on “the cinematic smack of the instant.”8³ The economy of monstrative pleasure required an escalation in the intensity of these shocks and in their unpredictability. Arguably this inflationary economy of monstration helped to drive many of the innovations in early cinematic techniques as filmmakers borrowed techniques from each other in an effort to outdo the level of spectacle. A second element of monstrative attraction was the way that narrative intelligibility, if not coherence, operated within this visual economy as a kind of limit point. Early filmmakers needed some level of narrative coherence and familiarity in order to create a series of spectacles that would be intelligible to audiences. Noël Burch defines this aspect of early cinema as part of its “non-closure,” by which he means not only a sense that early films did not have clear and satisfying endings but also that the diegetic worlds of early films were not self-sufficient and independent. Early projections often relied on either a paid lecturer, who explained the development of the series of displays, or a fa-

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miliarity with the narrative itself. Burch contends that these early films contain a “tacit affirmation that the narrative discourse is located outside the picture—in the spectator’s mind or the lecturer’s mouth.”84 There is no evidence to suggest that many of the earliest films featuring horrific elements were accompanied by a lecturer. So, it may be that these early films relied on a familiarity with superstitions, spiritualism, and folklore to create their diegetic worlds. Edison Studios’s 1900 Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel (fig. 2) can serve as a useful example of some of the ways that the broader concerns about superstition framed the display of horrific elements in early films. Spooky Hotel was an eighty-foot, one-reel short copyrighted by Edison Studios on March 21, 1900. According to Musser, the film was likely produced by an “unidentified Edison affiliate” along with several other “magic films.”85 The eighty-foot reel had a running time of approximately one minute and was advertised in the July 1901 Edison Films catalog. Although the plot of the film is relatively simple, understanding the brief narrative requires some broader cultural framework. In the film two men enter what appears to be a bedroom. One is taller, slim, and well dressed. The more portly gentlemen wears what appears to be rural clothing, with a heavy trench coat, string tie, and hat. The catalog informs us that this is a hotel landlord entering with “his rural guest.”86 Prominent in the sparsely furnished room is a large clock. As the two men sit and talk, presumably about the arrangements for accommodation, the landlord gestures back toward the clock, holding up two fingers. And, indeed, the clock reads 11:58—two minutes until midnight. Something in the conversation and the acknowledgment of the time unsettles the rural guest, who makes move to leave. The landlord convinces him to stay, but as the two men return to their chairs, a figure with a white face and dressed in a white sheet appears behind them briefly, knocking the guest’s hat off his head before disappearing. The guest assumes the assault came from the landlord, and the two tussle before again returning to their seats, whereupon the figure in white reappears and slaps the landlord’s head before, again, disappearing. Another tussle ensues. As the men return to their seat, the figure in white reappears and frightens the landlord, who runs out of the room.87 As the rural guest turns to chat with the landlord, he sees the figure in white, and then, according to the catalog description, “Josh discovers that his companion is really the ghost, and in great fright he grabs his things and rushes out of the room, followed by the ghost.”88 Spooky Hotel clearly fits within the kind of monstrative attractions described by scholars such as Gunning and Gaudreault. The focus is 46

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Figur e 2. A ghost menaces Uncle Josh in Edison’s Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel (1900). Photo: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Washington, DC.

on the action and the escalation of the argument between the two men punctuated by the sudden appearance and disappearance of the figure in white. As with the economy of monstrative pleasure, the action escalates throughout the short film. The tussle between the two men is more dramatic and physical during the second bout, and the brief appearance by the figure in white escalates until at the end of the film the figure stays visible long enough to chase the rural guest away. But it also seems clear that the second characteristic of monstrative attractions is important here as well: the reliance on external contexts to create narrative coherence and intelligibility. The Edison catalog provided one possible means for intelligibility, at least to those viewers who had access to the description. The main plot is predicated on “a rumor that a ghost appears in that room every night at 12 o’clock.” Audience members without access to this helpful bit of information, however, would likely not have found the concept difficult to discern. Even without knowledge of the diegetic rumor, turnof-the-century American audiences would have been familiar with the notion of midnight as the “witching hour” and with the appearance of 47  |  Horrific Elements in Early Cinema

ghosts. Writing in 1902, T. Shekleton Henry described the common appearance of spirits in magic shows as well as séances: “An irregular luminous appearance . . . shortly assumed the form of a man about six feet high, enveloped in white drapery.”89 The producers of this early short were clearly aware not only of the expectations related to the timing and appearance of a ghost but also that these expectations would be widely shared by their potential audience. They would also likely have banked on some familiarity with the titular “Uncle Josh.” Uncle Josh, popularized by the performer Cal Stewart, was a well-known comic figure in the 1890s. Uncle Josh was portrayed as “a befuddled New England farmer” and became, for many urban Americans, “the quintessential country resident.”90 In addition to the three films Edison would make featuring the character, Uncle Josh appeared in several popular cylinder recordings of “rube skits,” which were comedies focused on the rural protagonist’s comic misadventures when encountering aspects of modern life.9¹ The use of Uncle Josh in the supernatural tale of Spooky Hotel fits with the previously discussed association between superstition and the rural and uneducated. Uncle Josh would feature in another film connected with the supernatural, Uncle Josh’s Nightmare. Also copyrighted by Edison on March 21, 1900, this 150-foot short finds Uncle Josh in an almost identical room, though without the clock, as he turns in for the night. Appearing without warning or any clear precursor, a figure in a black costume, complete with short cape and floppy cloth horns, appears and begins fighting with the protagonist. During their struggle, the man in black, evidently the Devil, appears and disappears several times until Uncle Josh manages to ensnare the Devil in a sheet and put him into a large wooden trunk. The Devil soon reappears, and then various items in the bedroom—the bed, table, and so on—begin to disappear until Uncle Josh begins gathering his belongings, only to find a large skeleton, dressed in women’s clothing, arising from his wooden trunk. After a moment in which Uncle Josh seems to despair of his predicament, all the objects in the bedroom reappear and Uncle Josh turns back to his bed before the film ends.9² It is worth noting that the Devil was a remarkably pervasive character in nineteenth-century popular culture and in early films in particular. In just the first few years of moving pictures, a devil character featured in films such as The Laboratory of Mephistopheles (Méliès, 1897), Faust and Mephistopheles (Smith, 1898), The Devil in a Convent (Méliès, 1899), and The 7 Castles of the Devil (Zecca, 1901). In his 1904 book Devils, J. Charles Wall observed the cultural ubiquity of the Devil in his var48

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FIGUR E 3. Uncle Josh confuses the silver screen for reality in Edison’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902). Photo: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Washington, DC.

ious guises: “Nowhere can we turn but we hear that Archfiend’s name coupled with every conceivable object and invoked over every inconceivable theory.”9³ The third Uncle Josh film from Edison Studios did not employ horrific elements but in ways was indicative of the deeper anxieties circulating around uncanny marvels and excesses of credulity. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (fig. 3) was copyrighted by Edison Studios in January 1902 and featured a different, younger actor in the role of the rural rube. This time, rather than encountering the uncanny phantoms of the supernatural, Uncle Josh faces a different, though related, form of uncanny apparitions—the shadowy figures of the moving picture show. Whereas the previous two Edison films saw Uncle Josh befuddled by the appearance and disappearance of supernatural entities, here he encounters images on the moving-picture screen—an image of an attractive woman he attempts to seduce, an approaching freight train he is frightened by, and the image of a suitor for the attractive woman with whom he seeks to fight. The film ends with Uncle Josh in a real struggle with the frustrated projectionist.94 49

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Lynne Kirby, in her examination of this film, observes the ease with which the fear of the uncanny images of the supernatural transferred to the uncanny images of the living pictures: “His hysteria—the exaggerated fright, the bodily reaction to the train film (one easily passes from hysteria to paranoia here)—is not only a train phobia, it’s a cinematic hysteria as well. As a proxy for the ‘naïve’ spectator, his reactions are to be read in relation to shock—the shock not only of the train image . . . but of the filmic image: the panic of projection.”95 In all three of these Edison films, Uncle Josh typifies the unsophisticated rural rube and, at least in Kirby’s analysis, demonstrates the potential dangers of the hysterical male who is unable to reconcile himself to the newly modernized America. Read collectively, the Uncle Josh trilogy can also be seen as reflective of the broader cultural anxieties about credulity in relation to the emergence of a new modern America. In all three films, Uncle Josh is frightened by something uncanny. In Spooky Hotel, he faces what is presented as the actually supernatural. There is no indication in Spooky Hotel that Uncle Josh is mistaken in perceiving the white-clad figure as a ghost, and, indeed, the apparition also frightens the innkeeper. There is some uncertainty about the appearance of the Devil in Uncle Josh’s Nightmare. The title opens the door for interpreting what happens on the screen as a dream—the opening scene is, after all, Uncle Josh lying down for bed. But as is often the case with the uncanny, it is unclear whether the events that follow are happening within the diegetic world of the film or within the mind of the sleeping Uncle Josh. The film suggests a complex mise en abyme in which the audience views an unreal image of Uncle Josh as he views the imagined image of the Devil; both Uncle Josh and the audience are engaged in an interpretive struggle with uncanny apparitions. In Moving Picture Show, Uncle Josh faces another uncanny doubling, of the “living pictures.” Here, however, the audience is more clearly in on the joke. As viewers now familiar with the projected image, the audience can enjoy the spectacle of Uncle Josh’s credulity. Just two years after Uncle Josh’s initial struggles with the clearly supernatural ghost and the potentially supernatural Devil, the audience was encouraged to see the spectacle of the uncanny marvel from a position of incredulity. Although Edison’s films of Uncle Josh’s travails foreshadow the way Americans would treat horrific elements within films in the coming decades, it is worth pausing over the prominence of these horrific elements, often presented in films as actual supernatural entities, within early films. James Morgart, for instance, observes that the appearing 50

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FIGUR E 4. A shop owner is confounded by mysterious objects in W. R. Booth’s The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901). Photo: British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, UK.

and disappearing mischievous figure, whether ghost, the Devil, or some other trickster, “was almost immediately taken up as a trope in early film.” At times this trope was utilized to string together a series of trick effects, as in Walter Booth’s The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901; fig. 4), in which the proprietor of a curiosity shop is confronted with a series of strange figures, including a floating head, a woman whose top and bottom halves are not connected, a ghostly armored knight, and a trio of tiny imps. The film ends with a monstrous face looming toward the screen out of a cloud of smoke, causing the proprietor to flee. Perhaps as a consequence of the uncanny experience of early moving pictures, hauntings featured prominently. A 1904 ad in the New York Clipper noted that Harbach & Co., among various projection equipment and titles for sale, offered “Haunted House Films.”96 At times these hauntings focused on the appearance and disappearance of some specter, as in Uncle Josh’s filmic adventures and in Curiosity Shop, but at other times the films focused on objects moving of their own accord. In J. Stuart Blackton’s The Haunted Hotel (1907), for example, a weary 51

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traveler is confronted with various objects that move on their own, including tea that pours itself into a cup and a knife that slices bread of its own accord. Segundo de Chomón’s The Haunted House (1908) utilizes similar moving plates as well as appearing and disappearing specters to terrify a trio of travelers seeking refuge from a rainstorm. Chomón’s film also includes a horrific demonic figure, complete with pale skin and elongated nails and fangs, appearing intermittently during the chaotic scene. Indeed, ghosts and apparitions were so popular in early trick films that the Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work, published in 1911, featured a section on how to create spectral images through double exposure of the negatives. As with Uncle Josh’s visit to a spooky hotel, these films also assumed a certain level of familiarity with the visual manifestation of hauntings. Haunted places were not unfamiliar or inconceivable to audiences around the turn of the century. Writing in 1904, J. M. Peebles described the ambivalence of Americans who might publicly deny the prospect of an actual haunted house but still felt a level of trepidation while within one: “You do not believe there is such a thing as a haunted house; yet entering one in the silent hour of a dim hazy moonlight, listening to your echoing footsteps, you soon take discretion to be the better part of valor, and retire without delay.”97 David P. Abbott reported in 1909 that two celebrated mediums who visited Omaha, Nebraska, “had considerable difficulty in securing rooms as the property owners were afraid of the reputation their property might acquire of being ‘haunted.’”98 Reports of ghosts and hauntings were, as noted above, widespread, and the visual depiction of hauntings in early films mirrored closely the descriptions of actual hauntings. Giuseppe Lapponi’s 1906 description of ghostly activities during a séance almost precisely describes the activities in both Blackton’s 1907 and Chomón’s 1908 films: Objects in the room begin to move about. The stools skip by themselves, sometimes climbing up the back of those present, or bow to the ladies of the assembly, if there are any present; the chairs dance and jump about, changing places, bending first one way then another, or standing on one leg obliquely, but without falling, against all laws of equilibrium. The china, the glasses, the candelabra that ornament the room, the tables, and other furniture of the room begin a singular dance; they move about and jolt against one another, and mix themselves up in an extraordinary muddle without breaking or being damaged.99

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Most histories of early cinema group the films discussed above within the broader category of trick films, or what Gunning calls the “genre of discontinuity.” Others attend to the comedic reactions and pratfalls and group these kinds of films with other films utilizing broad, physical humor. Morgart, for instance, argues that in most early films the horrific trope of the disappearing spirit was played not for terror but for laughter. Early films often framed horrific elements with the kind of frenetic physical energy later associated with chase films, and for this reason, Morgart contends, “it is important to note none of these films is particularly horrifying.”¹00 It is perhaps worth pausing for a moment over the question of audience reaction to what I am calling “horrific” elements. First, as noted in the introduction, my purpose here is not to seek to recover “lost horror films” in the sense of claiming these turn-of-the-century fi lms for a genre that would not be articulated for another three decades. Rather, I want to observe the presence of the elements that would later become part of the classic horror genre and trace the ways they were engaged and framed within earlier films. Noël Carroll’s notion of horror is useful in that it suggests two basic constitutive components: the presence of some kind of unnatural monster, and the treatment of this monster within the diegetic world of the film as something fearsome and repulsive. Although I do not seek the kind of ahistorical categorization that Carroll pursues, his broad definition of horror does help to frame the elements within these films—ghosts, devils, and the like—as horrific elements. Uncle Josh, like the curiosity shop owner and the various travelers, found the apparitions to be horrific, and there is some reason to suspect that at least part of the appealing shock of some of these cinematic attractions was derived from the audience’s fright at these apparitions. As already noted in the discussion of precinema, fear (or, at least, unease) was a common component of popular entertainment during the period, and this fear was often associated with displays of the uncanny and apparently supernatural. The shock of horrific elements was also at times described in terms more related to fear than mirth. Frederick A. Talbot, writing in 1914, described The Haunted Curiosity Shop as “a well-executed and startling trick film.” Georges Méliès, whose influence will be discussed in the next section, described his bag of cinematic tricks as an “arsenal of fantastic and magical compositions capable of driving the most fearless person mad.” Whether audiences of early cinema were startled or driven mad is difficult to ascertain, as there is very little use-

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ful reporting of early screenings, and those that do exist rarely describe audience reaction in ways that are easily discernible. In addition to the question of whether audiences of these early projected films experienced something akin to fright in the face of appearing and disappearing ghosts and demons, there is the question of how such films played into the broader cultural debates over the attraction to marvels and credulity. Some film historians, such as Matthew Solomon, have found within early filmmakers a decidedly antispiritualist tendency, and it is certainly true that many of the magicians making early films would have found the practices of spirit mediums objectionable. But even among films most clearly focused on the practices of spirit mediums and investigators, there is a notable ambivalence within the films themselves. George Albert Smiths’s Photographing a Ghost (1898) features a photographer opening a trunk labeled GHOST and proceeding to try to photograph the uncooperative spirit, which appears and disappears and then begins causing chairs to fly about the scene. Eventually, the photographer quits in despair. Although the film can certainly be read as poking fun at the scientific pretensions of many spirit investigators of the period, it is also notable that, at least within the diegetic world of the film, the ghost is real and, indeed, in both appearance and behavior conforms to broader cultural expectations. It is the photographer, seeking to use scientific instruments to catalog the spirit, who fails and, in his failure, becomes the object of ridicule. Smiths’s film, like those other films trafficking in horrific elements, should not be seen as an endorsement of spiritualism or superstition. Yet they should not be read as explicitly antispiritualist, at least in their execution. Rather, there is a strong ambivalence: Smith may be making a joke at the expense of spiritual investigators, but in doing so he depicts their beliefs in exactly the kind of spectacular manifestations they described. Through their very acts of display, these films were also playing along the line between the real and the unreal. This uncanny experience can be positioned not only in relation to the emergence of early cinema but also within the cultural contexts of the marvelous and the anxiety around credulity. Gunning recalls a passage in Frank Norris’s novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) in which an elderly immigrant woman dismisses the marvel of the new Kinetoscope. “It’s all a drick,” she exclaims, “I ain’t no fool; dot’s nothun but a drick.”¹0¹ Mrs. Sieppe, like many in the nineteenth century, was anxious about being fooled or overly credulous. This anxiety—of being too credulous in the face of new marvels—is also echoed on the

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moving screen within those diegetic worlds containing horrific elements. Just as Uncle Josh or the intrepid spirit photographer was confronted with the appearance of a supernatural image, so, too, audiences were confronted with the image of this very confrontation. The uncanny experience of seeing an animated spectral image or, later, animated inanimate objects (as in Haunted Hotel) was mirrored in both the diegetic and nondiegetic worlds. In keeping with the inflationary logic of the cinema of attractions, the intensity and realism of horrific elements quickly escalated across the early years of cinema. The man in a white shroud in Edison’s Spooky Hotel or the appearing and disappearing figures in Booth’s Curiosity Shop were replaced just a few years later with the pale, demonic figure in Chomón’s Haunted House. In part the escalation in both the quality and intensity of the “shocks” in these early films was driven by increasingly sophisticated techniques such as the introduction of stopmotion filming (as in Blackton’s Haunted Hotel, for instance). But there also seemed to be a clear trajectory in relation to the presentation of horrific elements in the early years of cinema, each film pushing the envelope in terms of the rapidity of the appearances and transformations and increasing the intensity of the shocks experienced simultaneously by the protagonists in the diegetic world and the audiences viewing from outside. Although the presence of horrific elements in these early attractions did not make them horror films, it is worth noting the way these films used what Gunning calls “the staccato jolts of surprise” and the creation of suspense that anticipates the spectacular “moment of revelation.”¹0² The movement between the suspense and the surprise created a unique attraction that could elicit a mix of emotions from audiences, including shock and laughter. And though many modern commentators are tempted to choose an emotional reaction and categorize these films as either horror or comedy, it is a temptation that should be resisted. Indeed, even early filmmakers struggled with how to describe their films. Méliès’s Star Films advertised its wares as “Magical and Trick Films” and as “Mystery Subjects.” The description of the 1903 film The Inn Where No Man Rests promises a picture “so full of mysteries that it’s impossible to give an adequate description in this limited space.”¹0³ Méliès was, with little doubt, a pioneering figure in the creation of magical films and the incorporation of horrific elements. His early works charted a path through the ambivalence and uncertainty of marvels and credulity, and his artistic vision would play a crucial role in the chang-

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ing reception of these elements within American culture. As such, it is worth spending the remainder of this chapter considering the place of Georges Méliès in early cinema.

“The most incredible creations are given the semblance of reality” As Matthew Solomon notes, the first decade of early cinema was an era in which “stage magic and trick films were fundamentally linked both in popular imagination as well as through concrete practices of production and exhibition.”¹04 In many of the films considered thus far, the tableaux resembled those in stage magic. The curiosity shop owner enters into a series of magical transformations that might well have been drawn from a stage magician’s act. Although numerous stage magicians entered into filmmaking, and even more took up exhibition and distribution of early films, one figure stood out as foundational. As John Frazer has argued, “In the evolution of the popular magic theater from stage to screen, George Méliès was the predominant innovator.”¹05 And though Méliès is now most widely known for his many magic films, his production was impressive in both size and scope. As Elizabeth Ezra notes, between 1897 and 1912 “he would make some 520 films .  .  . in genres as diverse as documentary, staged re-enactments of current events, erotic ‘stag’ films, féeries, ‘trick’ films and science fiction.”¹06 Not only was Méliès’s output impressive; so, too, was his popularity in the first decade of cinema. Indeed, Méliès proved so popular that American film production companies took to illegally copying his films to be redistributed under new titles.¹07 Méliès’s background as a stage magician and proprietor of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin helped to propel the popularity of his early films, which drew upon popular tropes of stage magic. As Solomon notes, the global popularity of stage magic meant that Méliès’s films enjoyed easy translation into numerous national contexts and helped to forge an emergent international cinema.¹08 In his 1914 assessment of early cinema, Talbot credits Méliès with introducing “all the devices known to the ‘Black Art’ into filmmaking.”¹09 Although it might be easy to dismiss Méliès as merely a trick-film producer or to reduce his copious catalog to the more spectacular films such as the much-celebrated A Trip to the Moon (1902), it seems clear that he was a crucial figure in pushing the early technology of cinematography toward the more fantastic and spectacular. As Méliès would later recall, he worked to use “cinema, not for the servile 56

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reproduction of nature, but for the spectacular expression of artistic and creative ideas of all kinds.”¹¹0 Although Méliès engaged a remarkable breadth of ideas, of note here is his regular use not only of the magical but of the horrific. La Manoir du Diable/The Haunted Castle (1896) stands as the oldest existing film to incorporate horrific elements. Méliès had crafted other trick films in 1896, such as The Vanishing Lady, and even a fantastic film, A Nightmare, in which a young man’s nightmare includes a beautiful woman transforming into a dancing minstrel and then a clown as well as an enormous moon. But with The Haunted Castle (Star Film No. 96), Méliès utilized the broad iconography of superstition and Gothic literature to craft a short film that, as Morgart argues, “establishes precedent for many of the visual motifs that have become synonymous with Gothic horror films ever since, including the visual depictions of witches, ghosts and bats.”¹¹¹ Although Méliès had dealt with frightening situations in A Nightmare and the similarly themed A Terrible Night (1896), in which a man is menaced by an enormous bug, it was in The Haunted Castle that he first utilized the broad motif of the supernatural. The Haunted Castle opens in what appears to be a dark castle. A bat floats into the frame and then transforms into a man in black clothing. The figure in black magically produces a large cauldron and then, in a puff of smoke, an implike assistant. A woman emerges from the smoking cauldron, and the figure in black continues his magic incantations before causing the cauldron and then himself to disappear. Two men appear and are soon menaced by the imp wielding a pitchfork. The shorter of the two men runs away in fear, but the bolder man tries to sit down in a chair that disappears just as an imposing skeleton appears. The figure in black reappears and conjures forth the imp. They menace the bolder man, who tries to run away before being stopped by the sudden appearance of a group in white cloaks. A beautiful woman appears and the man kisses her hand, but she changes into an old hag. As the bolder man draws his sword, the old hag multiplies into several figures wielding staffs. The timid man returns to aid his friend but is soon pursued by the group, which chases him until he jumps from the window in the scene’s background. The group of cloaked people menaces the remaining man before disappearing, and as the man seeks to leave he is confronted by the figure in black. In a final bid to save himself, the man discovers a cross upon the wall and uses it to force the menacing figure in black to slink away in fear (fig. 5). At a running time of only about three minutes, The Haunted Castle is remarkably successful in packing in a wide variety of the elements that 57

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FIGUR E 5. The Devil is overcome in Georges Méliès’s The Haunted Castle (1896). Photo: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

would dominate visual depictions of horrific elements: menacing bats, disappearing figures, devilish imps, figures in black, animate objects, ghostlike figures in white, and even the power of the cross to repel evil. These themes pick up the popular representation of the supernatural in Gothic literature, The Castle of Otranto, and similar works of the late eighteenth century. Similar themes and visual depictions would appear in numerous Méliès films, including: The Bewitch Inn (1897) and The Inn Where No Man Rests (1903), which both featured haunted hotel rooms; The Devil in a Convent (1899), The Pillar of Fire (1899), The Treasures of Satan (1902), and The Infernal Cake-Walk (1903), all focused on Satan; The Witch’s Revenge (1903) and The Enchanted Well (1903), both depicting witches and witchcraft; and even The Monster (1903), offering the first depiction of a mummy as a monstrous figure. Although many of these early films were promoted in the language of comedy, there was also a clear strain of both the marvelous and the startling in the advertisements from Méliès’s Star Films. The Witch’s Revenge was described as “replete with rich costumes, beautiful settings and startling effects.” The Infernal Caldron and the Phantasmal Vapors (1903) depicted “the demon Belphegor . . . with his imps” as they torment “three unfortunates who have been consigned to the depths.” The film was promoted as “a

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fascinating and absolutely new illusion.” Similarly, The Damnation of Faust (1903) was described as “replete with stupendous attractions, bewildering mysteries and marvelous effects.”¹¹² Although Méliès utilized the broad Western interest in the supernatural, there were also cultural contexts particular to nineteenthcentury France that may have shaped Méliès’s particular vision of the horrific. Gaudreault contends that “Méliès’s magic ‘views’ were an extension of his fantastic stage performances and belong to the same cultural series as his stage activity.” These performances drew heavily upon the popular French féerie plays, which, according to Katherine Singer Kovács, were “the single most important theatrical influence in the development of Méliès.”¹¹³ Similarly, Solomon notes the influence of Méliès’s time in London at Maskelyne and Cooke’s Egyptian Hall and the various magic and occult plays staged there. In his mix of the humorous and the eerie, Méliès’s work also resembled the infamous Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol, which arose with great fanfare in 1897. The Grand Guignol developed a unique theatrical product that, as Richard Hand and Michael Wilson contend, “strove to terrify and titillate the spectator through a mixture of horror, laughter, and the erotic.”¹¹4 Another uniquely French cultural practice during this period that resembled Méliès’s films was the popular series of stereopticon photo cards known as “Diableries.” As Brian May notes, “Diableries were all the rage in France from the 1860s almost until the end of the century.”¹¹5 In the Diableries, sculptors carefully crafted small tableaux of life in Hell—with scenes ranging from a dramatic depiction of Satan being cast out of Heaven to a humorous view of life in Satan’s kitchen to the erotic view of Satan’s women bathing. In turn, these tableaux were photographed using stereoptic techniques that allowed the viewer to see the images in vivid three-dimensional detail. The original Devil’s tales were derivations of the popular medieval mystery plays, but by the nineteenth century the Devil had become a celebrated figure in his own right, featuring not only in the visual spectacle of the Diableries but also in popular literature such as Le Tiroir du Diable and stage shows such as the 1844 review Diableries de l’anée.¹¹6 Méliès drew upon these and other cultural materials to craft his unique visions of devils and spirits and magic and through his artistic vision crafted an enduring foundation for the visual depiction of the supernatural and the horrific. Interestingly, unlike some of his imitators and competitors, Méliès seemed intent on crafting his fantastic elements using the most realistic means possible or, as he would later re-

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count, utilizing his art so that “the most incredible creations are given the semblance of reality.”¹¹7 In this way, Méliès worked along the broad cultural fault lines detailed in the first section of this chapter—the tension between the love of the marvelous and the fear of excessive credulity. In these early films Méliès, and others like him, worked not so much to debunk the uncanny feeling associated with superstition and spiritualism as to provoke that feeling. As Ezra notes, the films of Méliès often work directly to “call into question the very distinction between fantasy and reality.”¹¹8 This tenuous fault line—the line that separated reality and fantasy—was much on the mind of turn-of-thecentury Americans. The rapid changes in technology, politics, culture, education, and philosophy raised major concerns about where the new American epistemology would lead the young nation and how much of its received traditions and perspectives would have to be left behind. Cinema emerged along precisely this fault line, and early filmmakers quickly followed the lead of artists such as Méliès in seeking to create work that animated these concerns and uncertainties in the pursuit of new, and more shocking, attractions.

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CH A P T ER T WO

Weird and Gloomy Tales U NC A N N Y NA R R AT I V E S A N D FOR EIGN OT H ER S

Nothing scares and nothing daunts them, They would snap the ghost who haunts them “THOSE ENTER PR ISING MOT ION PICT UR E M EN,” MOTION PICT UR E STORY M AGA ZINE, FEBRUA RY 1913

A

UDIENCES VIEW ING THE EAR LIEST PROJECTED moving pictures likely saw these uncanny images at carnivals or in vaudeville halls where the marvelous spectacle of the Cinematographe was only one of the novelties on display. The terrain of the moving picture began shifting around 1905 in what scholars have termed the “nickelodeon boom.” Between 1905 and 1907, thousands of small theaters popped up around the United States devoted primarily to projecting moving pictures. The rapid expansion of nickelodeon theaters occurred largely in urban centers, often immigrant neighborhoods, where five cents purchased a cheap form of entertainment that did not require extensive knowledge of the English language or high levels of cultural literacy. Richard Abel estimates that by 1908 there were close to eight thousand nickelodeons in the United States with as many as three hundred in Chicago and close to eight hundred in New York City.¹ Eileen Bowser contends that “by 1908 or 1909, only the very smallest towns lacked a moving-picture theater of some sort. Where the population was not big enough to support a permanent theater, an exhibitor would do a circuit of several towns, showing films one night a week in each town.”² The nickelodeon boom fundamentally altered the development of 61

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cinematic practices. The rapid increase in demand for new reels to fill the shows running daily at thousands of theaters across the country pushed both the industry and the art of cinema in dramatically new directions. Within two years, the way films were produced, distributed, and viewed was markedly different from the carnival screenings of the early days. Charles Musser argues, “The year 1907 was a key turning point in cinema’s history as pressures created or magnified by the nickelodeon boom transformed screen practices at almost every level.”³ Not surprisingly, these changes also had dramatic impact on the way horrific elements were employed in films and, importantly, the way these elements were framed within the broader culture. Here it is worth noting three of the major changes to American cinema caused by the nickelodeon boom. First, increasing demand created enormous pressure on film producers and exhibitors, a pressure that was initially filled in large part by foreign producers. The demand for films in US theaters quickly outpaced the capacity of American production companies to meet it. Nickelodeon owners were desperate to fill their screens with new films, and, as Bowser observes, “a nickelodeon manager got films wherever and however he could.”4 This often entailed renting films from a rapidly expanding number of rental exchange companies, though these films were at times badly deteriorated older reels or illegally duped copies. By late 1907, American production companies worried about their inability to control the market and the circulation of older and inferior prints. In November, several of the major American production companies convened a meeting with the larger rental exchange firms in an effort to create a voluntary association to protect the quality and fairness of the connection between film production and distribution. Many of the issues discussed were focused on the quality of films and the importance of copyright, but as Michael Aronson notes, “Implicit in these directives . . . was the manufacturers’ attempt to regulate and retain primary control of the films and their profits.”5 Much of the first decade of cinematic production in the United States was dominated by squabbling among American film producers and exchanges as various corporate interests fought battles over patent issues, trademarks, and copyright in the courts and in public relations campaigns.6 These battles set the stage for the emergence of the Motion Pictures Patent Company (the Trust), a collusion between several major American film manufacturing interests often associated with Edison. Beginning in 1908, the Trust struggled to create stability and clarity in the American marketplace and to advantage its members by limiting competition. However, 62

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as Robert Anderson notes, in the first years the Trust’s “attempt to control, through interlocking agreements, all aspects of the industry (i.e., the production of raw film, the manufacture of motion pictures, the manufacture of projecting equipment, distribution, and exhibition) failed due to the volatility of the marketplace.”7 The gap between the demand for new films and the limits of American film production was filled by foreign film companies, largely French. Tom Gunning notes that as early as 1903 “French films began to fill American screens, predominantly the products of Pathé, and most American production companies imported foreign films, legally or illegally, from England and France.”8 Abel goes so far as to argue that the availability of foreign films, especially from Pathé, “provided the single most significant condition of emergence for the nickelodeon.”9 As noted in chapter 1, some of these films were influenced by a uniquely French sensibility toward the supernatural and horrific. Bowser notes that as early as 1907 “magic films and object animation films that played with notions of time” were widely popular. The films of Méliès, Chomón, Smith, and others circulated widely on American screens, carrying with them the marvelous spectacles of fairy tales and folktales and exploiting the widespread familiarity with and interest in the supernatural. Just as the nickelodeon boom opened the door for foreign films, it also helped create the conditions for shifts in film technique. A second effect of the boom was the increased pressure toward narrative films. For films using horrific elements, this shift was crucial. The spectacle of appearing and disappearing monsters or the depiction of translucent spirits was insufficient to maintain audience interest for very long. The inflationary economy of the marvelous spectacle observed in chapter 1 continued and accelerated with the nickelodeon boom, and even the most inventive series of tricks and attractions lost their capacity to intrigue audiences. Filmmakers began shifting away from the spectacle of actualities or tricks and toward narratives. Increasingly, films constructed narratives that were internally sufficient and not dependent on prior knowledge of the story or on the explanations of a lecturer. This was, as Charlie Keil argues, a transitional period in which spectacular attractions became absorbed into narrative practices. According to the growing population of critics and commentators whose writings appeared in various trade journals, audiences demanded, as Keil puts it, that “filmic narration . . . supply its own internal explanatory devices.”¹0 André Gaudreault views this transitional period as the point at which the paradigm of monstration—the cinema of attractions in which spectacle was the primary focus—began shifting into the paradigm of nar63

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ration. Merely showing a tableau of magical events was no longer interesting to audiences who had become familiar with these tricks. Rather, as Gaudreault argues, “the mere aggregation of tableaux gave way to the creation of closer links between fragments. To mise-en-scène was now added mise en chaîne, or putting in sequence; the creation of a chain of fragments.”¹¹ This shift to narration meant that the appearance of supernatural creatures and other horrific elements had to be framed within a coherent and believable plot. During this period, numerous filmmakers embraced the challenge of stringing together horrific elements into coherent supernatural narratives. As a third effect, the combination of rapidly expanding venues for viewing moving pictures and the development of more sophisticated narratives helped to fuel a widespread moral panic in American culture.¹² Much of this panic focused on the kinds of audiences most commonly found in the nickelodeon theater: the working class, children, and immigrants. In a 1910 letter to the New York Child Welfare Committee, John Collier articulated two of these anxieties. First, Collier wondered about the impact of moving pictures on the working classes: “How is this mass of wage-earning families being influenced by motion pictures?” he asked. Second, Collier observed that “nearly half a million children go to moving picture shows each week in New York” and questioned “what part are motion pictures themselves, as moral and mental agencies, playing in the child’s life?”¹³ The third population of concern was the large cluster of immigrant communities that frequented nickelodeon theaters. Immigration was a hot topic in the early 1900s due in part to the economic impact of new laborers seeking opportunity but also, as Noel Kent observes, where these new immigrants were arriving from, such as Sicily and Bohemia. As Kent notes, “These new immigrants, many with swarthy complexions, bizarre-sounding native tongues, and outlandish costumes, were widely viewed as less ‘desirable.’”¹4 A 1910 report from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures echoed this sentiment when characterizing the nickelodeons of New York’s Italian neighborhoods: “They are badly ventilated and unsanitary. The odor in one of the shows where the Italian working men form a greater part of the patrons, is almost unendurable. The films are often questionable. These films are ordinarily importations and invariably deal with murdur [sic], assassination or some other illegal proceedings.”¹5 The concerns of Collier and the National Board of Review were not atypical. As Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer observe, “Widespread rhetoric on the deleterious effects of cinema on the social body spread quickly from early 1907.”¹6 64

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Although much of this rhetoric attended to particular filmic elements such as crime, sex, and sacrilege, one can detect within these critiques of the nickelodeon strains of the anxieties associated with superstition. American commentators throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century were critical of the lingering place of superstition within American culture. They chastised the Americans’ obsession with novelty and marvels and their excessive credulity. Indeed, many of the critiques of American credulity and enchantment with marvels were predicated on the assumed gullibility of the working class, young people, and immigrants. The anxiety arising over the expansion of moving-picture venues in the first decade of the twentieth century parallels these earlier concerns. Cultural critics seemed to presume that the marvelous spectacle of the moving image was capable of wielding undue influence over susceptible audiences. Although much has been written about the panic generated by the nickelodeon boom, especially as it related to the implementation of governmental censorship and other forms of regulation, I want to pursue the resonance between the anxieties over moving pictures and the anxieties over marvels and credulity, especially as they relate to the depiction of horrific elements.¹7 The crucial term that would come to shape the production and reception of films with horrific elements during the nickelodeon boom and for a few years following it was weird. This term became regularly associated with films utilizing horrific elements and crafting narratives based on the logics of superstition and the supernatural. Although other terms, such as mysterious or startling, were also used in relation to these kinds of films, “weird” appeared consistently as a descriptor and was widely used in film promotional materials as well as the commentaries and reviews from film writers working in the several film trade journals, such as Moving Picture World, Moving Picture News, and Motography. At first glance, calling films dealing with supernatural entities, magic, and monsters “weird” made perfect sense. The term is derived from the Old English wyrd and is probably related to the Old High German wurt, with both words denoting a sense of fate or destiny and alluding to a set of higher powers directing the course of human events. As early as 1625, weird was a noun denoting an entity with supposed magical power.¹8 By the early nineteenth century, Percy Bysshe Shelley used the term to describe supernatural entities, and his poem “Witch of Atlas” described a macabre story, “a tale more fit for the weird winter nights.”¹9 For American audiences in the early twentieth century, anything de65

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scribed as “weird” might also suggest a connection to the growing body of pulp fiction eventually known as “weird fiction.” While acknowledging the hybrid nature of this literary genre, Benjamin Noys and Timothy Murphy observe that it is generally defined around “its estrangement from our sense of reality.”²0 In their estimation, weird fiction arose between 1880 and 1940 and became most clearly defined with the founding of Weird Tales, a pulp-fiction magazine, in 1923.²¹ H.  P. Lovecraft, perhaps the author associated most closely with the genre, defined the “weird tale” as having “something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint . . . of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”²² Weird films thus shared some of Lovecraft’s sense of the violation of natural laws and the undermining of scientific and rational thinking. In this way, weird films, like weird fiction, constituted a kind of implicit critique of the increasingly rational American culture. Careful attention to the way the term weird was employed in relation to early horrific narrative films suggests a complex constellation of concerns. Weird tales, as these films were often called, provided a counternarrative to the emerging American rationalist epistemology. In weird tales, one’s fate was determined by external, cosmic forces and not by one’s ingenuity or ability. Weird tales attended to the past, to mythic times of witches and knights, or to the ways in which elements of the past—ancient curses or ghosts—reemerged into the present. And weird tales often centered on the power of those typically deemed powerless in the emerging American self-conception of the early twentieth century. Women, people of color, and foreigners were often portrayed as wielding mysterious powers beyond those possible in the real, rational world. Although these motifs, or at least the visual depictions of them, were common during the earlier period of attractions, the shift from monstration to narration meant an emphasis not only on the visual spectacle of the horrific but also on the crafting of a narrative logic, a logic that would be labeled “weird.” The growth of narrative pushed, as Bowser notes, for a “change from cinema as presentation (an attraction) to representation (the realistic expression of the drama and emotions of a story),” and for filmmakers this meant crafting the illusion of a coherent narrative framework and an effort to “avoid as far as possible in66

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consistencies that might break that illusion.”²³ For filmmakers working with the kinds of horrific elements introduced by Méliès and others, this meant employing a narrative logic explicitly steeped in superstition and the supernatural. In chapter 1, I employed Ernst Jentsch’s notion of the uncanny to explore the way the moving bodies of “living pictures” created a not entirely unpleasant sense of unease in audiences. For Jentsch, the uncanny results from a disconnection between perception and belief, and this disconnection opens a space for the emergence of fantasies and delusions. The shift in moving pictures from attraction to narration meant that horrific elements became more than just uncanny spectacles. The mise en chaîne itself became uncanny. Here it is helpful to engage Freud’s notion of the uncanny. Freud faults Jentsch’s earlier conception for its lack of attention to the deeper sense of meaning intrinsic to the experience of the uncanny. For Freud, the experience of the uncanny is more than just misperception but entails a reframing of the familiar in terms of past desires and anxieties. The unease caused by imagining that a childhood toy has come to life involves not only the blurring of animate and inanimate but also the return of a long-repressed “infantile wish.”²4 So too the fear of ghosts or doppelgängers, for Freud, arises from a sense of earlier fears making an “unintentional return.”²5 In both cases—the return of the fear and of the wish—the crucial aspect of the uncanny is that “the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns.”²6 Although Freud’s concern in his initial essay seems primarily in terms of psychoanalysis and aesthetics, other commentators have noted the broader applicability of Freud’s sense of the uncanny. Nicholas Royle, for instance, employs the notion of the uncanny in the interrogation of “sexuality, class, race, age, imperialism and colonialism— so many issues of potentially uncanny ‘otherness’ already evident in the nineteenth century.”²7 Royle’s observation of the uncanny aspects of modern life emerging during the nineteenth century is echoed by Mladen Dolar, who observes a specific historical sense of the uncanny “that is closely linked with the advent of modernity and which constantly haunts it from the inside.”²8 Returning to the framing of horrific elements in the films of the transitional period (roughly 1903–1913), the term weird encompassed the uncanny experience of a culturally repressed past. Americans were, arguably, attracted to these exotic and supernatural tales in part because they resonated with older traditions and beliefs that were now 67

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marginalized in the new modern America. The fantastic tales of superstition that had caused such anxiety since the inception of the cinema of attractions became unsettling narratives through which repressed elements of superstition, folklore, and Old World traditions returned to trouble the solidifying narrative of American rationalism and exceptionalism. The supernatural mise en chaîne was familiar and appealing to audiences familiar with the logic of superstition and who were experiencing the slow repression of foreign traditions in the forging of the new American identity. During the transitional period of cinema, these unsettling narratives were increasingly identified as foreign and, later, were pushed almost entirely off of American screens. Between 1903 and 1913, the term weird, mirroring the cinematic narratives it commonly denoted, was transformed from identifying fantastic tales to connoting films that were decidedly foreign and, ultimately, un-American. In the transitional period, the supernatural mise en chaîne was categorized as “weird” in three different senses: first, as a signal of the supernatural and horrific; second, as a signal of the foreign and exotic; and, finally, as a signal of the gloomy and un-American.

“Weird happenings to order” Although the term weird has a long-standing association with the supernatural, around the turn of the century this association became commonplace in discussions of popular visual culture. An 1893 lantern slide depicting a skeleton in a haunted castle was described as “most weird,” and the play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was described in 1900 as a “weird and wonderful drama.”²9 In 1903, the magician Kellar was described as having a large following “who delight in the mysterious, the uncanny and weird feats performed by the master of legerdemain.”³0 A 1904 magic trick with dissolving playing cards was promoted as a “weird new illusion,” and part of the attraction of Frederick Ireland’s Enigmarelle, supposedly an early mechanical woman that performed on stages throughout Europe and America, was its “weird influence” over audiences.³¹ The Gilmore-Long Music Publishing Company advertised the concept for a new musical as “a weird jungle story, taking place in the land of bamboo huts and where the cannibals thrive.” The play promised to benefit from the music, which “helps to carry out the weirdness of the story.”³² These examples suggest the scope of the term weird. The term was associated with the magical and illusory and also, more explicitly, with 68

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the unnatural and supernatural. Gothic tales of skeletons and split personalities, as well as magical and mechanical illusions, were all encompassed by the term, as was the explicitly exotic and foreign. Beyond the subject matter—skeletons and monsters and magic—an affective tone can be discerned in the term’s use. The description of the musical characterizes the music as working to “carry out the weirdness of the story,” suggesting that the quality of being weird constitutes not just the subject but the attitude of the work and its relationship to the audience. A similar sense of the term is found in a description of Edgar Allan Poe’s reading of his masterpiece “The Raven.” The author was reported to have “lapsed at once into a manner, expression and tone of voice of gloomy almost weird solemnity, gazing as if on something invisible to others, and never changing his position until the recitation was concluded.” This performance was contrasted with a later disappointing recitation Poe gave for a small audience that was delivered “in a mechanical sort of way, and with a total lack of the weird and gloomy expression which had given them such effect” at the earlier reading.³³ Thus the term seemed not only to entail narrative elements but also to encompass a sense of the quality of both the narrative’s performance and its effect upon the audience. This effect was similar to, or at least associated with, the sense of the mysterious and the uncanny, and, not surprisingly, early filmmakers soon adopted the term weird to describe their magic and trick films. Méliès’s film The Drawing Lesson (1903), a 160-foot reel that depicts an art teacher who transforms objects into a statue of a woman that then comes to life, was described as performing “all manner of weird feats, such as bringing statues to life.”³4 Similarly, The Apparition (1903) was advertised as surpassing the earlier The Inn Where No Man Rests (1903), as “all of the tricks are new and very ludicrous” and “the introduction of the Specter gives a new and weird effect in motion photography.”³5 By the time of the nickelodeon boom, weird films and effects had become remarkably common. A 1907 article in Moving Picture World described the everyday job of the cinematographer as working to “observe these strange phenomena and have his machine right on the spot to get them because he makes the weird happenings to order.”³6 Delving deeper into the arts of constructing these weird happenings, an article by Littell McClung in 1908 described the tricks—such as stopmotion and substitution splices—behind producing mysterious effects and noted how “in many pictures the negatives are produced positively, giving grotesque results.”³7 Even a cursory glance at films appearing in the first few years of the 69

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nickelodeon boom suggests these weird happenings were being ordered on a regular basis. The 1907 Selig Polyscope Company production, The Misadventures of a Baby Carriage, was described as “the wild and weird experience of an apparently bewitched baby cab and its innocent inmate.”³8 Many of these weird films, such as Misadventures, were framed in an explicitly fanciful or whimsical sense. The 1907 film The Ghost Holiday depicted “a ghost appearing in the church yard and being joined by a group of other ghosts, skeletons, etc.,” who commandeers a passing automobile to head into town for dancing and fun. Similarly, Chomón’s 1908 Cave of the Spooks was described as a “weird picture” in which “we take a pleasure trip into the infernal regions and are entertained by his Satanic Majesty and all the spooks that are connected with his household.” As evidence of how common these kinds of “weird” films had become, the reviewer of Cave for Moving Picture World complained that it was “one of the familiar magic films, which has little to commend it beyond the dance of the skeletons, which is an original conception and secures abundant applause. . . . Aside from this there is nothing out of the ordinary.”³9 The pressure of this familiarity was, in part, pressure to construct more complex narrative framings for the use of weird horrific elements. Some early films found the mise en abyme of dreams and hallucinations as an effective way to frame fantastic images. Biograph’s The Sculptor’s Nightmare (1908) found the boozing sculptor locked up in the cooler and experiencing “most weird hallucinations. Huge masses of clay appear and slowly model themselves into busts of Taft, Fairbanks and Bryan, the G.O.P. Elephant and an animated Teddy Bear.” In Pathé’s Scullion’s Dream (1908), three chefs fall asleep, with each dreaming of fanciful events such as knives moving of their own accord and dismembering one of the cooks and of a fly drawing a picture upon the head of another. The film concluded with “each remembering his weird dream [and accusing] the other of being responsible for it with the result that there is a great melee.”40 Not all weird dreams were necessarily comical in tone. In Pathé’s Towards the Moon: or, A Child’s Dream (1907), a young boy secrets a book in his bed and reads until he falls asleep and into dreamland, whereupon “his experiences on this rather extended tour are of such weird nature that we follow him and, with him, enjoy the thrilling scenes and weird spectres.” Although framed within a child’s dream, the film included “his Satanic majesty” whose “horrifying visage one could scarcely imagine.”4¹ Other films followed in this less clearly comedic vein. Selig’s 1907 70

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Mike the Model was promoted as “a combination of mystic and comical ideas that is simply irresistible” and described as “weird, mysterious and comical by turns.”4² Méliès’s The Witch (1906) was advertised as “Dramatically Emotional,” and Vitagraph’s The Haunted Hotel (1907) had the tagline “Can You Solve the Mystery of The Haunted Hotel?” and was described as “a weirdly marvelous conception. Startling! Puzzling! Bewildering!” The advertisements emphasized “the poor frightened traveler” who is left “shivering with FRIGHT, and wondering what is going to happen next!”4³ Similarly, the 1908 film Ghost Story was reviewed as “a comic which has certain elements of realism which might well frighten the stoutest hearted.”44 Lux’s 1908 film Just Retribution employed horrific elements in the dramatic story of an innkeeper and his wife who murder a guest for his money. The murderous innkeeper gloats over his new treasure, but “remorse and fear begin to creep over” him, and soon “the ghost of the guest appears” and confronts him. In the end, the innkeeper falls dead of “grief and fright” in this film, which combined “a fine quality of sensationalism, illusion and dramatic effect.”45 The affective dimension of weird was also evidenced in the increasingly explicit discussion of the musical accompaniment for early films. Early films, of course, were not silent but often accompanied by music and sound effects. As early as 1910, columnists in trade journals were urging the inclusion not only of music but also of appropriate music. Clyde Martin, for instance, predicted “the next improvement in the film business will be the marking of titles with a musical cue.” This prediction would, for the most part, come true.46 Prior to the printing of official musical cues, trade publications offered suggestions for ways theater musicians could improve the quality of the viewing experience with appropriate accompaniment. In one of his columns in 1911, Clarence E. Sinn discussed the American Film Manufacturing Company production The Witch and the Cowboys (also known as The Witch on the Range), a film that mingled the weird dynamics of witchcraft with the increasingly popular western genre.47 Sinn found that the film contained “splendid chance for musical development” as “it abounds in weird scenes, contrasted with those of agitated, lively and pathetic character and altogether is such a one as the average pianist likes to work up into a ‘showy picture.’” Similarly, he recommends “something weird and rather lively” to accompany the Thanhouser supernatural fairy tale The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1911).48 In another column, Sinn recommended various pieces to accompany the Pathé production Satan’s Rival (1911), including specific recommendations such as: “mysterious weird 71

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till ‘Satan disguised as Prince,’ etc.” and then “bold heroic or polonaise till Hermit is on with Princess and others.”49 The concept of weird therefore suggested more than just the elements or even themes contained within a film; it also suggested the feeling audiences were meant to experience. The association of weird music with weird films made the connection between feeling and narrative clear. The recommendations of particular kinds of music to be “mysterious weird” or “heroic” for particular themes suggested the degree to which particular filmic elements were designed to evoke particular feelings, and it is clear that the notion of weird carried with it a particular kind of feeling, one contrasted with the heroic or whimsical and more closely associated with the mysterious and unsettling. The prominence of weird themes and feelings during this period was suggested by the description of the luxurious movie palace—The People’s Theater in Portland, Oregon—in 1911. In describing the many features of the new theater, Charles F. Morris noted the chimes on the $10,000 organ, which “will enable the organist to create a very weird and realistic effect when the peculiar picture being exhibited warrants.”50 By the 1910s, audiences expected more from a film than just a series of feelings, and there was increasing emphasis on not only developed narratives but also narrative coherence. Writing in 1911, W. Stephen Bush urged filmmakers to recognize the need for “unity of design” in films by which he meant “the extent to which the parts of a picture are coherent with and subordinated to a central idea.” As one example of this narrative coherence, Bush recommended Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which from the first scene “plants the seed of the idea in the spectator’s mind: we see weird, mystic, irresponsible powers at work, strange forces that help to weave the threads in the web of fate.”5¹ Into at least the early 1910s, weird was one of the threads that helped weave together the narratives of numerous films. Although the films attached to the descriptor weird were varied, they retained certain core supernatural qualities and uncanny feelings. The term weird continued to be attached to comedies, though usually with a supernatural or unnatural element. The 1912 Pathé film The Haunted Room was described as a “funny farce” similar to earlier haunted-hotel films in which a traveler finds himself in a “weird hotel” where objects begin to appear, disappear, and move of their own accord.5² Similarly, Thanhouser’s 1913 When Ghost Meets Ghost depicts a comedian bachelor who lives in “the funniest old haunted house.” Interestingly, the promotion for When Ghost Meets Ghost was clear to differentiate this treatment of the ghost story from others: “But it is 72

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a specter story that won’t scare the youngsters in your audience, for it is a purely comedy plot that is worked up without any ‘horrors’ or ‘terrors.’”5³ Thanhouser’s disclaimer was probably necessary. By 1913, American screens had seen numerous weird, mysterious, and gruesome films drawn from superstition and with explicit intentions of provoking horror and terror. Lubin’s 1909 film The Oysterman’s Gold featured a criminal murdering an oysterman for his gold and then being haunted by the vengeful “apparition of the murdered oysterman” until he commits suicide. The film was praised for intermingling the supernatural with a traditional crime story or, as one reviewer commented, its “curious contrast in utilitarian and weird tragedy.”54 The Nickelodeon’s reviewer criticized the Atlas film A Touching Mystery (1910) due to its “rather flippant title for a film which depicts a really horrible experience.” The film focused on a Hindu curse and a woman who is driven mad by “the horror of it all” and was praised for “suggesting a feeling of the weird and uncanny.”55 Ghosts and curses were not the only supernatural elements to receive noncomedic attention. Edison’s 1912 film An Unusual Sacrifice was touted as “the first instance in which the subject of telepathy has received serious treatment in a photoplay.”56 Hypnotism was engaged in Love and Hypnotism (1912), which Moving Picture World’s reviewer called “a somewhat morbid story.” The 1913 Union feature Balaoo, based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, focused on a half-human, half-monkey creature and was described this way: “It is not a love story, nor even a melodrama, but a ‘ghost’ or ‘were-wolf’ story, a weird tale.” According to one reviewer, the film “will startle the average spectator and it will surely be talked about.”57

“The birthplace of all such weird practices” Although the term weird did not come to constitute the kind of fully formed genre as did terms such as western or melodrama, it seems clear that weird signified for filmmakers, commentators, and audiences certain cinematic characteristics. These included the kinds of elements films employed—skeletons, ghosts, monsters—and the way the narrative would treat these elements through supernatural stories of magic, curses, and nightmares. But, the term weird also carried another connotation, one that would become crucial in the unfolding history of horrific elements in film. Throughout the transitional period, weird be73

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came regularly associated not only with the supernatural and superstitious but also with the foreign. Early promotional materials for films focused on foreign locations, and customs often described these actualities as weird. In a widely published 1909 essay titled “The World before Your Eyes,” professor Frederick Starr praised the moving picture for its ability to expose audiences to so many diverse places and customs. Through the magic of moving pictures, Starr had visited “the Orient and gazed at the watersellers and beggars and dervishes” and “beheld old fat Rajahs with the prices of a thousand lives bejeweled in their monster turbans.” Through the moving pictures, Starr had “looked upon weird dances and outlandish frolics in every quarter of the globe,” noting that “I didn’t have to leave Chicago for a moment.”58 The actualities and travel pictures Starr praised were often promoted as offering a glimpse of the weird. The Urban-Eclipse production Romantic Italy (1909) promised views of Roman fortifications and majestic waterfalls and a variety of “weird and thrilling scenes.”59 The review of a 1911 travelogue of Genoa asked readers, “Who has not been thrilled by the tales of weird and grand happenings in the old Italian castles, of the fascinating life ’neath the beating sun that has made ‘Italian blood’ the favorite theme of the composer?”60 Similarly, On the Frontier of Thibet (1911) promised “many truly Oriental scenes” and “should not be missed by any who love the weird and exotic.”6¹ The columnist for Moving Picture World’s “The Moving Picture Educator” column praised the Eclair Company for its series of travel films, including the 1912 release An Arabian Theater, which proved “weird and droll in its native surroundings.”6² The equation of “weird” with “foreign” influenced the depiction of horrific elements in at least two crucial ways. First, many films using horrific elements framed them in relation to explicitly Orientalist notions of the exotic East in which the strange magic of Egypt, India, and the Far East was seen as decidedly Other in relation to American notions of rationality and progress. Second, films that framed horrific elements within Western culture and aesthetics typically located the supernatural narratives within the distant past of castles and wizards and curses or as on the outskirts of civilization. Both frames—the Orientalist and the historical—suggested a sense of distance between American audiences and the superstitious narratives upon the screen. In some instances, the distinction between rational American and supernatural foreign Other was an explicit component of the narrative framework. There were likely many causes of the American moviegoers’ fascination with both the exotic Orient and the Western past. But the fram74

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ing of supernatural narratives in relation to the explicitly foreign can be understood in terms of the ongoing struggle between American progressive rationalism and the Old World superstitions raised in chapter 1. Framed in this way, the uncanny nature of explicitly foreign narratives suggests Freud’s sense of the uncanny. The frightening objects—spirits, ghosts, witches, and so on—were crafted in part out of the cultural repression of those past beliefs. In the American struggle to repress the unruly collection of cultures, languages, races, and identities that constituted the young nation, these repressed past identities were returning as uncanny specters to trouble the dominant narrative of American exceptionalism and progress. Attention to some of these films and their rhetorical framing may give a clearer sense of the ideological uncanny embodied within weird films. The connection between early cinema and Orientalism has been well established by other scholars. Antonia Lant, for instance, has carefully demonstrated the obsession with Egypt that existed in precinematic visual practices and even influenced the design of many early movie palaces. In Lant’s reading of the history, Egypt not only stood as an object for Western imperialist obsessions but also “served as the entry point to the east, the ‘Gateway to India.’”6³ Similarly, John MacKenzie identifies a close connection between early cinematic depictions of the East and the Orientalist strains in theatrical productions during that period.64 In both the precinematic and early cinematic treatments, the East was defined primarily in contrast to the West. Whereas the West, especially America, was depicted as civilized, progressive, and rational, the East was characterized as savage, backward, and irrational. In his foundational work on Orientalism, Edward Said noted the contrast often drawn between the Westerner, who “has at his disposal a sort of leverage” of rational and scientific thinking, and those of the East, who were depicted as enmeshed in superstition and beliefs in the supernatural.65 The expanded cinematic narratives of the transitional period regularly relied on Orientalist attitudes to frame horrific events. Biograph’s The Hindoo Dagger (1909; fig. 6) was advertised as “a thrilling story of the ominous presence of a Hindoo dagger.”66 This morbid tale intertwined the supernatural influence of the cursed artifact with a woman’s infidelity and murder. Indeed, one fairly common theme of films during this and later periods was the way the supernatural, or apparently supernatural, might intervene into the tranquility of the domestic sphere. Although largely a melodrama about infidelity and revenge, the story was explicitly framed by the promoters in Orientalist terms: “The 75

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FIGUR E 6. Lovers soon to be troubled by the influence of the supernatural in D. W. Griffith’s The Hindoo Dagger (1909). Photo: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.

name Hindoo is sure to conjure up in our minds thoughts of mysticism, fetichism [sic], thaumaturgy and occult art, and with reason, for Hindustan is, without doubt, the birthplace of all such weird practices.”67 Selig’s 1909 film The Moonstone also set its story in the Orientalist version of India by adapting Wilkie Collins’s novel of the same name. In the film, the cursed moonstone was stolen from an Indian temple during an uprising. The film then traced the efforts of the Indian prince to retrieve the stolen stone. Selig promoted the film as a sweeping adventure that “transports audiences from the commonplace of this workaday world into the mystic pagan symbolism of India” and emphasized the “occult powers of the stone.”68 Moving Picture World’s reviewer declared the original source novel to be “very weird, very fascinating, very eerie” and praised Selig for capturing its exotic spirit. In particular, the reviewer noted, “it is quite the thing to expect lively and accurate western dramas from the Selig studio, but it is a far cry indeed from the hurly-burly of the great untamed American West to the mysticism of the Orient, yet the drama is quite as successful.”69 The re76

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view is noteworthy not only in its equation of the weird with the Orient but also in its recognition of a distinction between the American West and the supernatural East. In reality, the Selig Company was one of the more active American film companies producing films with decidedly supernatural and weird stories. The interest in the occult may have arisen in part from William Selig himself, who, as a younger man, performed as Professor Selig, a mystic touted as “The Celebrated and Wonderfully Gifted Medium.”70 Of course, Selig was not the only American filmmaker that portrayed India as a strange and mystic location. In addition to Biograph, the Independent Moving Picture Company produced films such as The Idol’s Eye (1910), which was described as “a weird story of a large diamond abstracted from an image of Buddah.”7¹ The reviewer in Moving Picture World commented that the film “reminds one strongly of the ‘Moonstone,’” and though its dramatic situations were “not altogether pleasant” it was to be admired for depicting “some of the glamor of Eastern mysticism.”7² India was not the only foreign locale associated with mysticism, as numerous films utilized Egyptian mythology in crafting weird tales. The equation of Egypt with the supernatural was already evident in earlier films such as Méliès’s The Monster (1903), which featured a wizard bringing a skeleton to life in front of a seated pharaoh. The shrouded skeleton danced, grew enormously tall, and elongated its neck to grotesque length before being transformed into a beautiful woman and then back to a skeleton. The costumed “Egyptians” performed this spectacle before a large painted backdrop dominated by the distant figure of the Sphinx. Similarly, Pathé’s film The Black Witch (1906) featured a witch in blackface causing numerous objects to appear and disappear for the pleasure of some Eastern sultan and his bride. The Orientalist association between Egypt and the supernatural continued into the transitional period. Thanhouser’s 1911 She adapted the novel by Rider Haggard into a two-reel film starring Marguerite Snow. Reviewer W. Stephen Bush found the story a “weird and mysterious tale” and praised the Thanhouser production for “making a mysterious and complicated novel very plain to the average moving picture patron” while maintaining “their high standard of art and dignity in rendering this strange piece of fiction into moving pictures.”7³ The film begins in ancient Egypt as the Pharaoh’s daughter seduces a priest of Isis. After they have a child, the pair travel to see the mystic “SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-OBEYED,” who offers them eternal life if they bathe in mystic flames. When the couple refuses, the woman escapes with her 77

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child. The priest, evidently the object of She’s affection, is struck dead, but as one of the intertitles explains: “The body of her dead love is preserved by ‘SHE’ who awaits through the ages his reincarnation.”74 The scene shifts to London in 1885, where a young orphan is brought into the custody of a professor named Horace Holly. When the boy, Leo, reaches the age of twenty-five, he is given a box containing a letter and maps that direct him to where SHE continues to live and also instruct him to seek vengeance against her. The two men travel to Africa and to the temple where “SHE-WHO-NEVER-DIES” still “grieves beside the body of the man she loved and killed centuries before.” When the two men arrive, SHE takes Leo to be the reincarnation of her long dead lover and destroys the ancient body of the preserved priest before seeking to seduce Leo into joining her in the flames that give eternal life. Evidently because of Leo’s refusal, the flames change in character, and instead of prolonging her life they do the opposite. “From a figure of youth and beauty she turns to an old and shriveled hag and falls shrieking to the ground, where she dies.”75 Leo and Holly depart, but in the coda we see Leo back in London, his hair turned permanently white by the experience, where he destroys all records of “SHE, the mysterious.” She encapsulated much of the Orientalist uncanny that is evident during the transitional period. In addition to positing the actual existence of supernatural powers, the film located those mysterious entities both within the exotic Orient and with roots in ancient times. It is also notable that the film embodies supernatural evil within a female form, a trope that was evident in earlier films and would continue into later films. The introduction of the more contemporary Leo, whose twenty-fifth birthday more or less corresponded with the year of the film’s 1911 release, demonstrated the uncanny texture of the film. Ancient and distant supernatural entities intruded on the Western life of Leo, and it fell to him to go and face the ancient evil. Although he survived, the encounter left its mark, and in the end Leo did what must be done with such irrational threats from the ancient past: he destroyed all record of it. She was by no means alone in framing weird tales of the supernatural within Egypt. Gaumont’s 1912 film The Vengeance of Egypt told the story of the “spirit of an Egyptian Princess, dead 2,000 years, outraged by the stealing of a ring from a mummy’s finger.” The offended princess left “a wave of woe extending over a century,” and the film was touted as having “an atmosphere weird and interest compelling. A background of Oriental occultism wreaking the wrath of a wraith through human passions.”76 Moving Picture World heralded the film as “a new kind of 78

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horror in a three-reel Gaumont special” and contended that “its object is horror, always a new horror and, in many of its scenes, it is astonishingly effective.”77 The horror of Vengeance, as with other films of the era, was derived from the expansion of earlier uncanny marvels of the moving picture through the inclusion of exotic Otherness. The magical curses and supernatural entities that fascinated and horrified American audiences represented more than the tricks of magical effects, as in the earliest years of moving pictures; films increasingly relied on narratives constructed out of exotic and foreign customs. These weird foreign elements contrasted starkly with the workaday world of American progress and rationalism. They constituted an uncanny attraction that drew audiences into entertaining the dangerous return of the horrific (and repressed) Other into the rational world they had constructed. The contrast between American rationalism and the supernatural was rendered in relation to not only the Orientalist exotic Other but also European foreignness. Associating weird tales of magic and spirits with Europe made a degree of sense. The filmmakers crafting the earliest cinematic treatment of horrific elements were largely from Europe, with Méliès being the inventive pioneer. Those early filmmakers often trafficked in the kinds of folklore, fairy tales, and fairy plays familiar to European audiences and often introduced to Americans through their cinematic adaptations. In a 1911 article for Moving Picture News, A.  L. Barrett asserted that the popularity of European fairy-tale films was due in part to the fact that “there is no native American fairy lore.”78 The connection between horrific tales and European settings and history was established from the late 1890s, and many of the films discussed in chapter 1 framed their magical tableau within some medieval European setting, with princes, castles, convents, and so on. The association of the supernatural with Europe continued in the weird films of the transitional period (roughly 1903–1913) even as the pioneer of these films, Georges Méliès, began to fade from prominence. As a typical example, the 1908 Vitagraph film The Water Sprite is subtitled A Legend of the Rhine and told the tale of a bankrupt German baron who gains a fortune in a bargain with a mystical water spirit. But when the baron reneges on his end of the bargain, to return and marry the sprite, “there is an unusually loud crash of thunder and a flash of lightning which illumines the whole scene, and in the weird light of the window” the sprite returns to claim her due. The 1909 Pathé film The Evil Philter is also set during the early history of Europe and deals with witchcraft and love potions. The promotional 79

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materials remind the audience: “We must remember that the incidents in this story take place way back when witches and magic and all that sort of thing were looked upon very seriously.” As in Water Sprite, the temporary profiting from magic—here Lorenzo gaining a woman’s love through the magic potion—does not end well, and “wherever he turns, up pops some hideous-looking creature and finally we see the unfortunate man, after enduring all sorts of torments, swallowed up in an abyss from which issues flames and brimstone.”79 The Italian company Ambrosio was often associated with stories of brutality and crime, and some of their films trafficked in the supernatural. Ambrosio’s 1911 production of The Mask of the Red Death presented a scene in which “Death, a shadowy spectre, carrying his scythe, stalks into the castle, presenting a weird and awe-inspiring sight.” Similarly, its 1912 production of Blood Vengeance related the story of a woman driven to murder her brother’s paramour with a bag of snakes, an act encouraged by “her mother’s ghost.” Moving Picture World’s reviewer praised Blood Vengeance for its lighting and settings (“the effect is an eerie, literary atmosphere”) and noted how “the horror produced by the bag of snakes is tremendous.”80 Just as Americans were expressing explicit anxieties about European immigrants, especially those from Italy and other countries in Southern Europe, they found themselves attracted to horrific tales of magic and murder set within those very countries. Not all films dealing with horrific elements during the transitional period were explicitly set in foreign locales. The Witch and the Cowboys (aka The Witch on the Range) was set in the American West, where the superstitious nature of cowboys and the odd behaviors of an old woman combined to mix horrific elements with the western genre. Selig’s 1909 film The Witches’ Cavern depicted a young woman abducted from a campsite by “Wild Harry, who has always lived in the woods with his mother who is known as the witch of the valley.”8¹ When the young woman’s family returns to camp they find a note she has left: “Daddy.— A hideous monster, half man and half beast, has me in his power.” Although no existing print of this film seems to have survived, the production notes make clear that Wild Harry was a creature designed to create a sense of fear. Scene instructions for the first meeting of the young woman and Harry describe the scene: “Wild Harry creeps in. She is in terror.” Later, when she is in the cave with Wild Harry, “she shrinks in terror from him.” Like the witch on the frontier, Harry and his mother constituted an indigenous form of weird Otherness through their existence on the outskirts of progressive American civilization. The projection of supernatural aspects onto native peoples mirrored 80

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the equation of “weird” with “foreign.” A similar theme can be found in other films of this period. In the 1911 Selig production The Totem’s Mark, a young white woman is abducted by Indians but is accused of witchcraft by the women of the tribe before finally being rescued by her brother.8² The Champion production The Shark God (1913) focused on the indigenous people of Hawaii, where a woman, Piilani, tries to remove her romantic rival by seeking out “the Witch Doctor, begging him to pray to the Shark God to strangle her rival to death.” Only the hero Keoki’s intervention (killing the Witch Doctor) saves the damsel in distress and brings about a happy ending.8³ During cinema’s transitional period, the weird and supernatural were commonly equated with the foreign or primitive. The folklore of Europe or the mystical qualities of the East were seen as largely outside of the rational, progressive vision of America being constituted in the early twentieth century. In a sense, just as these past beliefs were being supplanted by a new, unified vision of American national identity, the weird films of the period allowed them to slip back into American culture, albeit in a particularly horrific and uncanny form. Importantly, these weird films—whether based on Eastern, European, or even indigenous cultures—were commonplace on American screens. Supernatural elements appeared in numerous films from various companies and were at times explicitly constituted as objects of fright and even horror. American audiences seemed drawn to tales of cursed objects, witchcraft, and avenging ghosts, whether located in contemporary India or set in the time way back when witches and magic existed. But just a few years later, as American cinema began settling into the classical narrative framework, the appearance of ghosts and witches became less common. Films dealing with the horrific would increasingly craft narratives in which the supernatural was explained away as a trick, hoax, or foolish mistake. The weird tales would recede and be replaced by stories in which superstition was equated with foolishness. The key to the demise of the weird film lay precisely in the quality that made it so appealing to American audiences: its foreignness. As American film producers began a decided effort to Americanize the American film, the weird foreign film would become one of their targets.

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a major shift. As Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer note, “By the late 1910s European imports had become marginal in the American market.”84 Numerous factors led to this shift in the kinds of films exhibited for American audiences. Some of these were industrial in nature. As American filmmakers sorted through their legal and business rivalries, a loose coalition began to work to secure American screens for American-produced films. By 1907, the formation of the Association of Edison Licensees and of the Film Service Association was working to marginalize most foreign producers save for Pathé, which, as Abel notes, remained “as the only significant foreign producer” in the American market. But even with its strong presence in America, Pathé continued to face the problem of being foreign. As the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close, the problem of being a foreign producer became more acute. The moral panic of the nickelodeon boom had centered strongly on fears that immigrants, along with the working class and children, would be led astray by the fanciful images and stories depicted in moving pictures. The pressure to create a homogeneous American culture necessitated securing the popular American movie screen for the purpose of indoctrinating immigrants. As Josiah Strong, an influential clergyman put it, either “we Americanize the immigrants” or “they will foreignize our cities.”85 The growing pressure against foreign filmmakers and themes had a profound influence on the presence of weird tales on American movie screens. To a large extent, the notion of weird films, with their horrific elements, supernatural plotlines, and fantastic effects, were seen as foreign products. In his 1911 explanation of cinematic trickery, Harrison Dent observed the equation of magical films with foreign filmmakers: “The Pathés were formerly acknowledged leaders in the art of producing magic trick pictures, and they still occasionally bring into this country one of those startling weird conceptions which prove that the ability is still there.  .  .  . The foreign makers are, generally speaking, more painstaking as to detail, more patient in working out intricate processes. To them we must probably look for a renaissance of magic in motion pictures.”86 Dent’s implicit sense that American filmmakers were not inclined toward magic and trickery was generally accurate. American filmmakers were shifting toward a cinema of realism, and while supernatural elements (or at least the appearance of the supernatural) would continue to be part of American cinema, the uniquely supernatural uncanny that was so prominent during the transitional period would start to fade. The supernatural mise en chaîne required for these fantastic film nar82

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ratives was criticized as unacceptable for incredulous American audiences. In a 1911 editorial titled “The Impossibilities in the Plot,” C. H. Claudy lambasted filmmakers who utilized improbable elements to propel their film narratives. Of Witch on the Range, Claudy complained: Talk about improbabilities—if anyone can find any bigger one than an old woman who thinks she is a witch, and does the regular witch act, with cauldron and skulls, incantations and charms, combined with a lot of cowboys, I wish he would speak up! Oh, yes, we will cheerfully admit an old woman might think she was a witch. We will even admit a lot of cowboys might think she was a witch, though it strains our credulity. But—there we stop!87

By 1913, John Rathburn noted the demise of the trick film and located the cause not only in the increased cost and difficulty of producing elaborate illusions but also in the fact that “the stock of subjects was becoming scarce, and the audiences more sophisticated and critical.”88 Here we have a sense of the relationship between the marginalizing of weird films and the broader cultural anxieties over credulity and the marvelous. For American filmmakers, the focus had shifted away from the marvelous and toward realism and authenticity. The ideal American audience was too sophisticated and critical to find the supernatural or horrific believable, and so the marvels of these weird films became marked not only as foreign but as un-American. Others have noted the harsh criticism aimed at foreign films even before the 1910s. Richard Abel has observed the way Variety seemed to single out Pathé for producing “ridiculous,” “pretentious,” “unpleasant,” and “ghastly” films.89 These criticisms, especially of being ghastly, gruesome, and morbid, were commonly aimed at weird films. As early as 1904, advertisers were seeking to capitalize on this general condemnation of French sensibilities. A 1904 Kleine Optical Company ad for its British film The Bewitched Traveler touted it as “nothing like the odd French Films” in a clear effort to differentiate its own weird tale from the more fantastic versions of haunted hotels crafted by French filmmakers such as Méliès, Gaumont, and Pathé.90 This criticism of “odd French Films” continued even as those films remained popular. The Nickelodeon’s reviewer criticized Selig’s 1910 The Ghost of the Oven because the plot “smacks of foreign invention “and “the wit of the situation is Frenchy.”9¹ In addition to criticizing “odd” French films, their imitators, critics, and commentators were quick to offer praise to films that deviated 83

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from the weird story lines. A reviewer in Variety, for example, praised Vitagraph’s 1910 historical drama Richelieu and “the latter day policy of the Vitagraph people to rest up on the weird ‘scenics,’” also noting that “the ‘picture going’ public will no doubt be glad of the relief from crime and chaos.”9² Similarly, a 1912 edition of Moving Picture News’s “A Few Words on Film Merits” column singled out the Lux production of Tommy’s Playmate for its respectful depiction of a mentally challenged character and avoiding “the weird gruesomeness so often forced upon us in films.”9³ Perhaps recognizing this shift in American taste, Pathé advertised its 1912 historical drama Don Juan and Charles V as “not the plot of a weird imagination, but a master’s dramatization of an historical complication.”94 By 1913, the equation of “weird” and “foreign” had largely shifted to include “weird” and “un-American.” An editorial in the New York Dramatic Mirror declared “the foreign manufacturers have been taught their lesson. . . . They are eliminating scenes, and through their American agents, who strive to give clear, decisive criticism of the films sent here, the European producers get closer to the American ideal.”95 Summarizing his 1913 tour of the European film industry, David Horsley, who had opened the first studio in Hollywood, was optimistic about the prospects of American films maintaining their dominance in the United States and abroad. In his informal talk about the future of American filmmaking, Horsley was reported to have proposed “a chain of theaters throughout the United States in which the best of regular and feature releases will be presented, and it is his intention to thoroughly eliminate all undesirable pictures and those having gruesome themes.”96 An editorial in the Moving Picture News echoed the point: “We know personally of many individuals who have been disenchanted by gruesome, morbid films, and will not risk attendance at an ordinary mobile picture show for fear of encountering others repugnant to good taste or pleasure.”97 Although weird films would continue to be produced after 1913, it seemed clear that American tastes—at least as articulated by film critics and commentators—were no longer inclined toward films that created “almost any nightmare, no matter how grotesque or weird.”98 American audiences were turning away from the magical, fantastic, and weird and more toward films embracing the emerging American film aesthetic emphasizing authenticity, realism, and action. The western became a popular genre for American audiences during this period. As American studios decamped for the West Coast and the easily available environs of deserts and plains, the production and distribution of 84

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westerns increased. Ideologically, the genre’s emphasis on action, individualism, clarity between right and wrong, and the manifest destiny of white males to dominate the expansive American frontier would play an important role in shaping American film sensibilities. As Abel argues, “Westerns played an unusually important role in regularizing and Americanizing the distribution and exhibition of moving pictures in the United States.”99 Similarly, melodrama in the American West offered a new, decidedly American framework for narratives of good and evil. No longer could evil spirits arrive unbidden to wreak havoc before slipping triumphantly away.¹00 In the emerging American sensibility, as one reviewer put it, “right triumphs and evil is either frustrated or gains its just reward.”¹0¹ This emphasis on action and emotional clarity underscored the emerging American cinematic frame of realism and authenticity. As Keil notes, American cinema increasingly promoted “an aesthetic predicated on both reproductive realism and believability.”¹0² Within this framework, weird tales of the supernatural and the appearance of gruesome horrific entities fell out of fashion. American cinema had moved away from the love of the marvelous and the openness of credulity and was shifting toward an aesthetic of realism and an attitude of incredulity. As evidence of the diminution of the explicitly weird and fantastic from American screens, consider the advice given by Film Daily to exhibitors of the 1918 film The Craving, directed by Francis and John Ford. The writers urged theaters to focus largely on the strange trick effects featured in the scenes where the protagonist hallucinates. “This ought to be a pleasing diversion from the regular run of program attractions,” the paper explained. “In the old days, we used to get a lot of this trick stuff, mostly foreign, and we get a lot in present day slap-stick comedies, but this is entirely different because of the manner in which it is presented.” The paper recommended that exhibitors “concentrate advertising upon the weird photographic illusions entirely, explaining that this is an interesting story written to permit of marvelous photographic effects never before shown in pictures.”¹0³ During the transitional period (roughly 1903–1913), American cinema saw a transformation in the way horrific elements were treated. The marvelous spectacles of appearing and disappearing ghosts or the tricks of witches and wizards were encompassed into more complex narratives based on a supernatural mise en chaîne. During this period, films routinely drew upon legends and folklore and presented fantastic tales with credulity toward the fantastic. These narratives were of85

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ten marked as foreign, in terms of both their makers and their settings, and as American filmmakers and commentators began clamoring for a uniquely American cinema, the weird and horrific became one target. The repression of foreign Otherness, which arguably had helped give rise to the interest in supernatural films, expanded to reject not only the makers and settings of these films but also the supernatural narrative logic undergirding them. Credulity was no longer an acceptable component of American cinema, and so the narratives of the supernatural, though not entirely disappearing, were soon replaced with a new version of the horrific. A 1912 column of “Musings of ‘The Photoplay Philosopher’” recommended attention to “a large field for Motion Pictures that has not yet been touched,” namely, “exposure of superstitions.” The columnist argued, “Superstition has probably done more harm in this world than war, famine or pestilence. . . . Uninquiring credulity has been one of the greatest curses that ever afflicted mankind, and it has set the clock of civilization back a thousand years.” Moving-picture producers could craft films to “show the folly of hundreds of false beliefs and superstitions, and the company that does so effectively will win and deserve the blessings of mankind.”¹04 Far from producing marvelous spectacles that would stretch the audience’s credulity, American cinema was being directed toward reinforcing the growing American epistemology of rational skepticism and incredulity. A precursor of where horrific elements would go in this more rationalist American cinema could be found in Vitagraph’s 1909 film The Plot That Failed. In the film, two speculators find gold on a farmer’s land and seek to frighten him away by pretending to be ghosts. Moving Picture World’s reviewer noted, “To drive away the occupants of a farm by constructing a series of ghosts is certainly novel enough to be interesting” and declared “it is such comedies as this which relieve the monotony of that long list of gloomy subjects by foreign manufacturers.”¹05 This particular form of relief from “gloomy” and “weird” foreign films would dominate the American treatment of horrific elements until February 1931.

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CH A P T ER T H R EE

Superstitious Joe and the Rise of the American Uncanny

Some directors are so superstitious that they will not start a picture on Friday. We can name at least seven that should not have been started on ANY day! “YOU SAW THEM, TOO!” PICT UR E PL AY, OCTOBER 1918

I

N A 1912 MOVING PICT UR E WOR LD EDITOR I A L , BANnister Merwin advocated the creation of a system for training a new generation of screenwriters. Production companies needed to “begin to encourage the training of photoplaywrights—men who can conceive and elaborate with full detail strong, human, convincing stories for the screen.”¹ In Merwin’s opinion, the future success of the moving picture industry hinged on the quality of the films being produced. Quality, for Merwin, was essentially an aspect of the writing and not of the photography or acting. Although acting and technical skill were useful, Merwin argued, “they will not, in themselves, hold the ultimate public—the public that is already tired of ‘trick films.’”² Although so-called trick films would continue to be produced after 1912, American taste was clearly shifting. The popularity of films depicting the explicitly supernatural, which had been a consistent aspect of American cinema since 1896, was waning. Many of the earliest films had drawn upon the widespread cultural knowledge of folklore and superstition to craft tableaux of horrific mise-en-scène (see chapter 1), and as films became more reliant on internal narrative structures the supernatural had provided an underlying logic (chapter 2). But by 1912 87

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the mise en chaîne of the supernatural was being swept away; the fantastic inventions of both the French féeries and the trick films, as Noël Burch contends, were exhausted.³ A new emphasis was being placed on, as Merwin put it, “strong, human, convincing stories.” American audiences demanded American films, and the aesthetic quality of American films was defined not by the marvelous but by the realistic and authentic. Thus “realism” became the common buzzword for motion-picture commentators. As Charlie Kiel notes in his thorough study of this aesthetic shift, “The demand that film provide access to a believable world became the dominant strain in most trade press criticism, especially from 1909 onward.”4 Commentators of the era praised films for being “a human story; believable; well acted; intelligently directed; lavish in equipment, and ornamented with a number of extremely logical episodes.”5 Effective story lines were seen as those that were “not only probable, but .  .  . entirely believable.”6 Fantastic films often failed to reach this standard. Essanay’s 1914 film The Ghost of Self was lambasted by a critic who noted that “the trouble with the story of this offering is that there is very little in it that is believable.”7 Although earlier audiences had embraced the marvelous activities of ghosts and spirits, as Eileen Bowser notes, “when filmmakers began to relate more complex stories . . . there was a shift in attitude. Reality began to be demanded for the staged fiction film.”8 Realism here meant not just internal narrative consistency or the quality of effects; it entailed, as Keil puts it, “providing images drawn from actuality.”9 A Moving Picture World commentator contended in 1910 that “there must also be a certain plausibility or verisimilitude in the piece. It all comes to this: that the things that are set to happen on the moving picture screen are reasonably likely to happen in real life.”¹0 Writing in 1911, C.  H. Claudy noted that one of the biggest reasons moving pictures failed was “unnaturalness. It may be unnaturalness of the vehicle, it may be unnaturalness of the plot, it may be unnaturalness of the acting.” Claudy attributed this general distaste for the unnatural in moving pictures to a simple fact: “Motion picture audiences are getting educated.”¹¹ American movie audiences were becoming cinematically educated. In part this education came from familiarity with the tricks used by earlier filmmakers to craft fantastic marvels in the now-out-of-favor trick films. Another way of thinking about this education was as a process of inculcating audiences with a new sensibility derived from the emerging modern America. New audiences—unlike Edison’s Uncle 88

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Josh, who was befuddled by the moving pictures in 1902—did not marvel at the uncanny images flickering on the screen. The moving picture audiences of the 1910s were more incredulous and discerning. They demanded realism, authenticity, and verisimilitude to the real world. J. Stuart Blackton contrasted the filmmaking of 1917 with that of the earlier days when noting that the focus on issues such as coloring and lighting, which “constitute the ‘aesthetics of the screen,’” now “keep us awake more hours than our ‘haunted hotel’ tricks used to in the olden days.”¹² American audiences, at least as voiced by the popular and tradepress pundits, wanted moving pictures that matched their real, lived experiences and were no longer willing to believe in fantastic tales of ghosts or witches or the magic of exotic locations. The crafting of an American cinematic incredulity came through at least two movements. The first entailed the rhetorical equation of “weird” (as in “supernatural” and “fantastic”) with “foreign” and, ultimately, “un-American.” The second entailed the crafting of a preferred viewing ethic of incredulity: audiences were encouraged to view the apparently marvelous and the weird through the rationalist lens of skepticism. The shift in the depiction of horrific elements during this period was striking. Although the mise-en-scène of the horrific—that is to say, the appearance of ghosts, witches, magic, curses, and similar frights— continued, the underlying logic of the supernatural mise en chaîne was replaced by what might be termed the “American uncanny.” In this narrative logic, supernatural entities were almost always explained away as tricks, hoaxes, or dreams. In part this crafting of the American uncanny occurred through the increased emphasis on narrative logic and coherence in the emergence of what would become classical cinema, with its focus on linearity, character point of view, and closure. Importantly, as Burch notes, earlier films had crafted an effect of “exteriority,” in which the characters within the film were “solely behavioral; one saw what they did, but there was absolutely no sense of that psychological interiority characteristic.”¹³ The emergence of cinematic interiority—the crafting of psychological points of view within the cinematic text—provided a clear point of identification for audiences. Audiences were now invited not simply to see the spectacle of movement (as during the cinema of attractions) or the movement of characters through narrative structures (as during the transitional period) but to identify with the psychological point of view and motivation of the characters upon the screen. The awkward relationship between the marvels of the moving picture and the emerging rational American epistemology finally came to resolu89

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tion through the crafting of a cinematic point of view that emphasized an attitude of incredulity. Films during this period actively worked to craft a viewing ethic that encouraged the audience to see through the appearance of the marvelous and fantastic and to maintain a cynical and discerning perspective. One way of engaging the American uncanny is through the work of Tzvetan Todorov, who applies Freud’s notion of the uncanny to literary structure. In Todorov’s taxonomy, the narrative of the uncanny is contrasted with its polar opposite: the marvelous. Tales of the marvelous are those in which the apparently supernatural entity or event is, in the end, proven to be real and the previously established laws of reality must be reconfigured. So, the marvelous monster is found to be an actual monster and our understanding of the world must adjust to this new reality. At the opposite end of the literary spectrum are tales of the uncanny in which the appearance of the supernatural is ultimately discounted and the existing laws of reality remain intact. Here the marvelous monster is revealed as a hoax, and thus our view of reality remains unchanged. In between these two categories lies the liminal space of the fantastic, which for Todorov is a state of suspension in which it is unclear whether the entity appearing before us is explainable (and therefore uncanny) or unexplainable (and therefore marvelous). Thus, there exist two possibilities in between the uncanny and the marvelous: the fantastic-uncanny, in which our uncertainty is resolved through the existing laws of nature, or the fantastic-marvelous, in which the uncertainty is resolved by recognition of the inexplicably marvelous.¹4 In thinking about this history of cinema, we find that, during both the cinema of attractions and the transitional period, horrific elements were largely portrayed in the mode of the marvelous. As classical narrative settled into American films, the structure shifted toward the uncanny. Interestingly, many films during this period (roughly 1912–1917) abandoned any sense of the hesitation that characterizes the fantastic by instead embracing the purely uncanny in the sense that the audience was let in on the trick before the unwitting victim. The strong tendency for horrific elements to be framed as uncanny worked to inculcate American audiences with a sense of incredulity toward the apparently marvelous. In the sections ahead I sketch out the emergence of the American uncanny and its framework for horrific elements. I do this first by exploring the broader parameters of its narrative structure through some of the films that utilized it. Then I examine some of the cultural values embedded within uncanny narratives

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before discussing the ways this unique cinematic incredulity helped to frame American identity.

“The ghost came, was seen, and was conquered” In many of the films employing the American uncanny, narratives were constructed so as to be entirely uncanny, which is to say that the audience was aware from the beginning that what would appear to be supernatural to certain characters was, in fact, a hoax. A good example can be found in Vitagraph’s 1912 short film The Haunted Rocker. In this romantic comedy, Jack and Madge are in love, but Madge’s father, old man Boggs, objects to the union. One night, as Boggs returns late from the club and evidently after a few drinks, he almost catches the young lovers in their courtship. Barely alerted in time, Jack hops from the old man’s rocking chair and hides. When Boggs enters and sees the chair mysteriously rocking on its own, he becomes convinced that he is seeing things. Jack and Madge catch on to the old man’s confusion and so rig the chair with a string to create the effect of the rocker moving of its own accord. Concerned for his own mental health, Boggs agrees to their union on the condition that they live in the home and take care of him. In the end, the now married couple reveals their prank and all ends well. Were the film to locate us within Boggs’s point of view, we would be brought into the psychology of the fantastic. Only in the end, after the marriage was approved, would our suspense be relieved, and, in Todorov’s scheme, we would recognize the genre as fantastic-uncanny. Instead, The Haunted Rocker lays out clearly and without hesitation the trick that will appear to Boggs as either supernatural intervention or hallucination. This choice of the trickster’s point of view was not uncommon. Indeed, an almost identical plot was described for the earlier film Tricked into Giving His Consent (1908). In this earlier film, another cantankerous father forbids the union of his daughter with her preferred suitor. When the suitor attempts a surreptitious entrance onto the property, the father has a servant shoot at the young man, who falls as if dead. With the aid of a friendly doctor, a hoax is perpetrated suggesting that the young suitor has died. Then the suitor “procures a sheet and puts it over his head and follows the old fellow wherever he goes; the latter, believing he is being pursued by his victim’s ghost, is almost driven to

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distraction.” The film evidently ends with the proposed union receiving the father’s blessing.¹5 Romantic comedies were not the only genre to employ the framing of the American uncanny. There were also a number of films that employed the ghost trick as part of an effort to thwart a burglary. Lux’s 1912 film Baby’s Ghost framed the story in a humorous fashion. When a mother and father leave their home, two burglars break into the house, but the “baby creeps downstairs and, peeping through the keyhole, sees the burglars at work.” Her clever plan to save the homestead and “ daddy’s money” involves “the entrance of a great white ghost” that frightens the burglars away.¹6 A more harrowing variation on this theme was used in Kalem’s 1913 film The Haunted House. In this film, two burglars plot to steal a valuable jewel from a family whose home is rumored to be haunted. While one of the burglars decides against risking an encounter with the spirit, the other slips into the house. As the burglar prepares to sneak into the house, the mother punishes the badly behaving daughter by locking her in a large closet where her temper tantrum continues. As the menacing burglar enters the house and approaches the terrified mother, the noise created by the daughter’s tantrum convinces the criminal that the haunting is real, and the mother is able to ward him off until the father returns. Although some critics found Kalem’s Haunted House lacking in real frights—Moving Picture World observed that “the audience laughed at what was not intended to be comedy”—the film is interesting in the way it employed the uncanny framework.¹7 The frightening element in the film is not the ghost, or even the activities taken to be a ghost, but the very real flesh-and-blood burglar. One particularly effective sequence involves the mother’s first glimpse of the intruding burglar. She sits at her vanity table, and both she and the audience see the burglar’s reflection in the mirror as he steps into the doorway of the bedroom. Although this sequence is technically sophisticated, its focus on seeing is most relevant. In a way, the entire premise of the film rests on the fact that the audience sees more than any of the four core characters: Mr. Chilton; his second wife, Mrs. Chilton; their daughter, Adelaide; and the burglar, Spider Pete. Unlike the Chilton family, we see Spider Pete conspiring to steal the necklace, and we watch him as he creeps onto the family’s property. Unlike Spider Pete, we see Adelaide throwing her noisy tantrum in the closet and know that these noises are not unnatural. The crucial mirror sequence is the first moment that both these gazes—that of the innocent family and that of the dangerous criminal—intersect. 92

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Numerous issues intersect on the reflective surface of the vanity mirror—upper and lower classes, guilt and innocence, the private sphere of the family and the public face of greed. But it is also worth noting that the key division that will propel the plot toward its conclusion is that one gaze—that of Mrs. Chilton—is incredulous, whereas the other—that of Spider Pete—suffers from excessive credulity. Mrs. Chilton knows that the rumors suggesting her house is haunted are superstitious nonsense and that the loud noises emanating from the closet are coming from her unruly stepchild. Spider Pete, however, still carries the belief in the supernatural. Upon first hearing the rumor of the haunting, one of his compatriots elects not to join him in the caper. Spider is able to hold back his fears enough to break into the home—“ghost or no ghost, I’ll get them stones,” Spider exclaims—but the strange noises are too much for him. Mrs. Chilton is able to gain the upper hand long enough to grab Spider’s gun and turn the tables on the criminal. Incredulity, in the end, is her saving grace. One other interesting subplot of the film seems relevant. Early on we learn that Mrs. Chilton is the second wife and that Adelaide is her stepchild. It is clear that the two do not get along, and the child’s tantrum is the result of this friction. The stepmother, we learn, has little interest in being a maternal figure to the disobedient child. After the events of the break-in, with the father’s return and all resolved, the stepmother and stepchild embrace. The stepmother’s way of seeing has shifted. She survives the ordeal by seeing Spider’s superstitious credulity and taking advantage of it, and in the end she can see through her own vanity and embrace her role as wife and mother. Characters such as old man Boggs or Spider Pete were thwarted by their superstitious nature, but in several films the plot turned on efforts to exploit the credulity of others. In Rex’s The Ghost of a Bargain (1912), for example, a cheapskate husband refuses to purchase his wife’s dream home in hopes of getting the price reduced. When an old couple purchases the property at the asking price, the husband concocts a plan to frighten the old couple away. “He invested in a long chain and a horn, stole into the house that night and commenced the ghost act.” Although the elderly couple is frightened away by the act, the real estate agent sees through the ruse and plants “a trap in the house.” When the husband tries his scary performance again, “the ghost came, was seen, and was conquered, for it went down the road with a double handful of buckshot where its pants hung loose.”¹8 A similar theme played out in Lubin’s A Deal in Real Estate (1914), in which Deacon Gregston “tries a bad trick to shave the price of an es93

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tate that he is crazy to possess.” The effort to spook the owners ultimately “falls through and holds [the Deacon] up to ridicule.” Deacon Gregston’s failing, like that of the husband in Ghost of a Bargain, is his assumption of widespread credulity. As the Moving Picture World reviewer noted, “Ghost stories nowadays are not taken seriously and the job that the old trickster puts up is a huge joke.”¹9 The relationship between haunted houses and real estate continued for several years, including Charles Avery’s 1917 short Done in Oil. A review of the production notes related to the development of the film suggests some of the elements at play in crafting the humor of the American uncanny. In an undated note, probably from late 1916, Hampton Del Ruth, one of the writers, suggested the comedic potential of the haunted house scenario: “I tell you, you are going to get more comedy out of this comedian if he is afraid, because suspense, fear are unquestionably the greatest comedy elements in the game.” Writer John Grey agreed, suggesting “could you do anything with Haloween [sic]?” In early drafts of the story, the two writers, along with Charles Badger, also consider introducing the idea through a traveling magician. “Let him be doing some tricks,” Badger suggested. Harry Wulze, not credited on the film but evidently part of the conversation, suggested that the magician could be a spiritualist.²0 Although the final film is now lost, the notes suggested an increasingly convoluted plot, and Brent E. Walker contends that the film was originally to be a Keystone two-reeler before being cut down to a short.²¹ The suggested elements eventually included a bumbling boob seeking a daughter’s hand in marriage for the purpose of securing a sizable dowry, an unscrupulous real estate agent seeking to purchase the family home for what he believes is an oil deposit, a curmudgeonly father, a damsel, and the “right” guy. In the proposed resolution of the story line, the “right guy” and his beloved use the ghost trick to frighten both the boob and the real estate agent, thereby securing enough profit to convince the father to bless their union. Although complex, the framing of the horrific elements was clear and consistent with the other films of the period. Incredulity was the crucial perspective that enabled the story’s hero to see through both the bumbling boob and the unscrupulous agent, just as excessive credulity led to the downfall of the story’s villains. The mise en chaîne of the American uncanny revolved around the ability of the right characters to see through the appearance of the supernatural and therefore validated a broader culture of incredulity. These films highlighted not simply the error of credulity but the folly 94

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of superstition. The characters falling prey to their superstitions were held up for ridicule, and in ways this careful crafting of the folly of superstition played an important role in instilling the American uncanny into cinema. Some of the clearest examples of the folly of superstition were films that took up the Photoplay Philosopher’s admonitions to “show the folly of hundreds of false beliefs and superstitions.”²² Edison Studios critiqued superstition in at least two versions of the same story. In the 1909 short He Wouldn’t Go under a Ladder, real estate agent Sam Land, known to his friends as “Superstitious Sam,” finds his attempts to close a deal hampered by his “superstitious nature.” Impeded by numerous ladders he refuses to pass beneath, Sam loses an important deal to his rival, Jim Pickens. “Again and again Sam’s superstition worked to Jim’s advantage and in the end Jim secured the customer for his firm.” Distraught over his business failure, Sam repeatedly walked beneath a ladder “until superstition was dead within him at last.”²³ Edison’s 1913 Superstitious Joe followed the same pattern but increased the stakes for the excessively credulous protagonist. In one of the early titles, we are introduced to “Joe Billings and Edward Stallings: Rivals in Work and in Love.” As in the 1909 film, Joe is hampered by his superstitions. When rival Ed begins to open an umbrella indoors, Joe rushes to stop him but in so doing knocks over a vase. When Joe refuses to pass beneath a ladder, a brick falls on his head, and Ed is able to secure the clients Joe was courting. On several occasions within the film, Joe’s plight creates great laughter in the crowds around him, as when he knocks over a ladder he is avoiding and breaks a store window. When the Vulcan Automobile deal is announced in the paper, Joe sees his chance to secure both professional and personal points. He steels his courage and walks twice under a nearby ladder. The spell of superstition broken, we later see Joe after he has sealed the deal for the automotive plant. Both his sweetheart and her parents look adoringly at Joe, and he celebrates by opening an umbrella indoors. Joe and Sam were, of course, not alone in their quest to escape the folly of superstition. In Edison’s 1913 Seven Years Bad Luck, when Arnold Smith breaks a mirror, his “superstitious colored maid prophesies seven years of bad luck.” The equation of superstition with people of color will be explored ahead, but here it is worth noting that Arnold’s run of apparent bad luck—his hat is ruined, he loses his job, he falls down a coal chute—reverses near the film’s end when he gets a replacement hat, is rehired at a higher rank, and receives “five tons of coal as a balm to his wounded pride.”²4 Superstition was also the weakness of the “fool95

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FIGUR E 7. Margaret and her fiancé, Charles, are troubled by the intrusion of a fake medium in Selig’s An Evil Power (1911). Photo: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.

ish young business man” at the center of Princess Films’s 1913 Friday the Thirteenth and for the title character of Nestor’s Superstitious Mary (1913), who made the mistake of setting her wedding date on a Friday the 13th.²5 In addition to a string of titles taking aim at the folly of superstition, several films focused directly on debunking beliefs in spiritualism, a practice still remarkably popular in the early 1910s. Selig’s 1911 film An Evil Power (fig. 7) was advertised as a “strong drama of clairvoyance,” and it typified much of American cinema’s reaction to spiritualism and spiritualist beliefs. A young woman, Margaret Kingdon, visits a medium with friends while her fiancé is away and soon falls under the medium’s hypnotic spell. The medium, Antonio Giuseppe, persuades her to dismiss her maid and replace her with his accomplice. Concerned at her strange behavior, Kingdon’s father wires her absent fiancé, played by Sydney Ayres, to return immediately, which he does “just in time to stop the farcical wedding of Giuseppe and Margaret.”²6 96

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A similar theme was used in American’s 1913 one-reeler The Occult. A young woman, Edna Brooks (played by Vivian Rich), becomes ensnared by a “strange Hindoo seer, who has established himself in the city. The mystic gentleman from the Orient pretends to have the power of weaving magic spells and charms.” After a demonstration of his “mystic powers” before a group of young women, “all are powerfully impressed and immediately are anxious to become students of the occult.” Edna’s fiancé, Harold Brinkworth, also played by Sydney Ayres, objects to her interest in these matters, but she persists and soon is under the spell of the Hindoo fakir. Harold tries to forget his troubles, but a dream seems to foretell the ill intentions of the false medium, and so he rushes to the home of his fiancée just in time to find her under the hypnotic spell of the fake medium. Harold intercedes and overcomes the medium in time to stop his fiancée from giving him valuable jewels. When she is awakened and learns of the deceptive medium, “Edna is more than willing to concede everything which Harold wishes, and she orders Raj Singh from her home.” In the end the couple are “happy once more,” though perhaps still wondering if Harold’s strange dream was a sign of magic or just loving concern.²7 A similar theme animated the 1914 Selig film The Soul Mate, in which Sally, a young superstitious woman, comes under the influence of a “charlatan palmist.” The trickster is finally revealed, with “Sally receiving a good lesson regarding superstition.”²8 Spiritualist beliefs were also the source of comedy, as in the 1914 short Love and Spirits, a Universal production under its Joker imprint. In this short film, the romance of Eddie and Betty is confounded because Betty’s “parents are ardent followers of a spiritualistic cult.” Eddie’s lack of credulity causes tension, and he sets out to resolve this problem by conspiring with the fake medium to pass on a message “from the beyond” that Eddie is the right suitor for their daughter. The plan falls apart when Eddie, pretending to be the ghost, accidentally is revealed. In the end, the father finally gives his consent and the couple marries.²9 A more polemic example of the antispiritualist trend in the American uncanny can be seen in Selig’s 1917 eight-reel production Beware of Strangers. Although now lost, this film was one of Selig’s feature productions and, as Moya Luckett notes, was one of the films that was heavily promoted and “treated as an event.”³0 Selig’s promotion of the film played up the angle that the film was produced in order to educate the public. “The production was made for no other purpose than the exposure of and the education of the public to the traps so cleverly laid by swindlers that they seem unbelievable.”³¹ Although the plot 97

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involved a variety of unsavory characters engaged in blackmail, illegal banking, and other activities, the central element of the plot involves a fake clairvoyant. In his notes on the production, writer Gilson Willets describes the clairvoyant, Professor Russberg, as “A Russian. Clairvoyant. Acts as advance agent for Syndicate, locating possible victims. . . . Through the fascinating spell he casts over Bertha, she is lured into the Syndicate.” Willets also describes in detail the audience room Russberg would use to convince his victims as “furnished with Oriental and mystic luxury and with suggestions of the mystic. Hindu idols, incense burning, draperies with mystic figures. . . . The lighting is itself mystic, the principal light coming from an electrolier over the table on which rests the crystal ball.”³² In these and other films, the spiritualist medium was immediately established as a fake, and Selig’s epic film added a more pointed publicservice dimension to the overall narrative structure of the American uncanny. The American uncanny established the narrative conceit that the appearance of the supernatural was always already fake, the result of a trick or misperception. Those who fell for the apparent marvel were marked as mentally and morally inferior, whereas those who maintained incredulity were more intelligent, moral, and romantically desirable. The pervasiveness across genres and film types was notable. The American uncanny, as demonstrated above, provided the underlying narrative structure to films ranging from one-reelers to longer, epic productions and was evident in comedies, crime dramas, romances, and melodramas. In part this pervasiveness may have been a continuation of the reaction against the weirdness of foreign films, and it is notable how often the fake medium was portrayed as explicitly foreign. The establishment of the uncanny in American cinema may also have served as a way of marking a uniquely American orientation toward the marvelous and another step in crafting a viewing ethic of incredulity.³³ Such a move also worked to entrench incredulity into a broader system of American values.

“Ghosts? Are you kidding me? I’m an American.” D.  W. Griffith’s 1910 short Rose O’Salem-Town provides a useful example of the ways in which the uncanny narrative structure that dominated portrayals of horrific elements during this period was intertwined with the broader emerging narrative of modern American exceptionalism.³4 The short film is of interest as an early example of 98

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Griffith’s directorial style, but here I want to focus on how superstition and incredulity are intertwined with other core American values. The main plot of the film revolves around a young unnamed woman referred to in an early title as “The Sea Child” who meets a young trapper by the sea. The trapper, who is friends with a local tribe of Mohawks, has come to view the sea for the first time and, meeting the young woman, immediately falls in love with her. The young woman, however, has also caught the eye of a local Puritan deacon who, through extortion, seeks to force himself upon her. The mother, a title explains, “ekes out a living telling fortunes and nursing the sick.” This activity gives an opening to the wicked Deacon, who accuses the mother and daughter of witchcraft. When the mother and daughter are seized by the Puritans, the young trapper solicits the help of his Mohawk friends, some of whom decide to join in the rescue. The rescue party arrives just in time to save the younger woman, and the film ends back at the seashore, where the trapper and his Mohawk friend shake hands. The young woman and the trapper embrace as they make their way back toward the town. Although the depiction of native peoples is markedly different from that in later westerns, there is a clear sense that the film seeks in some ways to engage the question of the presence of Europeans upon American soil. Whereas other films would justify this colonialism through the depiction of natives as dangerous, uncivilized savages, here the rhetorical focus is on the harmony between the “real” American—the trapper—and the native peoples. Scott Simmon notes the distinct tone of what he calls “eastern-filmed” westerns, in which the relations between white settlers and native peoples are depicted as cooperative. These depictions help to naturalize the presence of white settlers on native lands and thus “to reconcile certain irreconcilable claims about possession of the land.”³5 In Griffith’s film, the potential for reconciliation comes through the unique figure of the trapper, who serves as an early cinematic depiction of what R.  W.  B. Lewis called the “American Adam.” In Lewis’s analysis, the roots of “the first tentative outlines of a native American mythology” emerge out of the Adamic myth. The American Adam was a figure who entered into the dark, primitive wilderness to emerge as a new person, one with knowledge of the natural world and steeped in self-reliance.³6 This nineteenth-century figure would serve as a crucial means for American self-understanding and remains a core figure in American literature and film to the present day. As Bernd Herzogenrath contends, the American Adam “has provided one of the most persistent myths in the process of the nation’s ‘self99

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fashioning.’”³7 In Griffith’s film, the figure of the trapper serves as the American Adam. It is the trapper who first encounters the beauty of the Sea Child upon the shore. Dressed in tattered white clothing, the “Sea Child,” it is not difficult to imagine, symbolizes America itself, a virginal prize for the person able to win her hand. In this way, opening the narrative upon the rocky shores of New England serves to underscore the film as a kind of retelling of the myth of American discovery and conquest. In this version of the myth, it is not European settlers who come to seize the prize of America from the primitive and violent natives but the American Adam, who seeks to claim his bride from the clutches of the Europeans. As Nanna Verhoeff notes, the film inverts some of the later notions of American exceptionalism and conquest: “The Indians are good, the Puritans bad and the people that belong in a liminal realm halfway between wilderness and civilization, the girl and the trapper, are best.”³8 The moral landscape of Rose seems clear. The native Mohawks represent a more authentic, though primitive, version of America. The Puritans, still defined by their European religious zealotry, are the offending Other, and the trapper and Sea Child are the liminal figures who, through refashioning, serve as a version of the American Adam and Eve. The film ends with the three—trapper, Sea Child, and Mohawk leader—all at the seashore. The trapper and the Mohawk shake hands, the virginal Sea Child standing directly behind their outstretched arms. The Mohawk heads off past the camera while the trapper embraces his new bride, and they also slowly walk up the shore and past the camera—evidently into the new land they have made their own. Although the mythological underpinnings of the film are rich, and also deeply problematic, of interest here is the way the broader issues of superstition and incredulity are melded into them. The opening title announces the importance of superstitious beliefs for the ensuing photoplay: “RELIABLE AUTHORITY STATES THAT NINE MILLION HUMAN LIVES WERE SACRIFICED THROUGH THE ZEAL OF FANATIC REFORMERS DURING THE CHRISTIAN EPOCH. RELIGIOUS FANATICISM WAS IN MOST CASES THE CAUSE. STILL THERE WERE MANY VICTIMIZED TO SATISFY A PERSONAL GRUDGE.” Although the plot is careful to depict the accusation of witchcraft as part of the wicked Deacon’s anger at having his advances rebuffed, critics of the time were quick to condemn the way the film mixed religion and romance. The Moving Picture World reviewer objected that “the fact of the witchcraft martyrs has been used as an excuse upon which 100

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to build an unhealthy love tragedy in a way that is not honest, showing a distortion extremely detrimental and depressing”; and suggested that “the history of those superstitious times would afford sufficient incidents for picture portrayal, with the necessary lessons to be derived therefrom, without the painful introduction of an unhealthy and revolting love plot.”³9 The Nickelodeon reviewer concurred, noting that the Puritans “were superstitious and fanatical, and the film does well enough to bring out such characteristics, but they were not hypocritical libertines.”40 It would seem that, at least in the eyes of critics, the depiction of the evils of superstition was sufficient in itself without needing the mix of lecherousness to justify the action on the screen. In Rose, superstition serves not only as a framework for the “damsel in distress” scenario that is the film’s climax but also as a means of differentiating the Puritans and the trapper. The Puritans are notable in their dramatic costuming, black cloaks, and large hats with silver buckles. They are also depicted as a dangerous mob that enters into the home of the mother and daughter and violently drags them away. What binds these Puritans together is their religious zeal and superstitious beliefs, and in all these ways they are marked as decidedly Other, as not truly American. The contrast with the trapper is stark. The trapper is a self-sufficient man who is at home in the wilderness and a friend of the native peoples. As the trapper is an early example of the cinematic American Adam, it is his job to navigate the middle ground between the primitive simplicity of the native peoples and the outdated traditions of the European settlers. It is the trapper who must rescue the virginal Sea Child— and, symbolically, the new America—from Old World superstitions and beliefs. Notably, the trapper is entirely skeptical of the accusations of witchcraft, and he shows no hesitation or fear in soliciting the aid of the Mohawks. The fearless incredulity of the trapper serves as one of the key defining characteristics of heroic American masculinity during this period. The trapper is no more afraid of the superstitious beliefs in witchcraft than he is of the native peoples, and it is his bravery that marks him as both uniquely American and masculine and allows him to rescue the girl and claim her and the new lands as his own. The relationship between this vision of masculinity and an ethic of fearless incredulity was prominent in the crafting of the American uncanny. The ability to see through the appearance of the supernatural often led to romantic success. In several of the films discussed above, the successful suitor was the one who was incredulous to the apparently marvelous. The trend remained prominent into the 1910s. The 1913 Vic101

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tor film The Ghost revolved around a young man, Jim, who seeks the hand of his beloved but does not have sufficient funds. When a friend bets him ten dollars that he wouldn’t last one night in a supposedly haunted house, Jim takes the bet. In the house, Jim encounters not a ghost but a gang of thieves who have recently stolen some diamonds. Jim evades the gangsters long enough for his beloved to come with the authorities, and in the end the couple are wed.4¹ In addition to being interwoven into notions of individuality and heterosexual masculinity, incredulity was wrapped up in the notion of the modern man. These modern, incredulous heroes were successful not only in romance but also in business and industry. Several examples above note the importance of incredulity in business success, notably real estate (in films such as Superstitious Joe, Ghost of a Bargain, and Done in Oil). The protagonist of the 1911 Imp production The Haunted House is a telegraph operator working for the railroad who comes to a small town and unmasks the “miserly old villain” who has been “playing upon the superstition of residents of a country hamlet.” In addition to playing upon the long-established notion that the rural poor are more susceptible to the dangers of credulity, our protagonist is established as successful and technologically savvy. The announcement appearing in Moving Picture News described the film’s hero as “from the city and intelligent.” When he “hears the weird stories of the haunted house,” he investigates and “is convinced that some evil-minded person is responsible for the strange demonstrations at the house.”4² Incredulity as a marker of successful masculinity was evident in numerous films. In the 1912 Méliès film Ghosts at Circle X Camp, a young, inexperienced “tenderfoot” arrives to work at a cattle ranch and is subjected to a rough initiation by the experienced cowboys. However, “the tables turn when the tenderfoot bets that his tormentor dare not stay in the haunted house.” The chief cowboy accepts the bet, and when the tenderfoot arrives disguised as a ghost, the bully is terrified. “Almost frightened to death, he jumps into a stream and after a good wetting he looks up only to see the disguised tenderfoot laughing at him.”4³ The intersection of successful masculinity and incredulity was also evident in Thanhouser’s The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel (1913), in which a daughter and her widowed father are to be evicted from the hotel they run for nonpayment of taxes. The hotel’s failure is due to the widely held rumor that the hotel is haunted by the ghost of the deceased wife. Into this mystery of the marvelous enters “a young doctor [who] comes to the resort and becomes interested in the ghost story. He determines to investigate and discovers the ghost in the person of 102

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FIGUR E 8. The brash American Jarvis, played by H. B. Warren, overcomes the faux ghost to get the treasure and the damsel in distress in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ghost Breaker (1914). Photo: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.

the daughter, whose mind has become unhinged through grief.” In the end, the doctor is able to cure the young woman of her delusion, and “business picks up and everybody is happy.”44 Whether steeped in technology or medicine, the protagonists in the American uncanny are not taken in by the appearance of marvels but, instead, can see through them and in so doing correct the misperceptions and maladies of those who are more credulous. Whereas Griffith’s Rose O’Salem Town represents an early depiction of the equation of American national identity, masculinity, and incredulity, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1914 film The Ghost Breaker (fig. 8) represents its more mature formulation.45 The film revolves around an American protagonist, Warren Jarvis, played by H.  B. Warren. Henry Nicollela contends that Ghost Breaker “has the distinction of being the first of a popular sub-genre in the Silent Era, the ‘Old Dark House’ comedythriller” (a subgenre I explore in chapter 5).46 The plot of DeMille’s film, drawn from the popular stage play by Charles Goddard and Paul Dickey, revolves around a brash Kentuckian, Jarvis, as he is drawn into a complicated plot involving a Spanish princess, hidden treasure, and a supposedly haunted castle. Reviewers were generally positive about the 103

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film, and much of the praise centered on the way the plot dealt with the American protagonist’s clash with Old World superstitions and beliefs. W. Stephen Bush, for example, celebrated the film’s American sense of humor: “We love to see young Americans brush aside the ceremonies and conventions of the Old World and go directly to the point.”47 Indeed, it is Jarvis’s uniquely American incredulity that allows him to serve as the “ghost breaker” for the princess and overcome the villainous Duke d’Alva, “who has played upon the people’s superstitions with weird sounds and the rattling of chains while trying to find the treasure himself.”48 In the end, Jarvis is able to see through these superstitions and find the treasure and gain the princess’s hand. As a Motography review notes, with “the task of curing the old castle of ghosts accomplished, Jarvis turns his attention to a weightier matter [and] finds that winning the princess’ heart is a much easier and more pleasant occupation than ‘ghost breaking.’”49 Like the other protagonists in films of the American uncanny, Jarvis embodies a uniquely American incredulity that allows him to see through the marvels of Old World beliefs and customs. Like his fellow protagonists, Jarvis reaps both romantic and financial rewards. As Jarvis says, “Ghosts? Are you kidding me? I’m an American.”50 The Ghost Breaker nicely embodies the cinematic formation of American pragmatism. The mysteries of the marvelous are solved through rational incredulity and basic pragmatism. As Kitty Kelly, reviewing the film for the Chicago Daily Tribune, notes, the film is “all a nice happy grewsomeness[,] for H. B. Warner is there with his debonairness—and his revolver.”5¹

“Rastus is frightened to death by a terrible ghost” Protagonists in the films of the American uncanny, such as the trapper in Rose and Jarvis in Ghost Breaker, were presented as idealized American males. They were adventurous, self-reliant, and unwilling to be cowed by or bow to the beliefs of the Old World. They were brash men of action for whom the horrific marvels of superstitious tales presented only momentary obstacles to be unraveled and overcome. Not all the protagonists were so fully formed, and for some, such as Edison’s Superstitious Joe, the path to success lay in the shedding of Old World superstitions and fears. In the preceding section, I focused on the way that incredulity was woven into the cinematic crafting of an idealized American masculine identity. In this section, I attend to the way the films of the American uncanny reinforced this idealized mas104

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culine figure by contrasting it with others, most of whom were portrayed as suffering from excessive credulity. One of the already obvious groups of Others crafted in the American uncanny was women. Although the period did feature a number of adventurous “girl detectives” in popular serials such as The Perils of Pauline and The Hazards of Helen, it is notable how often women were depicted as victims of credulity.5² Shelly Stamp observes this paradox in her examination of early film heroines, noting: “Pleasing though these fantasies of independence might have been for contemporary viewers, they were invariably laced with peril.”5³ The crucial element that distinguished the imperiled heroines of the serials and the endangered women in weird films was their degree of incredulity. In films featuring the faux supernatural, women were prominently depicted as susceptible to the conniving plots of fake mediums (see, e.g., An Evil Power, The Occult, and Beware of Strangers). They were also typically the ones imperiled by the apparently supernatural menace (as in The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel and Ghost Breaker). Even more commonly, women were portrayed as the reward for the man able to see through the appearance of a horrific entity and prove his masculinity by braving the mysteries of the supernatural. Although women were, at times, partnered with the incredulous male, usually in some plot to garner paternal approval for marriage plans, it was more common for women to be depicted as credulous figures awaiting the assistance of an idealized American male hero. Women were not the only group contrasted with the idealized incredulous male. The lower classes and uneducated, especially those living in rural areas, were also often depicted as credulous. Added to this was the general depiction of those from overseas, whose superstitions had given rise to the weird films of the early twentieth century. Now that the turn against weird films had taken place, these Europeans were also held up to the harsh light of the folly of superstition. In The Ghost Breaker, Jarvis’s insistence that he cannot believe in ghosts because he is an American typifies this newly drawn distinction. At the root of much of this concern about creating a unique American national identity and crafting a strong line of demarcation between the American and the foreign Other was the broad cultural anxiety around immigration. Even before the sweeping restrictions on immigrants enacted in the Immigration Act of 1917, there was a strong movement to limit not only the number of immigrants entering the United States but also the kinds of immigrants. The 1917 act defined wide classes of undesirable individuals excluded from immigration into the 105

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United States, including “idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, alcoholics, poor, criminals, beggars, any person suffering attacks of insanity.”54 Nancy Ordover observes the ways this national anti-immigration sentiment intersected with and was fueled by the broader pseudoscience of eugenics, a program designed to engineer certain genetic features based on racist assumptions. Ordover notes, “In constructing entire racialized categories of demonized others, eugenicists put forth an ideologically purified America—purged of past sins and guarded against future menace.”55 This ideologically purified America was, without exception, white, and so it was not surprising to find that the cruelest demonization efforts were focused at those who were perceived as nonwhite. American cinema played a prominent role in crafting the racialized distinction between “American white” and Other. Daniel Bernardi, for example, contends that “U.S. cinema has consistently constructed whiteness, the representational and narrative form of Eurocentrism, as the norm by which all ‘Others’ fail by comparison.”56 Driven in part by the numbers of immigrants entering the country and the growing internal migration of previously enslaved African Americans, the threat to American whiteness during the early twentieth century was perceived as great. As Gwendolyn Foster notes, in the face of these challenges, “Hollywood and its audiences desperately attempt to maintain whiteness in the face of its inherent mutability.”57 Although this perceived threat came in part from immigrants entering the country, it was also seen as coming from those racialized others living within the nation, especially African Americans and Latinos. From its earliest years, American cinema perpetuated racist stereotypes through gross caricatures of African Americans. One of these stereotypes, as Gerard Butters Jr. notes, entailed “the superstitious and fearful nature of African-American men.” Butters notes the stereotype’s centrality in early films including Biograph’s 1897 Hallowe’en in Coontown and its 1905 film Thirteen Club, in which an African American waiter is comically terrified by a dungeon-like fraternal meeting room used by a group of whites. The trend continued into the era of the American uncanny. In Dixie Duo Down South (1910), two girls frighten an African American man by dressing up as ghosts. As Butters notes, “The man is so afraid he turns white (a common occurrence in films with black men).”58 The depiction of African American males as superstitious and credulous was a persistent theme throughout this period. In Edison’s 1909 film A Persistent Suitor, the character Jim, “a colored dandy—fearless and nervy,” is pursuing the Deacon’s daughter but is frightened away 106

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when “the Deacon waylays Jim in a dark neck of the woods, made up as a ghost.”59 Similarly, the 1912 Powers short film Their Christmas Turkey is loaded with stereotypes surrounding its African American protagonist, Rastus, who, in a game of cards, loses the money he has to purchase a Christmas turkey. He ends up stealing a turkey, but then, “arriving home, Rastus is frightened to death by a terrible ghost, and he kneels and confesses.” The “ghost” ends up being his wife’s sister, and all ends well with a Christmas meal.60 Edison’s 1914 blackface comedy George Washington Jones added a visit to a “spiritualistic medium” to the racist mix. The visit prompts great fear in the protagonist, who “was so thoroughly frightened by a number of ghosts that he rushed from the house as though a legion of devils were after him.”6¹ Latinos were also generally depicted as ignorant and superstitious. The 1909 Pathé film Mexican Legend was advertised as “ beautiful drama of this superstitious country,” and Lubin advertised its 1913 film The Evil Eye as “a strong Mexican story of superstitious and rural ignorance.”6² Similarly, the American Film Manufacturing Company’s 1913 two-reeler The Ghost of the Hacienda was dubbed a “weird story of Old Mexico.” The film followed the familiar ground of hidden treasures and superstitious locals who believe the hacienda of the title is haunted. Although such was a common theme, American Film was quick to note that it was “a story which contains much of the weird and ghostly superstition natural to the country in which it is laid.” The film’s climax includes a sequence where the young heroine affects the appearance of a ghost to frighten away a group of bandits. When “the Mexicans catch sight of her, and with many yells, and much crossing of themselves, they flee, leaving the Hacienda and its protectors in peace.”6³ The growing prominence of westerns and “Indian pictures” also furthered a sense that the indigenous peoples of America were deeply superstitious and easily fooled by the appearance of the marvelous. The Witch of the Everglades (Selig, 1911) featured a woman seeking revenge on the Seminoles and their superstitious fear that she is a witch, and the 1913 Kalem film The Saving Sign finds the heroine Ruth saved when she makes a sacred sign that the superstitious natives fear. The year 1914 saw similar stories, such as Éclair’s The Devil Fox of the North, in which the fur of the titular fox is “held in superstitious regard by the woods people,” and Bison’s two-reeler The Legend of the Phantom Tribe, a supernatural fairy tale about a resurrected tribe, which was “based partly upon actual superstitions existing among the redskins.”64 The racial stereotype of susceptibility to superstition reached almost all nonwhite groups. Depictions of the weird and marvelous were of107

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ten tied to Southern Europeans, often Italians, and through Orientalist depictions of Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Indian cultures. These stereotypes extended at times beyond the screen to discussions of international audiences of film. The early 1910s saw a number of trade stories focused on the superstitious reception of moving pictures in other parts of the world. A 1913 report on Vitagraph’s “Globe Trotters” tour noted “the Chinese were very superstitious regarding the moving picture camera and it was with utmost difficulty that any of them were persuaded to pass before it, and as for posing them—well, it was almost impossible.”65 The folly of superstition narrative extended even to immigrant audiences within the United States. Great anxiety surrounded the popularity of the nickelodeon theater in urban, immigrant neighborhoods. As cinema matured, these anxieties continued. An essay by Cornelius O’Shea appearing in a 1911 issue of Moving Picture World is instructive in this regard. O’Shea’s essay was titled “An Appeal to the Savage” and took as its founding premise a distinction between “tribes or races or nations” in terms of their degree of civility. O’Shea argued that “the lower down in the social scale we go, the less refinement there is to be found, until we arrive at the hut of the savage, where there is nothing but animal instincts.” The crux of O’Shea’s argument was the need for theater operators to seek civilized and civilizing films and to advertise these uplifting products appropriately. Theater owners advertising gruesome, unwholesome, or magical fare were going to draw those kinds of savage audiences to their establishment. “Place on a billboard a poster of the Italian vendetta, wherein some poor human being is elected to sudden living death, and the illiterate and superstitious Italian will be appealed to in an instant.” O’Shea objected to such salacious advertising, noting “we are not supposed to be living in a savage country, but some of the posters we have seen are very close to the call of the wild.”66 Both on the screen and in the discussions surrounding early screen practice, a line of demarcation was drawn between the incredulous, civilized, white American male and the superstitious, uncivilized, gendered, and racialized Other. Although American cinema reinforced this emergence of white supremacy in many ways, the films discussed here also helped to reinforce and naturalize a sense of a new American national identity. The mise en chaîne of the American uncanny, and with it the valorization of the idealized incredulous hero and the ridicule of the folly of superstition, were woven into the creation of a uniquely American heroic figure. This American hero was white, male, rational, 108

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pragmatic, and incredulous. He had no fear of legends or myths or any obedience to past customs. He could pass through haunted castles, ignore rumors of witchcraft and magic, and face down ghosts with his wits, fists, and revolver. For those males who had not yet achieved this heroic status, they had simply to face their fears and overcome their superstitions. Those who were unable to do so—such as the poor, the racialized Other, the villainous—were not worthy of being American heroes and became the objects of ridicule. The cinematic framework for American national identity was founded on a modern rational and pragmatic worldview. In an editorial titled “Your Program,” Louis Reeves Harrison instructed readers of Moving Picture World that the primary force influencing society was science. The power of science could be brought into the crafting of moving pictures by focusing on “knowledge of our own weaknesses. Hopeless vanity furnishes abundant comedy material. There is much tragedy in superstitious resistance of truth, in the suffering and misery entailed upon humanity by ignorance. Moving pictures are to be one of the great spans of progress toward an end none can foresee.”67 The films of the American uncanny sought to highlight the comedic failure of past superstitions and move America toward this new era of rational progress. The American uncanny dominated cinematic depictions of the horrific and supernatural throughout the remainder of the silent era, and it was not until Universal’s release of Dracula in 1931 that the notion of the supernatural as marvelous would regain the popularity it had maintained during cinema’s early years. Throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s, the mise en chaîne of the American uncanny dominated the depiction of the apparently supernatural. DeMille’s The Ghost Breaker predicted a widely popular subgenre of films set in spooky old mansions, where the thrill of horrific-looking menaces was balanced by engaging mystery and comedic elements. But before turning to these films set in old dark houses, another trend emerged that helped to expand the range and intensity of the shocks and gruesomeness on American screens. The horrors of legendary creatures such as Frankenstein’s Monster, Dr.  Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Phantom of the Opera emerged on American screens during the early twentieth century based not on their capacity to frighten or thrill but on their origins in great literature. These literary monsters were crucial to opening American screens to a dramatic escalation in terror, monstrosity, and shocks.

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CH A P T ER FOU R

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The theater manager and the librarian work together. “Go to see the picture,” advises the librarian. “See it, then read it at the library,” suggests the theater manager. “THE LIBR A R IE S CO-OPER ATE,” PICT UR E PL AY, J ULY 1920

E

VEN AS MOTION PICT UR ES BECA ME COM MONPL ACE for American audiences, the anxiety associated with them did not diminish. In spite of the prevalence of motion picture houses in the 1910s, the alarm among certain guardians of public morality continued to sound. As Tom Gunning notes about this period, “The movies became the locus of a number of social anxieties which included the sexual behaviour of children, the uneasy integration of immigrants into American life and business . . . and the existence of a form of entertainment that seemed to be evolving outside the restraints of dominant culture.”¹ The moral panic that arose around the nickelodeon boom of the early 1900s continued into the 1910s as governments, public intellectuals, and industry professionals struggled to find ways to craft films that were not only innocuous but, ideally, beneficial to the social order. Although many films explicitly cited as sources of anxiety featured crimes and sexuality, there was an overwhelming sense among pundits that moving pictures represented a unique danger in and of themselves. This danger was constituted not so much by their content as by the seemingly mystical power they were seen as holding over audiences. A 1911 editorial in Moving Picture World titled “The Psychic Force and Value of the Moving Picture” captured this popular sentiment: 110

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The taste of the American public in the matter of plays, amusements and literature is today much influenced by the moving picture. In a year or two, we venture to predict, the public taste will be moulded altogether by the products of the film-makers and thus moulded will manifest itself in plain and numerous ways. This will be due to the unique psychic force of the moving picture, of which these few lines are intended to give a somewhat detailed explanation. The moving picture acts upon the mind and soul (the psyche) of man more directly, more strongly and with more lasting effect than any other known agent for impressing the senses.²

The almost magical power attributed to moving pictures was subscribed to widely throughout American culture. Moving images were seen as engaging the audience members at a primal level through their capacity to craft mise-en-scène and to display emotions that were then mimicked in the minds of the audience. As a 1915 editorial by James S. McQuade observed: It is in the spirit of the theater to express horror by the wild gestures of the body. It would be in the spirit of the photoplay to make the world around the terrified person change in a horrifying, ghastly way. The camera can do that, and the spectator would come deeply under the spell of the emotion to be expressed. It becomes his emotion, just as in the close-up it is his attention which is forced on the single detail.³

This sense that moving pictures moved directly and unfiltered into the minds of the audience raised considerable concerns among social reformers, many of whom were worried about the way moving pictures were influencing children, immigrants, and the poor—populations seen as more susceptible to the influence of the moving picture and, thus, most in need of protection. This anxiety manifested itself most visibly and perhaps influentially in the comprehensive movement toward censorship that arose during the first decades of the moving picture in America. As early as 1907, cities were implementing local ordinances around the content of moving pictures. The first state board of censorship was established in Pennsylvania in 1911, and within a matter of years, similar boards existed across the nation.4 The introduction of state censorship led to a series of court battles 111

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that was resolved in 1915 by the US Supreme Court in Mutual v. Ohio, a decision that fell in line with the broader cultural anxiety over the persuasive power of film. The First Amendment did not, the Court reasoned, protect films because films were not actual expression but a mere representation of ideas. And though not constituting actual and protected expression, moving pictures were nonetheless dangerous: “They are mere representations of events, of ideas and sentiments published and known; vivid, useful, and entertaining, no doubt, but, as we have said, capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition.”5 The Court’s decision would provide the legal foundation for a variety of legalized censorship activity until its reversal in 1952 in the landmark Burstyn v. Wilson. Perhaps not surprisingly, the growing moving picture industry sharply opposed governmental censorship. In 1914, the Motion Picture Exhibitors League expressed “uncompromising opposition to all forms of legalized censorship.”6 As an alternative to state censorship, many in the industry supported voluntary, nongovernmental regulation, which often took the form of promoting high-quality pictures. Chief among these organizations was the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures—later the National Board of Review—which, contrary to its name, publicly opposed legalized censorship. Part of the National Board’s plan was to promote good films through a formal seal of approval. As J. W. Binder, author of this plan, argued: Two things menace the solid growth of the motion picture. They are, in order of their importance, legalized censorship whether federal, state or municipal, and, second, bad pictures. I mean bad from a moral, not an artistic standpoint. To be sure, fundamentally, the two are one. If there were no bad pictures put out by irresponsible producers, the clamor raised by politicians and reformers for legalized censorship would have no point.7

The movement to promote high-quality and morally uplifting films aimed to do more than simply reduce their immorality. Prominent social reformers actively sought to use the motion picture in an effort toward social engineering. Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist at the time, observed in 1916 the potential for harnessing the power of the moving pictures: “The fact that millions are daily under the spell of the performances on the screen is established. The high degree of their suggestibility during those hours in the dark house may be taken for granted. Hence any wholesome influence emanating from the photoplay must 112

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have an incomparable power for the remolding and upbuilding of the national soul.”8 The twin specters of legalized censorship and industry pressure toward morally uplifting films would seem, on the surface, to have been another impediment in the production of films with horrific images and motifs. One might have expected the general move toward American realism to be reinforced by this emphasis on uplifting films and to create an even more serious obstacle to films depicting the horrific. This was, however, not the case. The pressure to create uplifting, highquality films opened a door for the introduction of a variety of horrific narratives, including such iconic figures as Frankenstein’s Monster, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Phantom of the Opera. The push to craft films based on great books encouraged filmmakers to reach into the long traditions of Gothic literature to craft films that were simultaneously shocking and grounded in a high literary tradition. After exploring the literary frame for horrific films, I then turn to the way the growing interest in the artistic merits of cinema helped to frame reception of experimental foreign films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, before concluding by examining the American response to artistic German films in the form of big-budget spectacles, especially The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera.

“Carefully tried to eliminate all the actually repulsive situations” Although never fully limiting the portrayal of crime, violence, and immorality in American films, the uplift movement did have a strong influence on the way cinema was conceived during the second decade of the twentieth century. Even as they continued producing numerous lowbrow films, American filmmakers and industry commentators widely adopted the rhetoric of uplift as a means to define what watching motion pictures should mean to audiences. This embrace of uplift language likely served two interrelated purposes. First and foremost, circulating the argument that motion pictures could uplift as well as degrade audiences helped to promote films as a potentially positive social force that could defuse some of the political energy arising around legalized censorship. In line with Binder’s argument, the calls for censorship were largely fueled by the perception that films were promoting low culture and immorality. Second, in addition to pushing the case against legalized censorship, 113

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embracing the campaign for uplifting films also helped to differentiate cinema from other forms of low entertainment, especially vaudeville, and instead portray it as an art form in and of itself. Eileen Bowser notes: “The Progressives who wanted to uplift the industry and educate the masses in attendance at the nickelodeon deplored the vulgarity of the variety show and campaigned actively to get rid of it. . . . The motion-picture producers shared their mission, but did not articulate their other major objective, namely that vaudeville stood in the way of expanding the market.”9 The loft y ambitions of this uplift rhetoric were captured in a 1911 Motography editorial that declared: “The producer who today is amusing the pleasure-seeking public with light drama tomorrow will make the pictorial text-books of a nation’s schools; while the entertainment feature, developed as literature is now developed, will have its own Rudyard Kiplings and Mark Twains.”¹0 Such declarations were not uncommon in the trade journals at the time, and numerous editorial writers asserted both the artistic potential of motion pictures and their capacity to have a positive impact on society. Although not as spectacular as the administrative structures of censorship, these declarations of ambition may have had a substantial impact on the emergence of cinema as a cultural category. André Gaudreault argues that the cinema did not emerge as a cultural institution until around 1910 and that this emergence was due not solely to filmmaking practice but, perhaps more important, also to shifts in “what the dominant culture of the day made of it.”¹¹ In other words, the way cinema was talked about and described played as crucial a role in the emergence of cinema as an institution as did the changes in filmic techniques. The years between 1910 and 1915 were the crucial period within which institutionalized American cinema was forged. A major part of the emerging conception of cinema was the insistence that the motion picture was an art comparable to more established relatives such as painting and literature. The motion picture’s capacity to instill morality became one of the key arguments toward establishing its comparative merits. A 1911 Motion Picture Story Magazine editorial contended: “As the drama has been a great moralizer in the past, so can the moving picture be a source of great good in the future. All art is ennobling, and the motion picture art is no exception.”¹² This aspiration toward the artistic, literary, and morally uplifting was used as evidence of the overall benevolent nature of not only films but also their producers. As one pundit noted, “The film manufacturer, by depicting the poetic, the classic, and the historical, discloses a latent desire on his 114

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part to uplift rather than ‘descend to the level’ of the mob.”¹³ One of the chief ways of demonstrating the benevolent and socially progressive nature of the filmmaker was to draw upon the poetic, classical, and historical for material. In their study of this period in American filmmaking, Roberta Pearson and Robert Uricchio note numerous films that “drew material from such respectable sources as Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tennyson.”¹4 The growing prominence of literary adaptations was encouraged and lauded in the trade press at the time. In a 1914 letter to Motion Picture Story Magazine, Frank Spalding of Flushing, New York, insisted on a “higher standard of literary and dramatic taste for the writer and producer,” and in the same year, the mayor of Cincinnati was reported to believe that “pictures of the right kind give a greater incentive to literary and other pursuits that make for the uplift of the people.”¹5 Adapting these classics not only fit into the rhetoric of uplifting cinema but also provided a defense against critics who found the material violent or immoral. As Pearson and Uricchio note, “The industry could feign outraged innocence and wrap itself in the Bard’s cultural respectability” whenever critics questioned the appropriateness of films adapted from great literature.¹6 The connection to great literature provided important cover for filmmakers trafficking in horrific images. This point was laid out with remarkable clarity in a 1911 New York Times editorial supporting the uplift movement: Don’t you know that one of the biggest elements in the art of amusement is the sensation of horror? . . . Now, that was an effect something like what Shakespeare aimed at in “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.” It was art. Also, it was amusement. My terror was a delicious one. It was the same “amusement,” if you like that word, that I got later in life when I read “William Wilson” and “The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”¹7

The literary tradition would come to provide ample resources for filmmakers who sought to portray the weird and horrific, and the uplift movement would provide the broader rhetorical parameters within which such films were framed. One instructive example of the uplift framework is Edison Studios’s 1910 version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Released on March 18 of that year, the short film measured 975 feet in length and was not particularly well received by critics, at least one of whom found the acting 115

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repetitively histrionic.¹8 The film itself was directed by J. Searle Dawley and constituted a remarkably liberal adaptation of Shelley’s masterpiece.¹9 In the Edison film, a young student named Frankenstein discovers the secret of life while at university and designs to “create into life the most perfect human being the world has yet known,” as he puts it in a letter to his sweetheart. Unfortunately, due to the “evil” in his own mind, the young student creates a hideous monster who menaces the protagonist and his beloved until the young student’s “better nature” asserts itself on his wedding night. After a confrontation between Frankenstein and his creation, the Monster as “the creation of an evil mind is overcome by love and disappears.”²0 The centerpiece of the film is the emergence of the creature from a vat of chemicals, a visually impressive spectacle that seems to have been produced by crafting a figure out of papier-mâché, setting it on fire, and then showing the sequence in reverse.²¹ Edison’s Frankenstein is dominated by an overarching theme of sexual purity and the inherent duality of the human psyche, a theme that would be notable throughout the horrific films of this period. I will return to the theme of duality, but here want focus instead on the way Edison Studios justified its creation of such a “gruesome and ghastly subject” (to quote the studio’s own description).²² At the heart of Edison Studios’s framing of Frankenstein was the confluence of uplift rhetoric, the pleasure of horror, and cinematic spectacle. The opening paragraph of Edison’s promotional synopsis emphasized the story’s place in the literary tradition: “Frankenstein is considered by nearly all readers of fiction the most harrowing story that has ever been placed in the field of literature.” The promotional material recounted the tale’s origin from a summer picnic, with Lord Byron and other guests in attendance, and declared that Mary Shelley’s novel stood alone as a story that “reaches the climax of horror and awful suggestion.” Interestingly, the Edison promotion made clear that the gruesomeness and horror were attributes of the original source novel and that the Edison company “has carefully tried to eliminate all the actually repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale.” Shelley’s authorship also played a role in several newspaper advertisements for the film. In a small advertisement for a screening at the Bijou Theatre in Austin, Texas, the film was described as “a liberal adaptation of Mrs. Shelley’s famous story, one of the most weird and wonderful ever written.”²³ In addition to emphasizing rigorous self-censorship of the more dis116

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turbing aspects contained in the source material, the studio’s promotional synopsis also emphasized the moral of the story: “Here comes the point we have endeavored to bring out, namely: That when Frankenstein’s love for his bride shall have attained full strength and freedom from impurity it will have such an effect upon his mind that the monster cannot exist.” The message was clearly one of moral and sexual purity; as the studio suggested, whatever ghastly and horrific elements that remained were the result of the classical source material. Despite these stipulations that the ghastly and horrific aspects had been removed and that the real point was one of moral uplift, there was also evidence that Edison Studios was seeking to engage the “art of amusement” from the “sensation of horror,” as the Times editorialist put it. The film, as well as the production and promotional materials, make clear that the sensation of horror was at least one of the effects that the filmmakers were seeking to provide. Within the film itself there are none of the sequences of humor or slapstick that marked other weird films of the time. The reactions within the diegetic world of the film to the Monster are consistently those of fear and terror. When Frankenstein first lays eyes on his creation, he experiences “horror and fear at the result.” When the Monster encounters the bride, we are meant to discern a “terrible shriek” as the film’s protagonist “stands terrified.” Even the Monster himself “shrinks in terror” at the sight of his own reflection in a mirror.²4 This “monster effect,” especially its creation, was also positioned as a centerpiece of the film. The creation occupies a substantial portion of the film’s middle section, and the sequences were promoted as “some of the most remarkable photographic effects that have yet been attempted.” As if this hyperbolic declaration was not sufficient, sometime between the February 14 drafting of the studio’s synopsis and the March 15 publication of the synopsis in the Edison Studios publication Kinetogram, another sentence was added at the end to focus the audience’s mind on the cauldron special effect: “The formation of the hideous monster from blazing chemicals of the huge cauldron in Frankenstein’s laboratory is probably the most weird, mystifying and fascinating scene ever shown on film.”²5 The term weird as used by the studio would likely have signaled the supernatural and horrific in the minds of audiences, and the insistence that the horrific aspects had been limited is evidence that the film sought to entice audiences with the pleasure of horror. The more the materials claimed that truly ghastly aspects had been eliminated, the more audiences may have been enticed to see which aspects remained. 117

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The archival materials related to Edison’s Frankenstein provide one other piece of evidence as to the film’s horrific intent. As was customary during this period, the studio recommended incidental music to accompany the film, and the recommendations to accompany Frankenstein relied heavily on Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz. Indeed, a “dramatic” passage from the opera was to accompany each scene in which the monster enters.²6 Interestingly, Der Freischütz was among a series of popular “ghost stories” in the opera houses of the early nineteenth century and was, as Diego Saglia notes, “filled with superstitions and omens, apparitions and sublime landscapes.”²7 After having seen the opera, Mary Shelley herself declared that “the music is wild but often beautiful—when the magic bullets are cast they fill the stage with all sorts of horrors.”²8 Many theaters may have ignored Edison’s musical suggestion, and even if they did follow it, audiences may have not recognized the opera. Those who did hear the music, however, likely reacted as Shelley had. In any event, it clearly shows that the Edison studio sought to evoke feelings of fear in its audiences. Edison was not alone in drawing upon the canon of horrifying literary classics. Filmic adaptations of Dante’s Inferno were promoted as both uplifting and horrifying.²9 In 1911 promotional material from the Monopol Film Company, Inferno was recommended to “exhibitors who favor the Educational movement.”³0 A 1912 promotional piece for the Superior Feature Film Company’s twin release of Purgatory and Paradise provided a clear example of this confluence. The article’s opening sentence describes the films as part of a general trend toward “the filming of old classics and literary masterpieces, both ancient and modern.” The films’ plot is recounted as the poet’s “weird journey with Virgil through the tortures of Purgatory, and onward through the beauty and peace of Paradise,” and the films were declared as depicting “the extremity of beauty and horror.”³¹ Similarly, there were several adaptations of Faust, which combined images of Satan and demons with the tale’s morality and literary pedigree. As Inez Hedges notes, the Faust myth became remarkably popular among early filmmakers and was “the subject of over two dozen films in five different countries before 1913.”³² Foreign literature was not the only source for horrific literary classics. Filmmakers also embraced American authors such as Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving’s classic The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, for instance, was adapted by Eclair in 1912 and promoted as “one of the most famous tales of our literature and the production, is a worthy representation.”³³ Interestingly, Moving Picture World complained that the Eclair film “isn’t an exciting picture . . . and the headless horseman 118

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won’t fool even the children” yet concluded that the film was worthwhile as “it represents a famous and widely popular story.”³4 During the same period, Poe became almost synonymous with weird and horrific films, and his name was associated with most things seen as eerie and macabre. In an article about scouting film locations, for instance, H. F. Hoffman noted parts of Montclair, New Jersey, could stand in for “a house of gloom on the Edgar Allan Poe style.”³5 Similarly, several films were described as “Poe-like” in relation to their weird or macabre plots, including When The World Sleeps (1910), The Dream Woman (1914), and The Vivisectionist (1915). The latter film was declared to have “considerable of the gruesome strength of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.”³6 In a 1914 letter to Orrin Cox of the National Board of Censorship, Mrs. Marion Meigs declared her belief in “the power of motion pictures . . . for good and evil in the lives of the adolescent boy and girl.” The best way to harness this power, in her opinion, was to push for “our great novels” to take up more of the screen. Her belief, one shared by others, was that “even the worst kind of boys and girls of the street would be as interested in seeing Quo Vadis as they would something that was more reprehensible.”³7 The use of great literature became a core pillar in the uplift movement as film producers, in Eileen Bowser’s words, “learned to sugar-coat the educational pill by enclosing the lesson in a drama with a moral.”³8 But the sugarcoating of literary tradition also provided a means for films to engage and even expand the filmic depiction of the horrific and gruesome. This tension echoed the broader tension facing American cinema during this period, namely the tension between uplifting content and entertainment. A careful and uneasy balance between the sugarcoating and the pill was required, and this duality seemed particularly evident in the films promoted as uplifting horrors.

“They had to make Hyde horrible to the eye to make him convincing to spectators” By far the most explicit and popular horrific engagements with the notion of human duality were the several adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, originally published in 1886. By Stevenson’s own account, the novel derived from his interest in “man’s double-being.”³9 Although Stevenson was already well known from his earlier novels, including Treasure Island (1893), it was Hyde that, as Gillian Cookson observes, “confirmed the author as 119

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a literary celebrity.”40 Perhaps one reason Hyde was so well received in the late nineteenth century was the way it captured broader anxieties around the issue of human duality. As Arthur Herman observes, a sense of the precariousness of civilization, especially in the face of degeneration and atavism, was widespread throughout the arts and letters during this period. Stevenson’s novel is typical of those of the period in concluding that civilization and civilized behavior “rest . . . on repression of the animal within.”4¹ Although some sense of duality and repression are present in the literature of most periods, Stevenson’s novel frames this theme within another topic prevalent at the time: scientific progress. The emergence of the Mr. Hyde personality is caused by the scientific experiments of the respectable Dr. Jekyll. But Hyde is not merely a personality change for Jekyll. The transformation into Hyde embodies, quite literally, the fear of atavism, and Stevenson’s depiction of Hyde owes a great deal to Darwin’s notion of evolution. As Stephen Karschay notes, “Hyde is marked out as an evolutionary throwback, a degenerate individual in a seemingly intact world of spotless Victorian decency.”4² The distinction between Jekyll and Hyde exists on numerous parameters, and it seems clear that the duality of the two can be read in relation to a variety of cultural points of tension. Thomas Reed Jr., for instance, sees Stevenson’s novel as an allegory for the widespread cultural concerns over alcohol, observing that the potion that transforms the doctor into Hyde also creates “an altered state of being in which Jekyll feels comfortable indulging his morally troublesome appetites.”4³ Stevenson’s novel proved so popular that it was the subject of numerous adaptations in the early twentieth century. In 1887, Thomas Russell Sullivan adapted the novel into a stage play, which, although popular, was criticized by some for diminishing the psychological themes in favor of a more conventional melodrama, including the addition of a love interest.44 Sullivan’s play would serve as the basic framework for the several film adaptations of Hyde, the first of which was produced by William Selig in 1908, reportedly utilizing a stock company of actors who had been performing the play in live theater.45 Recognizing the comedic as well as dramatic potential in Stevenson’s tale of duality, Selig’s company produced a spoof of Hyde titled The Modern Dr. Jekyll the following year, with the comic conceit that a criminal uses the potion to become different people to effect his escape from the law. Moving Picture World praised Selig’s spoof as one that “compels attention by its absurdity.”46 The year 1910 saw the release of a Danish version of Hyde from Great Northern. Thanhouser released a version in 1912 star120

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ring James Cruze, followed by a 1913 IMP version produced by Carl Laemmle and starring King Baggot. By far the most celebrated and influential version of Hyde was the 1920 Famous Players–Lasky film starring celebrated actor John Barrymore. And 1920 also saw a version of Hyde directed by J. Charles Haydon and produced by Louis B. Mayer, as well as an unauthorized German adaptation, Der Januskopf, directed by F. W. Murnau. The reception of these adaptations of Stevenson’s novel demonstrated some of the ways that the rhetoric of uplift was incorporated not only into the developing art of cinema but also into the depictions of the horrific. Producers of these adaptations, as well as critics and trade reporters, carefully utilized the concept of literary artistry as a means of justifying the production and reception of the films. But, across these twelve years, the rhetoric also shifted in important ways to begin encompassing not only the literary antecedent but also the cinematic artistry as a justification for the depiction of the horrific. Every adaptation of Hyde heralded the source material. Selig’s 1908 version was described as being produced “in strict accordance with the original book as to scenery, costumes and dramatic cast” and justified itself by noting that “to mention that this conception was written by Robert Louis Stevenson is sufficient recommendation for its eligibility to class it among the foremost interpretations of moving pictures.”47 As early as 1908, the subtle equation of literary source material and cinematic artistry was evident. As the cinematic choices were made in “strict accordance” with Stevenson’s celebrated novel, the filmic adaptation was already deserving of elevated status. The potential to exploit the literary antecedent to filmic adaptations was not lost on exhibitors and others. In 1912, Hugh F. Hoffman, a selfdescribed “lecturer of special releases” in the New York City area, advertised lectures related to several literary films, including Homer’s Odyssey, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dante’s Inferno, and Thanhouser’s Egyptian horrific film She.48 A 1920 Picture Play editorial applauded the success of the 1920 Barrymore version of Hyde, contending that years earlier such a literary film would not have attracted the same level of attention (this in spite of the fact that both the 1912 and 1913 versions were successful). Hyde’s success was used as proof that American cinema had moved away from producing low-quality films, a change attributed to not only better producers but also better audiences. The editorialist argued: “Credit is due to the public [that], by its demands, forced the change.”49 The demand for higher-quality pictures, or at least the rhetori121

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cal framing of cinema within this demand, gradually expanded to encompass not only the source material from which films were derived but also the productions themselves. The 1920 Hyde was described by the Kansas City Star as “dignified, impressive, artistic.”50 Praise for the high quality of the early adaptations of Hyde often focused on the filmmakers’ ability to faithfully reproduce scenes from either the novel or the play. Margaret MacDonald praised the 1912 Thanhouser version: “Those familiar with the story from which the picture was made will be thrice impressed by its reproduction on the screen.”5¹ The moving picture adaptations of Hyde generally drew far more directly from the stage play than from the original novel, but this connection did not so much diminish the use of artistic/literary rhetoric as shift its emphasis away from literary motifs to more theatrical and, eventually, cinematic artistry. In both the theatrical and cinematic adaptations, much of the discussion focused on the capacity of the lead actor to effectively portray the moral and rational Dr. Jekyll in addition to the libidinous and monstrous Mr. Hyde. The Kansas City Star’s 1920 review of the Famous Players–Lasky production suggested the correlation between stage and motion picture actor when noting, “The appearance of John Barrymore in the dual role of Jekyll and Hyde recalls to many Kansas Citians the success of the late Richard Mansfield in the stage version of the classic.”5² Indeed, Barrymore’s performance in the 1920 version of Hyde would become one of the film’s aspects most often cited to prove its cultural value (fig. 9). Barrymore, like Mansfield before him, had been an accomplished stage actor, and as early as 1909, after his performance in Winchell Smith’s comedy The Fortune Hunter, he was hailed as a star. Although Barrymore had been appearing in moving pictures since 1913, Hyde quickly became his most acclaimed performance.5³ The perceived quality of the performance served as a corollary frame, along with the literary source material, for justifying the film. As the Manitoba Free Press declared, “The great story by Robert Louis Stevenson is too well known to require comment; but ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ were never known or understood until you see John Barrymore in the title roles.”54 Barrymore’s performance was identified as of a new class of moving picture acting, a style that no longer relied on extravagant gestures or lengthy title cards but that achieved a new level of intelligibility through realism.55 The New York Times declared of Barrymore: “No actor needs fewer subtitles, or leaders, to make him intelligible. He belongs conspicuously in the relatively small class of actors in motion pictures who are really motion picture actors.” For Hyde, this acting prow122

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FIGUR E 9. Mr. Hyde, portrayed by John Barrymore, mixes with dangerous characters in John Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). Photo: British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, UK.

ess was placed into a decidedly more gruesome and horrific narrative than in other instances, and the Times made a special point of the way the horror of Stevenson’s narrative was adapted from the literary to the visual arts. “There may be some who consider that Mr. Barrymore has made the character of Hyde too repulsive,” the review noted. While acknowledging that Stevenson’s description of Hyde did not portray the character as being visibly deformed, the reviewer made a point of the way horrific narratives were shifted from their literary sources into the visual mediums of stage and film: “They had to make Hyde horrible to the eye to make him convincing to spectators.”56 The film’s popularity suggested that they were successful in crafting a realistically horrific Hyde that would lure audiences to theaters. In Hutchinson, Kansas, for example, audiences were warned to come prepared “to behold acting that will at times bring warm tears of pity, and at times will make your blood run with horror.”57 Even though the horrific aspects of the 1920 version of Hyde were framed within the rhetoric of literary and cinematic artistry, earlier ad123

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aptations had a more difficult time addressing the narrative’s terrifying and supernatural elements. A Moving Picture World review of Great Northern’s 1910 version noted the difficulty in adapting the novel and play: “Very naturally this play suggests to the mind all that is morbid and gruesome, which is a thing picture makers have been trying to keep away from.” The filmmaker’s way of evading the implicit cultural prohibition of gruesome and supernatural elements was to frame the story of Jekyll’s transformation and crimes as part of a dream, a move described as “a very ingenious way of putting this drama before the young people and the various ‘Boards of Censorship.’”58 Although the 1912 Thanhouser version did not reframe its narrative, its promotional materials sought to clarify that the production did not dwell upon the weird or gruesome: “The present production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not one that is calculated to inspire horror or dread in the spectator.” Of course, the note in Moving Picture World did observe that “much appears that will convey emphatically the terrible change that the drug wrought” and that “the picture well shows how the evil in Jekyll’s nature oblivated [sic] the good.” And though the depiction of the horrific and evil might have brought criticism, Thanhouser was quick to note the ultimate service such depictions were being used for, as it would “renew attention in the fine problem that Stevenson presents in this famous story.”59 The competing IMP version, starring King Baggot, evidently also provoked a sense of horror in audiences. Motion Picture Story Magazine responded in one of its regular “Answers to Inquiries” columns: “So, King Baggot really frightened you in ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’ Thanks. Call again.”60 By 1920, the horrific nature of the Hyde narrative was no longer being downplayed but, instead, became one of its principal draws. An advertisement for the 1920 Gladys Brockwell vehicle A Sister to Salome seemed to capture the public sentiment: “Dual existence is a theme of irresistible fascination in fiction and the drama. ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ was a masterpiece in horror and in psychological analysis.”6¹ There are likely numerous reasons that Hyde proved such a productive source novel during the 1910s. Undoubtedly, the prominence of the novel gave producers confidence that audiences would be well disposed to the narrative. It was also likely that the growing interest in motion picture acting made the part attractive to a new generation of actors who wished to show their capacity in the dual starring role. But it also seemed likely that the focus on duality in Hyde would be of interest to

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American audiences during the early twentieth century. America at the time was a place steeped in dualities—the split between immigrant heritage and the emerging American national identity; the split between rural past and industrial future; the split between religious and spiritual beliefs and the promise of scientific certainty. The struggles over these dualities echoed throughout the various adaptations of Hyde, and it is telling that efforts at repression, and the consequences of these efforts, were played out within the body of Dr. Jekyll. Although maintaining the new American culture required careful vigilance toward external threats, Hyde seemed to underscore the need for internal vigilance to make sure that past tendencies did not resurface within the cultural body of the nation. These struggles play out throughout the Hyde adaptations of this period. The 1912 version starring James Cruze, the earliest surviving adaptation, portrays a crucial point of tension between Jekyll’s faith in science and progress and the religious foundations of modern society. The film, like most during this period, utilized a broader frame of melodrama and so inserts a romantic interest. Jekyll, we learn from an intertitle, “becomes the accepted suitor of the minister’s daughter.” The introduction of a love interest was part of Sullivan’s stage adaptation, but the love interest as minister’s daughter was not added until Selig’s 1908 version. The interrelationship between science, religion, and duality is perhaps best captured in a sequence near the 1911 film’s last third, in which Jekyll and his beloved are taking a walk through the park. As Jekyll begins spontaneously transforming into Hyde, he runs away, and the transformation takes place upon the steps of a nearby church. As Hyde emerges, he begins walking up the church steps but quickly turns back—repelled by the sacred site. Hyde returns to find Jekyll’s intended still waiting under the tree, and as he begins to harass her the minister arrives to intervene. After a brief struggle, the minister is killed and Hyde runs away, chased by a police officer. The 1911 version, and evidently the 1908 version as well, position Jekyll’s duality largely in relation to religion. Science plays its role, but it is limited. The 1911 version contains an intertitle at the film’s opening that explains: “The taking of certain drugs can separate man into two beings: one representing EVIL, the other GOOD.” The 1913 version, however, frames the narrative of duality much more in relation to science. Early on we are told that Jekyll’s friends “ridicule Dr. Jekyll for his unheard of experiments.” The 1913 version does not portray the opposition of religion so directly, but there is a telling sequence near the film’s

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second half. As Jekyll realizes that he cannot control the transformations into Hyde, an intertitle reads: “Dr. Jekyll is a martyr to science.” Immediately following the intertitle, we see a scene where a church boys’ choir passes Jekyll and his fiancée. He watches the young boys in their robes as they pass and even begins to follow them, perhaps driven by a desire to return to a simpler time of childhood and the comforts of faith. But Jekyll’s fate is sealed as his transformations become more uncontrollable, ultimately leading him to end his own life. A bell tolls as Jekyll dies in the arms of his fiancée. The 1920 version starring John Barrymore moved even further from the tension between religion and science but continued to play out tension along two fronts. On the one hand, as with the 1913 version, Jekyll was portrayed as a progressive individual—his greatest fault is his dedication to charitable work for the poor. As he is introduced, the title card calls him an “idealist and philanthropist.” His friend and antagonist, Dr. Richard Lanyon, is described as being “as conservative professionally as Dr. Jekyll was progressive.” Later, as a group of men discuss Jekyll, one objects that “no man could be as good as he looks.” If this version of Jekyll has a weakness, it is in his complete faith in science, and science indeed becomes the overwhelming motif of the film. The opening sequence is of Jekyll staring into a microscope—the audience given the opportunity to see the microbes moving across the screen. After Jekyll is tempted by the lure of an exotic dancer, he muses with Lanyon about the prospect of transcending his duality: “Wouldn’t it be marvelous if the two natures in man could be separated—housed in different bodies!” Lanyon replies, “Marvelous—but impossible!” But, Jekyll retorts, “Science has wrought miracles. Why not—this?” It is this sequence that leads Jekyll to pursue moral separation through science and ultimately leads to his demise. In addition to being the most explicitly focused on questions of progress—both scientific and cultural—the 1920 version of Hyde is the most explicitly horrific. When Jekyll is confronted by the father of his fiancée about his possible connection to Hyde, the transformation is provoked. The horrific visage of Hyde fills the screen, and his attack upon the older man is explicit and brutal. Hyde falls upon the man, seemingly biting his neck before savagely beating the unconscious man with his walking stick. This level of violence was far greater than those depicted in earlier films and would likely have raised some eyebrows among cultural critics had it not been for the literary cover provided by the novel and the artistic cover provided by Barrymore’s performance.

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“We may take their art and let their propaganda go” The American institution of cinema that emerged after 1915 was deeply invested in the concepts of American Progressivism. American films, with their linear plots and focus on moral cause and effect, were designed to instill within the viewer a kind of skeptical and highly rational conception of the world. Good would be rewarded, evil would be punished, and all was meted out through clear and logical means. The superstitions of the past would be discarded in favor of a more incredulous attitude based on science and rationality. Still, even with its focus on the future, the emerging American culture would simultaneously be knowledgeable of its past, even if it was not bound by it, and thus maintain a level of sophistication and culture derived from its European roots. The strange relationship between America and its European roots was dramatically highlighted during World War I. The war cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and brought an end to America’s isolation from the Old World. It was also a period in which the new American culture would be forged and tested as Americans sought to clarify their place in the world. As Robert Zeiger notes, “The experience of the Great War reflected the diverse strands of the progressivism that dominated public discourse during the first two decades of the century.” America’s involvement was, in a way, simultaneously a gesture toward its new independence and to its connection to its past. Or, as Zeiger puts it, “the Great War drove home the fact that America was Europe’s offspring and successor.”6² James Chapman contends that “the impact of the First World War on the fledgling film industry cannot be overestimated.”6³ The devastation in Europe took a toll on the film industries of several nations and left the United States as the dominant force in film production. The American film industry, by this point largely consolidated in Hollywood, was able to spend substantial amounts of money on the creation of long and cinematically impressive films. These technical advantages, as well as the growing interest in movie stars, helped American films gain “a definite following,” as Kristin Thompson notes, whereas “other national industries would have difficulty in creating films as attractive.”64 The American style of filmmaking evolved out of many trends: emphasis on rational cause and effect, linear narratives, attention to realism in narrative and cinematography, and others. Beyond these technical aspects, American films also embodied the cultural values of Progressiv-

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ism, including individuality, progress, and masculinity. American filmmaking projected these values to a growing global audience and also, especially during and after World War I, to its domestic audience. Leslie Midkiff DeBauche suggests that the war generated for Americans “a greater sense of national community” and that the film industry would rise to “play a central role in this new community.”65 The relationship between American filmmaking style and this sense of American national identity was evident in the American reaction to foreign films. Ironically, one of the first European film industries to regain prominence in the aftermath of World War I was the German industry, and numerous prominent German filmmakers crafted a style that was vividly different from that of the Americans. Although less lavish in setting, these German films embraced a more experimental and Expressionistic style as well as a decidedly darker tone. As Pierre Sorlin observes, “In Europe, the years following the end of the Great War saw the rise of the motif of a cataclysmic, apocalyptic horror that had marked the end of any idea of historical progress or possible improvement of the human condition.”66 Among the apocalyptic horrors, and most relevant to this discussion, were films that employed explicitly horrific images, including a film that would have a substantial influence on the later development of the horror film in America: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Caligari represented a significant challenge to the dominance of American cinema not only in the marketplace but also in terms of narrative structure and cinematic style. The 1920 German film was directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Meyer. The film starred Werner Krauss as the evil hypnotist, Dr. Caligari, and Conrad Veidt in the role of Cesare. The narrative of the film follows along with earlier films that focused on hypnotism and mesmerism and takes the form of a narrative told by Francis. In Francis’s story, the evil Dr. Caligari uses his somnambulist Cesare to commit murders. Caligari is eventually revealed as the director of a nearby asylum who, mad himself, seeks to become the legendary Dr. Caligari by re-creating his earlier namesake’s experiments in mesmerism. Caligari is eventually captured, but in a twist ending, Francis is revealed to be an inmate in the asylum. His entire narrative—and the vast majority of the film—is thus only Francis’s delusion.67 Caligari would eventually become one of the most celebrated and influential films in horror, as well as in cinema generally. My interest here, however, centers on its reception by US filmmakers, critics, and the public, for their responses to the German import uniquely illustrate the intersecting rhetorics of 128

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the newly institutionalized sense of American cinema, the uplift movement, and the ongoing public interest in the horrific. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence that Caligari constituted a challenge to both American cinema and American national identity was the widely publicized reaction of audiences in Los Angeles upon the film’s initial release. As Motion Picture Magazine reported in August 1921, “When Miller’s Theater in Los Angeles tried to show the Germanmade ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ a mob of wounded soldiers and members of the American Legion stormed the place and created such a riot outside the theater that the management gave up and showed an American-made film instead.”68 Variety painted a more vivid picture, noting that “a mob assembled, rotten eggs were thrown profusely and the naval provost guard was unable to deal with blue jackets from the fleet.” The initial riot, however, expanded as the Hollywood post of the American Legion “organized a parade with the assistance of the local members of the Motion Picture Directors’ Association and marched through the streets.” In the end, “some 2,000 citizens” were reported to have laid siege to Miller’s Theater, which eventually pulled Caligari from its screen.69 The strong reaction to Caligari was in part due to its German origin. The Treaty of Versailles had been signed only two years earlier, and animosity toward the German nation was still high among Americans. One commentator attributed the “great hullabaloo over the German films” to the “wild tales” that “they were German propaganda” before concluding that “if we know them to be such, they can do little harm. We may take their art and let their propaganda go.”70 Others did not agree. The American Legion, one of the main organizers of the protests, contended that “the fight against foreign films is being waged by the Legion for two purposes, one patriotic, the other economic.” On the patriotic side, the Legion observed that “there is a movement existent within the motion picture industry to create films of a more wholesome and elevating character,” and the German films were seen as not living up to that moral standard. Although the Legion admitted that Caligari “carried no particular significance as propaganda,” it was “a gruesome picture after the cubist style of art” and would “serve as the insignificant wedge for the showing of other pictures that would be dangerous.”7¹ The economic side of the issue was no less crucial. Many in Hollywood evidently believed their growing global dominance was threatened by the rising popularity of foreign films. The Caligari protests were in part recognition of the economic threat foreign films posed as 129

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“the business men became aroused,” and it was the confluence of patriotic and economic concerns that gave rise to the Loyal American Film League. As the Legion put it, “Not only was the patriotic zeal of the citizens aroused, but the business men began to realize that the making of pictures in foreign lands would imperil the industry, which has done so much to make Los Angeles one of the fastest growing cities in the world.” It was notable that among the organizers of the protest in Los Angeles was the Motion Picture Directors’ Association.7² Numerous pundits noted the hypocrisy of American film producers who simultaneously wanted relief from censorship while endorsing its use against foreign films. “Great is the groaning of the film flaneurs under the autocracy of censorship,” wrote one commentator, “yet these poor oppressed used the censorcratic method when they stirred up agitation that barred German pictures from Los Angeles.”7³ Frederick J. Haskin observed the sudden shift, wherein “those who, only a few months ago, stood solidly united in the fight against censorship, now are split into two bitter and belligerent factions by a new issue—the importation of foreign films.”74 Studio heads and professionals in Hollywood sought to limit the importation of foreign films, whereas exhibitors and theater managers welcomed the new influx of unique films. Exhibitors complained that “the American public has had enough of cow boys and stampedes.”75 Efforts to squelch foreign films were largely unsuccessful outside of Southern California. Wid’s Daily reported that plans for a protest in New York were abandoned, observing of California: “Smaller place. More actors.”76 Indeed, Caligari enjoyed considerable box office success in much of the country.77 The Goldwyn Distributing Company, which distributed Caligari, reported record attendance for the film at New York’s Capitol Theater, with more than 20,000 attending the film’s Sunday opening. Attendance on Monday broke previous records, and the company predicted that all previous Capitol box office records would also be broken.78 Much of the appeal of Caligari centered on its uniqueness. Goldwyn promoted the film by declaring it “thoroughly radical, so totally unlike anything that has ever been presented before.”79 The New York Daily News reviewer concurred, contending that Caligari “represents a new departure.” But this new departure was probably not for most Americans. The reviewer noted, “I cannot recommend the subject as one which the average healthy American will like.”80 Indeed, the cinematic uniqueness of Caligari was another cause of anxiety among American critics. Most of the focus on Caligari centered on its unusual, Expres130

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sionistic style, but it is also notable that the film gestured strongly back toward some of the themes common to the depiction of the horrific in earlier films. Themes of mesmerism, horrific murders, and seemingly supernatural mind control, as well as the film’s overall Gothic miseen-scène, marked it as entering into the realm of the weird and mysterious. Indeed, the film’s opening line, which comes from the older man who will be the audience for Francis’s strange tale, highlights the Gothic undertones of the narrative to come: “Spirits surround us on every side—they have driven me from hearth and home, from wife and child.” Although the older man’s haunted past does not become part of the unfolding story, it signals the broader weird and superstitious frame within which the film should be viewed. Critical reception of the film clearly identified it as one of those weird films that dealt in the gruesome and horrific. The New York Herald claimed the film “will give any one a first class, guaranteed, case of the creeps,” and the New York Tribune saw the film’s goal as “raising your hair from your head.” Similarly, the New York Sun remarked on the “swift stabs of horror,” and the New York Post described Caligari as “weird” and “the sort of thing that could not have been done in this country.”8¹ The equation of “foreign” and “weird” returned in relation to Caligari and similar films, such as The Golem and Nosferatu. Dorothy Thompson observed the influence of German mythology and superstition in these films and objected that they were “based upon an idea fundamentally repugnant to the American or English-man. It is amazing how much perversity of a peculiarly repellent nature will go down with the German public.”8² American critics were not univocal in their rejection of Caligari. The rhetoric of the uplift movement provided two crucial frames within which Caligari was defended. The first frame was built around connecting Caligari to the American literary tradition through the figure of Edgar Allan Poe. One newspaper critic called Caligari “packed with incident and terror of the kind made familiar by Poe and others,” and Motion Picture Magazine’s “Answer Man” declared it “a fantastic story of murder and madness, reminding you of Edgar Allan Poe’s work.”8³ Goldwyn also utilized this framing, describing Caligari as “like a page from Poe.”84 The reviewer for Visual Education took the equation a step further: “Poe on the screen! An impossibility some would say! . . . ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’—a film [that], although produced on foreign soil and by a German director, is so strangely similar to Poe’s creations, both in content and treatment, that it might well be his.”85 Parallels to Poe’s weird tales provided Caligari with some broadly lit131

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erary justification, but by far the most prominent quality of the film was its visual artistry. Indeed, the highly Expressionistic visuals of the film remain its most striking feature and the aspect most commonly discussed by film historians. S.  S. Prawer credits the film with wedding contemporary arts practice with cinema, observing “the way in which it brings the language of twentieth-century painting into the cinema.”86 Similarly, Gilbert Perez observes that Caligari’s highly artificial sets embody Expressionism: “Not a whiff of nature is allowed into the askew sets of Caligari, a paranoiac sketchbook of a world that seems continually on the point of toppling.”87 This retreat into artificiality was symptomatic of the broader Expressionist movement in Germany. In his influential reading of Caligari, Siegfried Kracauer notes that “by making the film an outward projection of psychological events, expressionist staging symbolized—much more strikingly than did the device of a framing story—that general retreat into a shell which occurred in [post–World War I] Germany.”88 Although critics at the time could not have foreseen the way the film connected with the evolving contours of Germany’s national culture, they were quick to comment on the film’s visual qualities, and these comments were often wedded with the uplift movement’s stated desire to champion film as an art in and of itself. The editors at Motion Picture Magazine rejected calls for banning German films such as Caligari and the historical drama Deception: “Let us not forget that art is international, beyond racial and national limitations. Let us also not forget it is only by competition that real advancement comes in any field of activity.”89 Caligari was often credited with pushing the boundaries of the cinematic arts through its innovative use of constructed sets. Herbert Howe saw Caligari as pioneering a new type of Expressionistic picture that “has endeavored to express moods by environment as well as by the characters moving therein. The artists have succeeded in conveying the feeling of depth, color, and limitless space, by supplementing real form with painted artifice” (see fig. 10).90 The use of artificial settings cut against the grain of American filmmaking, which had emphasized a realistic aesthetic that favored actual settings and, where possible, natural light. In a way, Caligari gestured backward to the earliest days of filmmaking and its reliance on sets constructed within studio confines. As Georges Sadoul notes, “Caligari’s series of tableaux and the colorful effect of its painted backdrops [were] almost a return to Méliès and to filmed theater, but using entirely new esthetics that were in harmony with the [post–World War I] confusion.”9¹ The use of sets to construct an Expressionistic mise-en132

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FIGUR E 10. Dr. Caligari wanders the twisted sets of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Photo: British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, UK.

scène for Caligari, however, went beyond recycling the tableaux of earlier films. Caligari’s use of Modernist painting techniques allowed its physical sets to express the mood and tone of the film. Writing in Vanity Fair, E.  W. Kemble observed, “The important thing was not that these patterns were derived from modernist paintings, but that they were always under control. There would be no guesswork on the part of the director, when even the sunlight was painted on the floors and walls.”9² The artistry of Caligari was, following this logic, an example of a purely cinematic art in the sense that its artistic qualities were derived not from its literary source material or even from the quality of the acting but from the quality of the cinematography and setting. Thompson found Caligari to be “something entirely new; a picture which was in no sense whatever an adaptation of the arts of the stage; a picture also which was not plot and remarkable photography; indeed, its art was not that of the photographer, but of the painter, and of the most modern painter at that.”9³ For some critics, this kind of artistry represented the next step in 133

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the evolution of the cinematic arts, and many bemoaned the lack of such artistry among American filmmakers. As one critic opined, “Just now there is hardly one in the entire field who has the knowledge, training or capacity even to understand the principles of art involved in such a masterpiece as CALIGARI—to say nothing of creating and producing a film of this artistic calibre.”94 The British novelist Gilbert Parker, while ultimately defending American filmmaking, acknowledged that Caligari and similar films demonstrated “a tendency abroad to grasp the particular problems of the movies and to evolve an art form peculiar to that medium.”95 American studios were generally portrayed as unable or unwilling to pursue such innovative techniques, being wedded as they were to a more banal form of film production. As Howe argued, “If Germany, raising from her knees can fling such an artistic gesture across the seas as to strike terror to the hearts of our prosperous magnates, we say let ’em suffer. It is a reflection upon our initiative if we, who have had the benefit of uninterrupted prosperity, are defeated in art by a nation which has been defeated in war, crushed with debt, and burdened with world hatred.”96 Praise of Caligari’s innovative artistry was not, however, universal. As one letter writer from South Carolina described her experience attending the film: “There were about twelve people in the theater when I arrived . . . and when I came out there were about five of my companions left in torture.”97 The writer was not alone in her distaste for the film. Charles Miller, president of the Motion Picture Directors’ Association, insisted that the American emphasis on realism would continue to dominate the screen: “Any striving for the bizarre or eccentric can be but a passing fad. ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ a European importation with cubistic and futuristic settings, may be followed by a flood of carbon copies of the same but I do not believe they will last. After all the greatest art is that which conceals. The screen must be natural in its appeal.”98 Miller’s prediction was in some ways accurate. At least two German imports followed along the lines of Caligari’s treatment of the horrific, and both were largely framed in relation to Wiene’s film. The Golem, codirected by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, adapted the Jewish mythology surrounding an animated clay statue. The Golem was released soon after Caligari, and exhibitors were advised to use the earlier film to advertise it. “Perhaps if you played ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ you will be better able to judge whether or not you can put over ‘The Golem.’ If they liked the former, they will be interested in this.”99 The third horrific German film, F.  W. Murnau’s celebrated adaptation of Drac134

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ula, Nosferatu (1922), was plagued by its own problems, not the least of which was its infringement on the source novel’s copyright, owned by Bram Stoker’s widow.¹00 Due in part to these legal actions, Nosferatu had a greater influence on filmmakers, including the director of the 1931 authorized adaptation of Dracula, than on moviegoing audiences. But where it was advertised, it was characterized as “a weird film like ‘Caligari.’”¹0¹ Caligari represented a threat to American film on numerous fronts. The Expressionistic artistry of German films suggested some levels of artistic deficiency among American filmmakers. Perhaps, as the US Supreme Court had suggested in Mutual v. Ohio, American film was simply a commercial enterprise. On another level, Caligari and its ilk constituted a threat to the realist frame of the American uncanny through which American audiences had been inculcated. The pleasure of Caligari, The Golem, Nosferatu, and similar films was constituted, in part, through the rupture of the incredulous viewing frame that American films had carefully constructed.

“The shade of Doctor Caligarri [sic] is with us again in this picture” Perhaps the most direct American response to the challenge presented by Caligari and the other German Expressionist films was a pair of big-budget films that emphasized horrific elements and the gruesome contortions of one of America’s biggest film stars, Lon Chaney. Universal released The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923, with Chaney starring in the title role as the disfigured Quasimodo. Based on the success of Hunchback, Universal released another horrific spectacle two years later with The Phantom of the Opera, again with Chaney in the title role. The connection between the two films was made evident in the earliest promotional pieces for Phantom. As stated in a “behind the scenes” report from Caroline Bell, Phantom promised “to be almost as big a production as was ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame.’”¹0² It is notable that the title of Bell’s report was “The Next Big Spectacle,” and it seemed clear that Universal meant this spectacle to be a response to the popularity and inherent challenge from German Expressionist films. In one of Universal’s own 1924 promotional articles for Phantom, the film was described as “a strictly modern picture.” More tellingly, the article laid out a stark contrast with the German Modernist aesthetic: “Weird lighting, grotesque shadows of the actors, and strange silhouettes are being designed 135

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in the fantasy which while weird is not to be on the ‘futurist’ order but ultra modern throughout.”¹0³ Phantom and to some extent Hunchback before it were framed as an American response to the influence of Caligari, something not lost on audiences at the time. In a fairly negative review of Phantom’s debut in San Francisco, Variety noted: “The shade of Dr. Caligarri [sic] is with us again in this picture, beautifully produced. It is all the serials ever made rolled into one, with ‘Doctor Jekyl [sic] and Mister Hyde’ thrown in for good measure.”¹04 Universal’s Hunchback and Phantom were described by the studio as “super features,” a category of high-budget spectacles that the studio differentiated from its usual dramatic productions—called, at times, “Jewels”—and their “high class western features.” Carl Laemmle, the studio head, touted Phantom: “As a super-feature, to follow in the footsteps of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ we are making ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ Gaston Leroux’s famous mystery story. Lon Chaney is the star, and in it he has another of his weird and grotesque roles. This picture will be the equal in every respect of ‘The Hunchback.’ I expect it will create an even greater sensation.”¹05 The increased emphasis on big-budget super-features was part of a broader strategy being developed at Universal with an emphasis on those films that would draw a higher price from exhibitors. Al Licthman, Universal’s general sales manager, explained: “I have come to the conclusion that exhibitors want bigger pictures, and they will pay to get them, because they make more money with them.”¹06 Lichtman’s sense of the public’s tastes was supported by an editorial penned by Malcolm Oettinger, who contended that “this is what the public likes: sentimentality and suspense, society scenes, simplicity, and the spectacular.” As evidence, Oettinger quoted his aunt, an avid moviegoer, who reportedly exclaimed, “Realism is my daily fare: don’t give it to me in novels or pictures.” From this and other observations, Oettinger concluded that “the public that pays wants thrills for every-day spines. The successful picture will cause the most flabby of vertebrae to stiff. And if it takes a gun in the drawer, a hotel fire, and a few batteredin doors to do it, the forces of filmdom stand ready.”¹07 One of the ways Universal sought to fulfill the public’s desire for spectacle was through the use of the horrific. In a trio of films, Hunchback, Phantom, and The Man Who Laughs (1928), Universal produced super-features that employed horrific elements as their driving force. Film scholar Ian Conrich calls these big-budget Universal films “horror-spectaculars.”¹08 All three films were notable not only because they were big-budget films using horrific elements but also in the way 136

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they sought to craft a new American framing for cinematic horror as a response to the influence and popularity of the earlier German productions. Conrich observes the strong influence of foreign films, especially German Expressionism, on these Universal films. Phantom director Rupert Julian was a New Zealander, and Paul Leni, who directed The Man Who Laughs, was German as was that film’s star, Conrad Veidt, who had also starred in Caligari. In addition, Conrich notes, “as the most European of the American studios, Universal was not just producing films with foreign filmmakers, but it was financially supported by its ownership of foreign exhibition circuits.”¹09 Conrich provides a thoughtful analysis of these films. For my purposes, however, the most relevant issue consists in the way these Universal films combined the shocking aspects of Caligari and the other European films into the broader frameworks of uplift and the American uncanny. In addition, these films were presented not simply as horrific spectacles but also as spectacles of realism. They did not embrace a return to the supernatural spectacles of an earlier era but rather expanded the horrific and gruesome potential in American realism by focusing not on the marvelous but on the graphic.¹¹0 This move toward the more macabre and disturbing was in turn justified by the broader rhetorical framework of the uplift movement, for these films were presented as both literary and cinematic art. Carl Laemmle made the connection between Hunchback, Phantom, and the broader uplift movement quite explicit in a 1924 radio address: “I understand that Mr. Orowitz [a popular radio personality and movie promoter] told you last week about ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ by Gaston Leroux with Lon Chaney. It is my hope that it will surpass even the success achieved by ‘The Hunchback.’ The Universal Company is doing its utmost to provide you with the kind of entertainment outlined by Will Hays and which I have been consistently advocating for years.”¹¹¹ Like earlier horrific films, Hunchback and Phantom were promoted in relation to the uplift movement, which saw the rise of Will Hays, the former US postmaster general, as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) with the explicit mission of cleaning up American films and Hollywood’s reputation.¹¹² In an earlier promotional article, Hunchback was touted as “one of the ‘bigger and better’ pictures that all producers are making their objective.”¹¹³ Universal was quick to highlight the literary pedigree of both Hunchback and Phantom. An early announcement of the plan to film Hunchback proclaimed the novel to be “one of the great classics of litera137

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ture” and “one of the pieces upon which [original author Victor] Hugo’s fame was founded.”¹¹4 Similarly, Phantom was promoted as based on the novel “by Gaston Leroux, the celebrated French writer.”¹¹5 The broader move by Universal to highlight the literary pedigree of its films was announced in a Universal Weekly articled focused on theater promotions for the studio’s 1924–1925 season of films. The article proclaimed: “Never before has such an array of authors been summoned to supply a Universal season as has been congregated for this 1924–1925 feast. It contains the names of writers whose fame is world-wide, names of authors who are known principally in England, names of authors who are known best in France, and many whose reputation is confined almost exclusively to the United States.”¹¹6 Beyond the literary pedigree of these horror-spectacles, Universal carefully constructed a sense of cinematic spectacle through its promotion of the elaborate sets and the bodily performance of their star, Lon Chaney. The sets occupied a remarkable amount of Universal’s promotional efforts, emphasizing their size, detail, and expense. With typical hyperbole, a promotional article on Hunchback described the construction of the Notre-Dame Cathedral and other structures as “the greatest architectural achievement of the motion picture industry” and explained that the cathedral “would be built exactly as it existed in 1482.” Construction of the vast set, which also included streets and other buildings, was estimated to take more than six months.¹¹7 The grandeur of the Hunchback set became a standard talking point for various behind-the-scenes reports, including one from Picture Play Magazine, which declared Hunchback “one of the most massive productions ever attempted.”¹¹8 Similarly, The Photodramatist reported Hunchback as “being made on a mammoth scale,” and Carl Laemmle proudly declared in Motion Picture News that “this super-Jewel is costing an enormous sum, but every dollar will show in the film.”¹¹9 From its earliest announcement, Phantom was consistently compared to the highly successful Hunchback, and Universal’s promotional material highlighted the increased level of artistry and expense in Julian’s 1925 film. As early as September 1924, Universal announced that Phantom’s “set-building plans . . . will eclipse even the far-famed ‘Notre Dame’” and the construction plans included “filmland’s first all-metal stage.”¹²0 The massive and expensive set for Phantom became a consistent focus of the film’s promotions. One advertisement featured a photograph of the Grand Staircase alongside a lengthy description of the set: “Its splendor is overpowering! It is dazzling—overwhelming! The Grand Staircase of the Paris Opera House is the scene of many vital 138

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moments in ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ Hence it is being constructed with the most painstaking attention to detail. Not a crevice in the intricate maze of sculpture will be omitted!”¹²¹ Another Universal promotional piece touted the hiring of “E. A. Yerbysmith, famous sculptor and painter,” to craft the plaster replicas for the opera set.¹²² The promotional emphasis on elaborate sets, as well as the large cast of extras, almost overshadowed the horrific nature of the narrative, and there seemed to be a level of tension between the film’s artistic aspirations and its more macabre and shocking subject matter. For example, on the same page of a Moving Picture World guide for exhibitors, one story reported that the magician Thurston had agreed to produce a real “Phantom” for the premiere of Phantom in New York, and a second story reported that Albertina Rasch would present “a new group of her famed ballet dancers in the pretentious prologue which will accompany the New York showing.”¹²³ Phantom was, on one hand, an exercise in high culture, with the film meant as a contribution equal to architecture, sculpture, music, and dance. Yet on the other hand, its roots were still firmly within the land of hokum, where magicians conjured spirits in front of an enthralled audience. The tension between progressive lightness and regressive negativity was also evident in the choice of the film’s leads. As Picture Play described the pairing: “Mary Philbin and Lon Chaney represent the opposite motifs of light and gayety, and darkness and horror” (see fig. 11).¹²4 Although Philbin was a legitimate star in her own right, having played the lead in Universal’s 1923 The Merry-Go-Round, it was Chaney who received most of the attention. In a 1924 promotional piece, Universal called Chaney “the premier character actor of the screen today” and compared the role of Erik the Phantom to Chaney’s role in Hunchback, noting that “Chaney will have an opportunity to display his art to an even greater degree than he did in ‘The Hunchback.’”¹²5 Like Barrymore before him, Chaney was portrayed not merely as an actor but as an artist whose mastery of his body provided a key element in the cinematic experience. The success of Hunchback led Universal to recognize how bankable Chaney was as a star—and a very particular kind of star at that. Chaney was promoted as a soft-spoken man but one with the uncanny ability to transform his body into grim beings in an almost supernatural way. As part of promoting both Hunchback and Phantom, Universal pushed out several biographical pieces about Chaney, and most highlighted the dichotomy between the quiet, private Chaney and the grim screen personas he adopted. A 1923 piece by Myrtle Gebhart titled “Would You 139

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FIGUR E 11. The Phantom (Lon Chaney) menaces Christine (Mary Philbin) in his shadowy dungeon lair in Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Photo: British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, UK.

Know Lon Chaney?” developed an underlying narrative of quiet suffering around Chaney: “Not handsome, of a somewhat somber nature, his face is stern even in repose, and his words carry conviction because of their absolute lack of affectation, because of the dominant strain that underlies them. A strain almost of savagery, certainly of rebuke, against a world that is only now, in early middle age, beginning to treat him well.”¹²6 Gebhart focused on Chaney’s early days as a dancer, where his true artistic talents were hidden by the cheap theatrics of musical comedy: “Can you imagine the hideous mask of those days—the soul with its dominant strain of somberness, longing to express the stark things its young eyes had looked upon, tripping the light fantastic in cheap tinkle little plays.”¹²7 A similar biographical piece in support of Phantom appeared in 1925. Written by Doris Denbo, this piece focused less on Chaney’s inner life and more on his artistic ability to transform his body to suit the role. In Denbo’s assessment, Chaney was a true phantom, a body created entirely for the cinema: “He has never allowed the world to see him as the 140

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man. He is ever the intangible spirit moving across the silver sheet in the form of a monstrosity, either morally or physically deformed.”¹²8 In her thorough analysis of Chaney’s on-screen personas, Gaylyn Studlar contrasts Chaney with other prominent male stars, such as Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolph Valentino. Unlike those of his contemporaries, Chaney’s performances, in Studlar’s analysis, represented not the celebration of American masculinity but its failure: “masculinity allowed to be failed and freakish.” Studlar suggests that Chaney’s monstrous deformities may have drawn their appeal partly from the broader trauma of World War I and “its horrific demonstration of the vulnerability of the male body.”¹²9 The emphasis on Chaney in the promotions for Hunchback and Phantom was, of course, not unique. The period of the late 1910s and early 1920s saw the rise of a system through which studios generated substantial amounts of information about their stars in an effort to create an audience willing to spend money to see their latest performances. Often, as Richard deCordova notes, the creation of stars emphasized the development of a personality attributed to the actors themselves outside of their motion picture performances, and it was this perceived personality that would fold back into the cinematic performance. What audiences learned about Mary Pickford’s personal life, for example, became a frame through which her performance on the screen was understood. As deCordova puts it, “The player’s identity entered into the process of the film’s production of meaning.”¹³0 In this way, the biographical publicity materials helped to create a sense not of an individual performance but of a category of films tied to the stars rather than genre. Biographical promotions touted not a single film but all the films associated with a particular star. The promotional material for Chaney differed from that for his contemporaries in its emphasis on the incongruency between his on-screen and offscreen personas. Although writers may note a certain “strain almost of savagery” in the offscreen Chaney, they were more likely to emphasize the fantastic nature of his on-screen bodily performances. In this way, the construction of Chaney as a cinematic phantom crafted a unique version of the star, one that would be pursued even more fantastically in the 1930s with the promotion of Bela Lugosi. The emphasis on Chaney’s bodily performances helped to escalate the level of gruesomeness in American cinema. It is worth observing two other aspects of the rhetoric surrounding Chaney’s body. First, as horrific and weird as his performances were, his characters were always framed within a broader American realism. Of all the fantastic and 141

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gruesome characters Chaney portrayed on the screen, none were supernatural. Both Quasimodo and Erik were merely deformed and disfigured humans. In addition to the natural causes affecting Chaney’s deformed characters, much of the Chaney publicity focused on his ability to make those deformities appear real. On Chaney’s star turn as the legless Blizzard in The Penalty, Gebhart reported: “His artistry in that role is best proved by the fact that he still receives letters from old friends expressing their sorrow that his legs were cut off, and when did the accident happen.”¹³¹ Within this frame, Chaney’s bodily artistry was tied directly to the art of cinema. When Denbo observed to Chaney that he was, in fact, merely a cinematic phantom, Chaney agreed and noted: “There is so much more real art to the screen, to my mind. . . . You must give every ounce of yourself to increase the illusion. Every thought, every emotion, must be given through the expressions of the eyes, hands, and face—it must come from the inside out—or the public is going to see you’re faking.”¹³² Chaney’s performances were rarely perceived as inauthentic, and his turns as Quasimodo and Erik the Phantom were particularly well received. In both instances, it was Chaney’s performance that became the central horrific element. Hunchback, which in many ways is not a traditional horror or Gothic story, was largely framed as horrific in relation to Chaney. Exhibitors Trade Review praised Chaney when noting that “the Quasimodo of Lon Chaney is a creature of horror, a weird monstrosity of ape-like ugliness, such a fantastically effective makeup as the screen has never known and in all human probability will never know again.”¹³³ In their promotion of Hunchback, Universal took care to insist, in a move similar to Edison’s with Frankenstein, that the truly horrific elements had been removed: “To-day, our tastes are different, and we would not care to have such gory stuff on our screens even if the censors would permit it. But that shouldn’t deprive us of a great story like ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ so we are to have it with some of its horrors removed.”¹³4 For some viewers, not enough of the horrors were removed. An angry person who signed a letter simply “A Hunchback of Chicago” objected to Chaney’s unrelentingly horrific portrayal of the physically deformed Quasimodo: The production is ugly, so fundamentally ugly in fact that you leave the theater feeling that your mind’s eye has registered a revolting picture you will be anxious to efface, and you almost have a bad taste in your mouth. It is indeed a feast for the mor-

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bid, without a single happy note thru-out. Chaney’s inspiration for his part as the hunchback must have been a nightmare he had, and I’m sure Hugo would never recognize this movie Quasimodo, this abortion, as being a child of his brain.¹³5

Promotion for Phantom embraced the frightening nature of the film more fully. The description of the film featured in Pictures and Picturegoer focused on the “sinister figure of ‘Erik’ [of whom] none can think without feeling a horror difficult to suppress.” The reviewer praised Chaney: “Never has he succeeded in making himself look quite so horrible as he does with this particular make-up.”¹³6 Promotional activities encouraged this focus on the horrific figure of the Phantom with stunts, including “a thirty foot figure of the Phantom, made from Phantom Red china silk” floated up into the air by a balloon and “a Phantom of the Opera masquerade ball on Halloween Night with costume prizes and special prizes for the best Phantom make-up.”¹³7 Universal fed into this framing of the film, promoting its suggestion of the horrific. In a Universal Weekly promotional article, director Rupert Julian is quoted: “The story itself is in spots one of horror. . . . And of course we cannot show, but only suggest, anything horrible or morbid.  .  .  . Everything will be suggested, where it is too strong to be shown, by shadows and shades; by weird apparitions made through scientific direction of light.”¹³8 The suggestion of horrors in Phantom was evidently successful. Photoplay named Phantom one of the six best pictures of the month and explained that “there is not a ray of sunlight, a spark of tender passion, or a real vivid comedy relief in the whole production, and yet, the atmosphere of mystery, the tense coil of suspense, the morbid quality of the story, the lavishness of the whole production is such that we pronounce it excellent screen entertainment.” The reviewer went on to note: “Rupert Julian has carefully avoided extremeness in his depiction of horror, and for this deserves great credit.”¹³9 However, not all viewers were as positively disposed to the suggestion of the horrific. Variety savaged the film, proclaiming that “Universal has turned out another horror. This newest of U specials is probably the greatest inducement to nightmare that has yet to be screened.” The reviewer concluded: “It’s impossible to believe there are a majority of picturegoers who prefer this revolting sort of a tale on the screen.”¹40 At least some theater owners backed up this prediction. W. E. Fields, proprietor of the Rylander Theatre in Americus, Georgia, complained that most of his fe-

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male patrons “came out shivering the first night and very few ever came back. Not a woman on its third night’s run. Horrible make [sic] of Lon Chaney almost drove them out of town.”¹4¹ In spite of mixed reviews, Phantom was a financial success for Universal and would have an enormous influence on the horrific films that followed. Following the pattern of most of the films discussed in this chapter, Phantom escalated its focus on the morbid and gruesome under the covering rhetoric of literary and cinematic artistry. Moreover, although Phantom remained within the broader parameters of the American uncanny, it also incorporated other important aspects of suspense and shock. The rhetorical frame of the American uncanny debunked notions of the supernatural through a framework of incredulous realism (see chapter 3). Real Americans were not fooled by the appearance of the supernatural or marvelous but instead saw immediately through such illusions and hoaxes. Phantom, as with the other American films discussed here, maintained this broader framework. The Phantom, like the Hunchback, was not a creature of the supernatural but was instead a normal, though disfigured, man. Some of the American films discussed in this chapter did move beyond the purely realistic, but in those films (especially Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) the narratives were framed in relation to science, especially science gone too far.¹4² That these films could push the boundaries of American realism and propriety as far as they did was due, at least in part, to their literary pedigrees. One final element becomes central as we move into the next chapter: these films’ focus on a shocking moment of transformation or revelation. The emergence of the creature from the cauldron in Frankenstein was clearly the centerpiece of both the film and its promotion. In the various adaptations of Hyde, the transformation from the genteel Doctor Jekyll to the horrific Mister Hyde becomes the focus of the viewer in terms of plot as well as the actor’s ability to effectively make the transformation believable. In Phantom, the moment of revelation is even more crucial. It is, arguably, the sequence the audience most anticipates: the revelation of Chaney’s latest grotesquery, and the sequence in that moment seems designed to maximize the shocking pleasure. Burning with curiosity about her mysterious benefactor, Christine (Mary Philbin) moves slowly toward the Phantom as he plays his organ. She hesitates but then moves to untie the mask that has hidden his much-anticipated visage from her and from us. Then, in one rapid movement, Christine removes the mask, and it is we, the audience, who first see the Phantom’s

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horrific face. In an important shot, the Phantom’s disfigured face looms in the foreground as Christine retreats into the background.¹4³ As the Phantom turns we see our horrified reaction mirrored by Christine, who falls backward in fright, her backward movement intercut with the grim image of the Phantom pointing his accusing finger at her. As he moves forward, his disfigured face looms larger and larger on the screen. The camera angle is low, seeing from Christine’s point of view as she/we view the menacing face of the horrific Phantom. Although the shot mirrors Christine’s point of view, it also recalls horrific films from the earlier part of the century—the looming devil’s head that menaced the travelers in Chomón’s The Haunted House (1908) or the monstrous visage that appeared at the end of Booth’s Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901). With this scene, Universal pushed the boundaries of the American aesthetic of horrific elements. Ultimately, Phantom did not cross the boundaries of the American uncanny—all the rumors of his supernatural origins were, after all, explained away through the use of hidden tunnels and trapdoors. And the heroic male leads, Raoul and the detective Ledoux, saw through the superstition to save Christine from the very human Erik. But Phantom did push the affective dimensions of the way American films depicted the horrific. Whereas most of the earlier films often revealed the “trick” of the apparently supernatural to audiences in the first moments, Phantom built the tension around the moment of revelation. And even more so than in Edison’s Frankenstein or the various adaptations of Hyde, that moment of revelation was built to be not only spectacular but also shocking. The implicit contract with American audiences—that the viewing ethic of incredulity would be rewarded by seeing the folly of others— was, if not quite broken, at least slightly bent. The viewing pleasure of Phantom was not the revelation of folly on the part of the credulous but rather the horror we feel at the shocking moment of revelation. It seems likely that it was this moment that led frightened audience members to leave the Rylander Theatre in Americus, Georgia. As W. F. Bushby wrote in a telegram to Carl Laemmle on April 29, 1925: “One gentlemen busily masticating gum—they are everywhere you know, a few seats remove from me, stopped with a vengeance upon seeing Lon Chaney tear off that mask. I noticed from this time on an intense tension pervaded the audience and there was no ‘let-up’ until the end.”¹44 In many ways, Phantom represents a culmination of the literary horrors discussed throughout this chapter. Although the first of the proper

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horror films would also rely upon literary precursors—Stoker, Shelley, Stevenson, Wells, and others—the films discussed in this chapter represented an important escalation of shock and gruesomeness for American filmmakers and audiences that would help set the stage for the emergence of the genre.

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CH A P T ER F I V E

Mysteries in Old Dark Houses

A murder a minute is the goal of the ghoulish shriekies. DEBOR A H DON NELL , “GOR IF YING THE A M ER ICAN SCR EEN,” MOTION PICT UR E CL ASSIC, DECEM BER 1928

T

HE DESIR E FOR ESCAPIST FANTASIES CONTINUED into the second half of the 1920s as American audiences called out for more excitement and more thrills. To satisfy this demand, American studios had, almost since their inception, borrowed from the theatrical tradition of melodrama. By the 1920s the melodrama was a popular and remarkably broad film genre, one that often encompassed films utilizing horrific elements. Interestingly, this was not always considered the case. In a 1907 letter to the Chicago Tribune from George Kleine, head of the influential early film producer Kleine Optical Company, Kleine singles out the melodrama for particular criticism. In his view of the early emergence of film genres, he recognized six types: scenic, historical, dramatic, comedy, mystic, and religious. Quite separate from these respectable genres were films that “are most open to criticism on account of their sensationalism,” films that Kleine noted were “on par with melodrama ordinarily shown in the cheaper class of the regular theaters.” Differentiated from the kinds of films drawn from low-class, stage-based melodramas were other genres, including “the mystic films [which are] trick pictures wholly innocent in their nature.”¹ By the 1920s, the distinction between the mysterious and horrific, on one hand, and the sensational and melodramatic, on the other, was not so clear. The 1920 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example, had 147

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been advertised as “the world’s greatest melodramatic romance,” and an early screening report for Universal’s 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera described the story as “Great Melodrama.”² The popularity of melodrama and its influence on early American film were so pervasive, Linda Williams has argued, that it served not as a genre but as a “fundamental mode of popular American moving pictures.” For Williams, the core of the melodramatic mode is one of encouraging “pathos for protagonists beset by forces more powerful than they and who are perceived as victims.”³ This broad orientation had certainly played a role in films featuring horrific elements, especially in relation to the audience’s sympathies for female victims. But in addition to constituting a broader cultural orientation, melodrama constituted a particular historical class of films. In his insightful analysis of the emergence of melodrama within American film and theater, Ben Singer urges people to think of melodrama as “‘a cluster concept,’ that is, to view melodrama as a term whose meaning varies from case to case in relation to different configurations of a range of basic features.”4 For Singer, the three core features of melodrama are: the strong representation of pathos; “heightened states of emotive urgency, tension, and tribulation”; and sensationalism, which emphasizes “action, violence, thrills, awesome sights, and spectacles of physical peril.”5 Singer’s broad features describe a wide range of films but certainly encompass many films utilizing horrific elements. Indeed, in a 1919 dissertation Singer examines, the author describes some of the characteristics of melodrama during the period as including “terror, horror; illogical endings; supernatural elements.”6 In this chapter, I explore the terrifying and horrific aspects of American films in the second half of the 1920s. During this period, the connection between the horrific and melodrama emerged within a particular subgenre of film often referred to as “mystery thrillers.” These films were typically set in old dark houses, and this setting became so connected with them that later film scholars would refer to these films as part of the “old dark house” genre.7 The genre, generally associated with Paul Leni’s 1927 The Cat and the Canary, crafted a unique version of melodrama and tried to escalate the gruesome shocks of earlier films with a primary focus on eliciting a bodily response from the audience, often in the form of shivers or shrieks. Indeed, mystery thrillers constituted an almost perfect example of what Linda Williams calls the “body genres.” In Williams’s conception, body genres are those that focus on the body—often in spectacular peril, pain, or pleasure. As she puts it, “The body of the spectator 148

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is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen.”8 This bodily connection can be seen in films discussed in earlier chapters (for example, the way the audience’s reaction is likely to parallel Christine’s horrified response to the revelation of the Phantom’s disfigured face). In this chapter, I focus not only on the mystery thrillers’ emphasis on the audience’s bodily reactions but also on the particular formula they developed to elicit these reactions. Although not violating the strictures of what I have called the “American uncanny,” with its insistence on a rational explanation for the seemingly horrific and marvelous, the mystery thrillers emphasized the moment of uncertainty prior to the explanation. The old dark houses were almost always rumored to be haunted; the dangerous men lurking in shadows often appeared monstrous; and the identity of those behind the creaking boards and strange goings-on remained unknown until the end. The pleasure of viewing the mystery thriller, in short, derived from the uncertainty about the nature of the strange events rather than their explanation. Returning to Todorov’s explanation of the uncanny (chapter 3), the mystery thrillers could be characterized as “fantastic-uncanny.” As noted, films such as The Haunted Rocker (1912) or The Haunted House (1913) had been presented as primarily uncanny, for the audience was already in on the trick (a string attached to the haunted rocking chair, a child’s tantrum that produced strange noises). By the second half of the 1920s, the emphasis had shifted away from the purely uncanny toward a more prolonged period of uncertainty, where the audience is left guessing as to the origins of the apparently fantastic occurrences depicted on the screen. Todorov describes this moment of uncertainty as the fantastic, a “hesitation” wherein the viewer or reader struggles to determine whether we have correctly perceived events (here gesturing back to Jentsch’s sense of the uncanny as misperception) and whether the events can be explained by rational means. For Todorov, the fantastic exists as a “frontier between two adjacent realms.” On one side lies the uncanny, where the rules of our rational world continue and the apparently marvelous is explained away; on the other is the realm of the marvelous, in which our understanding of the rational world must change to accommodate the existence of the marvelous thing we have perceived.9 The mystery thrillers discussed crafted what might be termed the “melodramatic-fantastic,” a kind of melodrama that evoked emotional and bodily reactions from audiences in part by their creation of fantastic situations. Apparently marvelous horrific elements were central 149

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to these films and to their explicit aim to provoke chills, thrills, and shrieks. In what follows, I trace the development of the melodramaticfantastic in the popular mystery thrillers of the late 1920s, paying particular attention to how the horrific became connected to the mysterious. I then examine the ways in which comedic elements were employed within the films to contain the bodily reactions to the horrific, before turning to the ways that the introduction of synchronous sound accentuated the effects of the melodramatic-fantastic.

“Can you keep a secret?” Abel Gance’s 1924 short film Help! (also known as Au Secours!) is an instructive precursor to the mystery thrillers that would come to prominence just a few years later. In the film, Max, played by Max Linder, is a bon vivant who leaves his charming wife one evening to go to his club. At the club, we learn that an older member, Count Maulette, owns a haunted castle and has bet a thousand francs that no man can last an hour within the haunted space. Max accepts the challenge. Max’s bravery is already evident to us. As he is traveling to the club, we see Max defeat a knife-wielding mugger, and he maintains some of this bravado through his early moments in the castle. However, the increasingly bizarre series of events, which includes vicious animals, a wax mannequin that comes to life, and a towering skeleton, soon frays his nerves. As he deliberates pushing the “help” button that will bring assistance (but also cause him to lose the bet), Max receives a call from his wife. She reports that a strange, disfigured intruder is looming over her. Fearing for his own life and the safety of his wife, Max pushes the panic button even though there are only two minutes left in his bet. With the button pushed, all is revealed: the monstrous figure in his wife’s bedroom was merely Count Maulette, and all the strange, ghostlike characters in the castle were theatrical performers. As Max’s wife laughs at the joke, Count Maulette explains that the castle’s upkeep requires him to play his little trick on some unsuspecting individual to raise sufficient funds. Count Maulette insists on being paid immediately: “I have to pay all those monsters right away. It’s a pretty expensive joke but it pays the bills.” Although largely whimsical in its approach, Gance’s film contains most of the elements that would be featured in the mystery thrillers of the late 1920s. The plot was often motivated by money—in Help! it was a bet—but in later films this often took the form of stolen money or a 150

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lucrative inheritance. And the proceedings usually entailed a haunted house (or castle), a masked villain, a woman in distress, and a man who must overcome some personal fault in order to rescue her and resolve the plot. In Roland West’s The Bat (1926), for example, the motivating factor is money stolen from a bank, the haunted house is a Long Island estate where the stolen money is hidden, and the primary antagonist is a costumed “superhuman crook who terrorizes numerous victims.”¹0 In Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary (1927), often cited as the key film of this subgenre, the reading of a will draws relatives to a haunted house, where one relative tries to drive the heiress to the fortune mad in order to steal her inheritance. Similarly, in Benjamin Christensen’s The Haunted House (1928), the motivating factor is again the will of an elderly man who does not trust his relatives and entices them to a haunted house to test their trustworthiness. The setting for Paul Leni’s 1929 The Last Warning is a supposedly haunted theater, and the villain behind the mysterious machinations is a theater producer who wants the upcoming show to fail so he can swindle investors out of their funds. The period between 1925 and 1930 saw dozens of similarly themed films, and most of them easily fit within the concept of melodrama. They focus on innocent victims, often young women, who are terrorized by some mysterious figure (or figures). They portray highly emotional situations, with numerous close-ups of terrified individuals as they scream. And, importantly, these films seek to elicit a bodily reaction from the audiences. In addition to these filmic qualities, critics and pundits of the period often labeled these films “melodramas.” Photoplay described The Cat and the Canary as “a corking melodrama,” and Motion Picture News described it as a “mysterious melodrama.”¹¹ Joe Brandt, president of Columbia Pictures, observed that the public’s demand for action and thrills was what “paves the way for melodramas of ‘The Bat’ and ‘The Gorilla’ order.”¹² What made these and dozens of similar films different from other melodramas was their use of mystery as the primary emotional frame. Some sense of mystery, of course, had been a feature of earlier films utilizing horrific elements; in the adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde much of the plot was motivated by the search for the mysterious figure of Hyde. Similarly, in Phantom, the plot was in part motivated by the search for the mysterious masked figure of Erik. Even Gance’s 1924 Help!, which contains many of the elements of the mystery thriller, hinged on the question of the nature of the marvelous things happening to Max. Perhaps the most immediate precursor to the mystery thrillers was Roland West’s 1925 film The Monster, starring Lon Chaney. The film, 151

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described as a “mystery play” by the Telegram and Mail, focuses on an amateur detective, played with comic precision by Johnny Arthur, who seeks respect and the hand of his beloved by searching for missing persons.¹³ The cause of the disappearances turns out to be a mad surgeon, played by Chaney, who plans to use his victims as experiments for transplanting souls. The film is replete with, as the New York Times described it, “ghostly hands that stretch forth menacingly, sliding panels through which queer faces appear, and skeletons in closets,” but these mysterious goings-on are primarily designed to allow our amateur detective to ply his trade. The crucial point that differentiates these precursors from the mystery thrillers is that the audience can only view the mystery, not participate in it. The audience for The Monster could have no way of knowing that Dr. Ziska (Chaney’s character) is a former mental patient performing dangerous experiments, and so the mystery is for our observation, not our engagement. The potential pleasure in the audience’s participation in the mystery was signaled by the opening intertitle for Roland West’s The Bat: “Can you keep a secret? Don’t reveal the identity of ‘The Bat.’ Future audiences will fully enjoy this mystery play if left to find out for themselves.” For many of the mystery thrillers that would follow, the primary engagement the audience had with the film was through its participation in puzzling over the narrative’s mystery. The Bat was based on a successful play whose “success on the stage ushered in an era of ‘thrill plays’ in the America theatre.”¹4 The Bat’s success, in turn, paved the way for other adaptations, and most of these also sought to engage the audience in the unfolding mystery. In the years following World War I, Americans were particularly attuned to pursuing mysterious figures lurking within their midst. The first Red Scare—a national panic about the potential encroachment of bolshevism and anarchism into American politics and culture—had been foreshadowed by the assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901. By the end of World War I, anxieties over the infiltration of Bolsheviks and anarchists into various segments of American society—especially labor unions and nascent African American civil rights groups—had become part of the national discourse. Newspapers and government officials, including a young J. Edgar Hoover, propagated the sense that Bolsheviks were every where, lurking inside American institutions, and that they must be detected and rooted out.¹5 A 1919 editorial in the Saturday Evening Post likened the public hysteria over bolshevism to other historical crazes, writing: “History will see our present state of mind as one with 152

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that preceding the burning of witches.” The Saturday Evening Post urged the nation to maintain a kind of pragmatic vigilance, arguing that “the need of the country is not more idealism, but more pragmatism.”¹6 In their own way, the mystery thrillers that appeared in the years immediately following the first Red Scare illustrated the importance of maintaining a skeptical eye toward even the most perplexing of mysterious conspiracies. Effective mystery thrillers were difficult to produce. As one reviewer noted, “Screen mystery plays never have been successful.” For this critic, the adaptation of mystery from stage to screen faced two substantial difficulties. First, “picturegoers are such an independentminded lot that they refuse to be influenced by time schedule and therefore drop in on their film entertainment at any hour they wish,” sometimes “seeing the end before the beginning,” at which point “the all important quality of suspense has been destroyed.” Second, the typical setting for mystery plays was a single old house, which forced “the picture into the mold of pictorial monotony.”¹7 Similarly, Mourdaunt Hall, writing in the New York Times, criticized the typically comedic approach to mysteries as producing nonsense. Hall wrote: “Invariably the filming of a mystery story results in little more than slapstick comedy, with the finger of suspicion being pointed at one character after another. The denouement is about as surprising as the discovery that butter melts in an oven. The whole affair is merely a dodge to force the spectator to make a silent guess as to who the perpetrator of the weird crime will turn out to be.”¹8 For both these critics, Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary successfully overcame these obstacles, and it was the success of this film that seemed to solidify the popularity of the mystery thriller. The critic who proclaimed that screen mystery plays had never been successful said of The Cat: “Right here and now I am willing to take back all I ever said about the mystery plays not belonging in the movies—for in this new cinema edition of ‘The Cat and the Canary’ Paul Leni has contrived to make your spine chill and your flesh creep and your hair curl to as great a degree as they ever did in the stage version.”¹9 Similarly, Hall praised The Cat for creating “genuine suspense” and suggested that “this is a film which ought to be exhibited before many other directors to show them how a story should be told.”²0 Before turning to some of the elements of Leni’s filmmaking style and the ways it helped to create expectations for future mystery thrillers, it is worth pausing to note the importance of mystery as the frame for horrific elements in the films of this period. Earlier films had certainly employed many of the motifs discussed above. Several of the 153

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films discussed in chapter 2 depicted hoaxes employing horrific elements, also often aimed toward some monetary gains, such as The Ghost of a Bargain (1912) and A Deal in Real Estate (1914). The mystery thrillers of the late 1920s differed by drawing the reader into the mystery as a puzzle that might be solved rather than a comic situation to be observed. The success of the mystery thrillers as a form of entertainment seemed in ways to rest upon their capacity to engage the audience with a puzzle that was neither too easily discerned nor too inexplicable. Christensen’s The House of Horror was criticized for being too predictable by Harrison’s Reports, which noted that it “does not hold the interest too much because the spectator suspects the ending almost from the beginning.”²¹ Interestingly, the film was also criticized for being too inexplicable in the resolution of its mystery by Photoplay, which observed: “One is not supposed to tell the denouement of a mystery. One can’t, for the climax is as mysterious as ‘the plot.’”²² Films that maintained strong, engaging mystery such as The Cat were praised. T. O. Service declared Lionel Barrymore’s 1929 The Unholy Night to be “the best mystery picture I have ever seen,” in large part because “it is a more complex mystery than most of them.”²³ Similarly, a Kansas City theater owner called Leni’s The Last Warning “the best one of the mystery pictures to date” because “the identity of the ghost absolutely cannot be guessed by the audience.”²4 Other theaters sought to exploit the mysterious ending of Last Warning by providing a jury ballot to audience members and then turning on the lights just before the film’s conclusion to see who picked the right suspect. Audience members guessing correctly received prizes. As Film Daily reported, “The stunt has proved inexpensive as well as exciting because very few patrons light on the real murderer.”²5 Cultivating this sense of mystery was an important part of promoting these films. Benjamin Christensen reportedly refused to reveal the identity of the actor playing Satan in his 1930 film Seven Footprints to Satan in order to build the sense of mystery around the film.²6 The emphasis on the mystery, or more accurately the audience’s participation in the puzzle presented by the mystery, locates these films within Todorov’s notion of the fantastic-uncanny. Although these films never ruptured the frame of the American uncanny in the sense that the apparently supernatural was always explained away in the end, the dismissal of the apparently marvelous was accomplished only at the end. And though American films remained largely bound by the strictures of realism and the insistence on incredulity and a skeptical viewing position, the emphasis on suspense seemed to open the door for the 154

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kinds of pleasure associated with credulity toward the marvelous. For many twentieth-century literary critics, as Caroline Levine notes, the literature of “suspense produces credulity and obedience.”²7 Interestingly, Levine argues against these claims and suggests that suspenseful literature asks the reader to suspend judgment and to assume a more critical attitude. This invitation to a critical suspension of judgment fits well with my sense that the mystery thrillers created moments of pause within the dominant frame of the American uncanny. The pleasure derived from being suspended in this fantastic uncertainty also gestures backward to the deeper roots of horrific elements within Gothic literature. Reading great Gothic literature entails engaging the story as a puzzle, for both reader and protagonist often struggle to discern what is real and what is illusory. As Charlene Bunnell notes, “An audience cannot merely read the Gothic story; they must experience it. Their own sensibilities must be aroused, their values re-evaluated, and their own social codes questioned.”²8 Gesturing (cautiously) forward into the horror genre that would emerge just a few years after these films gained prominence, it is interesting that Noël Carroll locates the pleasure of viewing a horror film within the puzzle-solving practice the audience is called on to engage.²9 For film, the creation of mysterious puzzles relied largely on the visual. For early mystery thrillers, the primary visual blueprint came not from Universal’s horror spectaculars but from Robert Wiene’s Caligari. The German filmmaker Paul Leni was generally credited as the person who successfully bridged the jarring and controversial German Expressionism with popular American filmmaking.³0 Motion Picture News credited Leni with “combining American audience appeal with the best and most suitable elements in European technique.”³¹ As with the more positive reviews of Caligari, Leni’s style was attributed to his reputation as a painter. Paul Gulick, writing in Amateur Movie Makers, observed that Leni’s “reputation in Berlin is rather that of an impressionistic painter.” Interestingly, even while crediting Leni’s artistic sensibilities as helping to create “a mystery picture which gives every promise of outrivaling its stage prototype,” Gulick insisted that the trick techniques used in his films had originated within American filmmaking. Gulick contended that the uses of strange camera angles, shadows, and carefully designed sets were of American origin, but “now it comes back to us as a new dramatic motif and the foreign cameraman, the foreign director are receiving a credit . . . to the detriment of the pioneers who actually started this cycle in the United States.”³² What155

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ever the real origin of such techniques, Leni was credited with utilizing them to not only craft a successful film but also lay the visual foundation for the mystery thrillers. Lotte Eisner argues that Leni was able to take the atmospheric tones of Caligari’s “‘decorative’ Expressionism” and make the sets, shadows, and camera angles an integral part of the unfolding action.³³ Commentators of the time agreed. William A. Johnston credited Leni with introducing a kind of “screen psychology” through which Leni “actually makes furniture talk; a long deserted hallways tells a story; he calls attention to a door by making it oversize and gets attention without taking it from the action in the foreground.”³4 Gulick credited this miseen-scène to Leni’s use of shadows and of Gothic furnishings. Leni’s use of shadow allowed him to utilize realistic sets—unlike the surreal sets used in films such as Caligari—and yet, by casting shadows at odd angles, retain a surreal sense of foreboding. Additionally, the use of Gothic-style architecture and furnishings lent “a strangely sinister atmosphere to the backgrounds.”³5 By combining the mise-en-scène of Expressionistic aesthetic, Gothic sets, and American melodramatic action, Leni was able to take the elements from earlier films and craft a blueprint for the mystery thriller. Of the unique blending of Leni’s visual style and the mystery stage play, Johnston observed that “this mystery play was a wise selection for this master of suggestive effects.”³6 Leni’s visual style in The Cat was highly influential on most of the mystery thrillers during this period. In addition to Leni’s other films—such as The Last Warning, which featured a fascinating sequence in which the camera swings on a rope from one side of the theater to the other during the fi lm’s climactic chase scene— the use of strange angles and Gothic sets would become standard practice for films such as Christensen’s The Haunted House and Tod Browning’s London after Midnight (1927). In The Haunted House, Christensen crafted unique camera angles by reportedly “placing his camera almost on the floor” in order to create “an eerie quality to his characters.”³7 For Mourdant Hall, Christensen’s camerawork was “more than slightly reminiscent of Mr. Leni’s work in ‘The Cat and the Canary.’”³8 Similarly, Browning’s London was described as a “modern mystery of the scientific detective” that also employed “fantastic settings and disguises and strange ghostly illusions.”³9 The element of mystery was, not surprisingly, crucial to the mystery thriller, but so was the thrill, and for many of these films the most shocking thrills were provided by the apparently monstrous and supernatural. In this way, the mystery thrillers served to engage their audi156

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ences on at least two levels of the filmic puzzle. At one level, in relation to the mystery, there was the question of who committed the crime and/or who was the mastermind behind the strange occurrences. At another level, the audience was presented with the uncanny-fantastic— investigating the supposedly haunted house, the seeming appearance of ghosts and monsters, people disappearing, and so on. It was the combination of these two—the criminal mystery within the realm of the natural, and the mystery of the possibility of another, supernatural realm—that caused audiences to happily pay money to shriek and scream at the screen.

“Emitting shrieks of blood-curdling intensity relieved by gales of laughter” The introduction of horrific elements into the mystery thrillers differentiated them from other forms of melodrama in which equally perilous and emotional situations were instigated through more natural means such as romantic rivalry or treacherous villainy. The mystery thriller operated along the lines of what I have labeled the “melodramatic-fantastic.” In this mode, audiences were incited to have a bodily experience of thrills and chills brought on in part by the introduction of seemingly marvelous elements. Even though some of the narrative pleasure was derived from the eventual resolution of this fantastic suspension—usually when the real villain was unmasked and the machinations of the horrific were revealed as tricks—much of the experience of the film was predicated on the fear evoked by the appearance of the horrific. The importance of horrific elements to the mystery thriller was partly evident in the films’ titles. Audience members who entered a theater advertising The Monster (1925) or The Terror (1928) or The House of Horror (1929) or Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) would have likely expected to see horrific elements (and might have been disappointed by their absence). But audiences were not disappointed, for this cluster of films encompassed a wide range of horrific elements, including ghosts, monsters, masked killers, mad creatures (often apes or gorillas), haunted houses, and séances. A 1927 Picture Play Magazine pictorial noted the sudden popularity of ghosts in a feature titled “When Ghosts Go Visiting,” noting “whether you believe in spooks or not, they make their appearance on the screen with all the uncanny effects that the camera men can devise.” The piece featured Finger Prints (a Louise Fazenda ve157

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hicle), the melodrama The Return of Peter Grimm (which featured a real, though not terrifying, ghost), and The Cat and the Canary (credited with having “quite the most horrific of all the ghosts”).40 The appearance of ghosts was typical of the mystery thrillers of this era. Supposed hauntings featured in The Bat, The Cat and the Canary, The Haunted House, The Terror, Something Always Happens (1928), The Unholy Night, The Last Warning, and The House of Horror. Séances played a central role in Tod Browning’s The Mystic (1925) and his The 13th Chair (1929). Although the appearance of horrific elements within these films seems well established, more relevant to this discussion is the question of whether such elements would have elicited fear. And another question—to push the notion of the melodramatic-fantastic even further—is whether such elements produced the kind of bodily fear reaction that, to echo Linda Williams, would have mirrored the bodily reaction of the characters on the screen. Above, I broached this issue by noting the cinematic techniques employed by Leni and others to craft an eerie and nightmarish visual quality for their films. Another form of evidence that may support my thesis is the reported reactions to these films, which I discuss below. As early as The Monster, an early version of the mystery thriller, there was a sense that horrific elements provoked a particularly embodied fear reaction. The New York American reported, “‘The Monster’ is in a class by itself when it comes to furnishing cold shivers and nervous chills.”4¹ Similarly, Photoplay described the viewer’s reactions to The Bat: “Your spine quivers and your hair stiffens every moment.”4² Theaters screening The Gorilla (1927) were promised that “a good amount of shivers should race up and down the spines of the spectators.”4³ The notion that a moving picture could provoke chills was, of course, not new. As early as 1905, Selig’s The Hold-up of the Leadville Stage had been promoted as “the picture that chills the blood.”44 But never before had there been such emphasis in American filmmaking on creating a fear reaction in the audience. The bodily reaction to The Cat and Canary was reportedly so great as to be miraculous. A reader wrote Photoplay with a story of taking a partially paralyzed youngster to the film: “As the film unreeled, our little nephew became more tense every moment. Imagine our surprise when, during one of the most exciting scenes, he jumped to his feet.”45 Reactions to these films were not isolated to individual feelings of dread but rather extended throughout the theater as fear became part of a communal bodily reaction. The New York Daily News suggested that viewers of The Bat would “be tempted to clutch the fellow in the 158

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next seat and scream.”46 Similarly, the Exhibitor’s Herald-World reported that The Last Warning was “a real thriller and kept most of the crowd in a shaky uproar.”47 This sense that an audience would engage bodily with the filmic attraction was part of the overarching genre of the melodrama, but where other forms of the genre focused on the thrills of adventure and near disaster, mystery thrillers aimed for a bodily sensation of chills and screams. The emphasis on creating fear within these films and then marketing this fear constituted a unique moment in the history of American film. Although many previous films had promoted their depictions of horrific elements, sometimes even promoting such elements as frightening, mystery thrillers were the first to make fear one of the primary objectives. This emphasis on fear was noted by some commentators at the time. Donald Beaton, a youth reviewer for The Film Spectator, observed, “The desire to be frightened into a state of collapse is a peculiar trait of human nature, but it is common to most of us.” For Beaton, The Haunted House satisfied this desire, for it was “sufficiently bloodchilling” and “the best to burst forth in all its horror.”48 A similar point was made by a reviewer of Seven Footprints to Satan, who identified the cause of the current interest in terror as an offshoot of modern life: “But our moderns, sophisticated though they pretend to be, love this sort of thing. They enjoy being chilled and thrilled—as witness the success of many mystery plays, pictures and books.”49 There were undoubtedly numerous cultural conditions that led to the surge in interest in mysteries and gruesome stories during the late 1920s. The horrors of World War I and the influenza pandemic undoubtedly had a tremendous psychic effect upon the nation and also led to the renewed interest in spiritualism. Although America did not see the same level of interest in spiritualism that arose in Great Britain and Europe, there was sufficient interest in mediums and séances to cause Harry Houdini to wage a highly public campaign against these practices. In his 1924 book A Magician among the Spirits, Houdini declared his concern as he “watched this great wave of Spiritualism sweep the world in recent months and realized that it has taken such a hold on persons of a neurotic temperament, especially those suffering from bereavement.”50 Cathy Gutierrez suggests that although post–World War  I spiritualism did not rise to the same level of serious religious or scientific consideration as it had during the nineteenth century, it did seem to function as a kind of “amateur form of grief counseling.”5¹ It seems plausible that the horrific consequences of World War I had renewed the American public’s interest in the supernatural and the horrific. Nu159

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merous scholars have noted the correlation between the popularity of horror films and moments of cultural trauma (see the introduction), and the same effect may have been at work even before the horror film’s framing as a specific genre. It also seems possible, as the reviewer of Seven Footprints suggested, that the relative calm and prosperity of the post–World War I period had led audiences to seek out more and more extreme thrills, including those that were chilling. The combination of the end of the war and a period of relative prosperity—the Roaring Twenties—may have led some “moderns” to seek their thrills on the movie screen. As discussed throughout this book, the inflationary economy of cinema put some pressure on filmmakers to up the ante on thrills and shocks. Although this escalating desire for shocks and thrills was embedded in the early cinema of attractions, its logic seemed to continue throughout the history of film, pushing filmmakers toward longer films, more realistic special effects, more complicated narratives, and so on. For horrific elements, the screen adaptations of great literature during the early 1920s had taken the depiction of gruesomeness to new and more graphic levels. The stardom of Lon Chaney was largely tied to this sense of gruesomeness. What the mystery thrillers seemed to add was an emphasis not only on the graphic and gruesome but also the possibility of the supernatural—that is, an uncertainty about the stability of the narrative frame of the American uncanny. It is also notable that many mystery thrillers were set not only in the present era—unlike many of the literary epics or marvelous films of earlier eras—but also in the United States. The possibility of horror was located within the worldview of the audiences, and this location—along with the aesthetic and narrative dimensions—made the melodramatic-fantastic all the more chilling. As in the late nineteenth century, critics worried about the public’s interest in thrills and shocks. A letter writer from Biddeford Pool, Maine, complained to Motion Picture Magazine of the type of moviegoer who “sat engrossed, thrilling to each climax, glorifying in each strain of passion.” These kinds of thrilling films had the potential to “harm the ignorant, highly reactionary public.”5² A similar set of concerns was articulated by the National Motion Picture League, which formed at Columbia University in 1916 with the goal of protecting children from indecent films. In its undated “Policy and Standards,” likely formulated around 1921, the League addressed concerns over films causing excessive emotional responses.5³ Under its list of what “Films Must Be,” the League laid out criteria that seemed to speak against the mystery thrillers. In clause (c), the League objected to “tense, nerve rack160

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ing situations,” and in clause (e) it objected to depicting acts of cruelty. Clause (m) spoke most directly to the kinds of emotional reactions evoked by the mystery thrillers. Arguing that films should be “wholesome as to emotions aroused,” the League expected high-quality films to eliminate “all scenes depicting hatred, intense fear, jealousy, revenge, intrigue, unfaithfulness, indecency, envy, superstition, deceit, cruelty, irreverence, and lawlessness.”54 Filmmakers during this period seemed to acknowledge this concern over the intensity of emotional reactions, especially as to mystery thrillers. Their solution to the problem of excessive “intense fear” and “superstition” came not through limiting their depiction but through the use of comedy as a counterpoint to horror. Horrific elements had often been framed within the comedic. And “weird” elements were often put into the service of some comedic narrative, especially in films focusing on what I have called “folly of superstition.” But the late 1920s saw explicit discussions of how comedy functioned in relation to horror and of the important function of comedy as a kind of safety valve for the negative bodily reactions to the horrific. The mix of bodily reactions to mystery thrillers was observed as early as 1926 with regard to The Bat. A Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer noted, “Judging from the nervous giggles and half suppressed screams, which mingled with the moan of the organ .  .  . the audience was supremely satisfied.”55 Even more dramatically, Motion Picture News praised The Bat’s inclusion of humor, “for it slackens the nerve-strain at intervals when it threatens to produce emotional hysteria among some of the on-lookers.”56 Similarly, T. O. Service observed that the audience for a screening of The Gorilla was “screaming one moment with laughter and the next with fear.”57 And though Mourdant Hall found Christensen’s The Haunted House to be too derivative of earlier mystery pictures, he observed that “during some of the sequences the people in the theatre, principally the younger element, were not only held to silence by some of the weird happenings in the old house, but evidently they also found the antics and expressions of some of the players, especially those of Chester Conklin, quite mirthful.”58 This mixture of laughs and screams would come to be understood as a crucial element of the mystery thriller formula, and it is interesting how consistently it was articulated in relation to the need for relief from the fear created by horrific elements. Reviewing The Bat, George Pardy of Motion Picture News observed the shift from its “eerie, creepy, blood-curdling atmosphere” to “experiencing a sense of welcome relief when a thrust of slapstick comedy momentarily changes horror to 161

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humor.”59 Toledo, Ohio’s, News-Bee found The Gorilla to be a “thrilling comedy beverage with an abundant amount of thrilling mystery that had Sunday’s audience emitting shrieks of blood-curdling intensity relieved by gales of laughter.”60 And in Exhibitors Daily Review, The Terror was described as having “spooky séance scenes, trick doors and wall, screams and shrieks—all [of which] help create suspense, while plenty of humor affords relief.”6¹ Similarly, Freddie Shader noted of The Last Warning that “there are 100 thrills in the picture and still sufficient comedy relief so that the tension on the audience isn’t too great.”6² The notion of laughter as a kind of pressure valve, as John Morreall observes in his insightful Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor, has been around since at least the eighteenth century. The theory that humor’s function revolves mainly around the physical act of laughter as a kind of expulsion of nervous energy has been articulated by such thinkers as Herbert Spencer, Sigmund Freud, and John Dewey.6³ For critics and filmmakers in the 1920s, this theory seemed to be in full effect. A brief exploration of how the comic interrelated with the horrific in films may provide a richer sense of how comic relief functioned for audiences. Although each of the numerous mystery thrillers had its own mix of humor and horror, at least three archetypes seemed to develop; interestingly, all three had precursors in earlier films that engaged horrific elements. The first comic archetype in the mystery thriller was the overly superstitious servant, a gesture to the superstitious folly films a decade earlier. Louise Fazenda captured the essence of this during her performance in The Bat, in which she portrayed the superstitious maid. Fazenda’s character introduced the notion that the estate was haunted, proclaiming that “this is the happy home of the Heebee-Jeebees. Doors slam—loose feet roam around—lights go out.” Fazenda’s character also expresses her unease with the increasingly supernatural tone that her time at the estate was taking, complaining to her employer that “for twenty years I’ve stood by you through Socialism, Theosophism, and Rheumatism—but I draw the line at Spookism!” With humorous lines and physical antics, Fazenda’s character echoed the comic figures of superstitious folly, but with an important twist. In the earlier films, the audience was generally in on the supernatural hoax, and so the figure of a frightened maid was purely an object of comedic relief. In mystery thrillers such as The Bat the audience is also signaled to be afraid of the potentially supernatural, and so Fazenda’s easily spooked maid character provides not only comic relief but also a mirror through which the audience could, in a way, laugh at itself. The reviewer for The Ed162

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ucational Screen seemed to capture some sense of this mirroring effect when noting: “Miss Fazenda runs away with the picture, as the screaming maid. Her silent screams are so generous and whole-hearted and well timed, that they are almost as hair-raising as real ones.”64 The popular comic actor Chester Conklin embodied a second archetype with his bumbling detective in The Haunted House. As Film Spectator’s reviewer noted: “Every time the spookiness gets to a point that would strain stout nerves, Chester Conklin strolls into the scene, his attitude expressing his intense longing to know what the deuce is going on about him. . . . His reaction to all the weird and mysterious things to go on around him assures the picture a hilarious reception by the public.”65 The actor Charles Murray filled this role in 1927 in The Gorilla. Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World reported, “It seemed that Charles Murray’s humor was at its peak as the dumb detective,” and the New York Evening World praised the film as a “compelling mixture of mystery and comedy, one balanced against the other so expertly that spectator finds himself thrilled to marrow while at the same time he is guffawing at boob antics of dumb detective.”66 In a way, this character type represented the reversal of the incredulous American, who figured prominently in earlier films such as The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel (1913) and The Ghost Breaker (1914). The brave American who entered the haunted house with guns raised would not necessarily, at least in the mystery thriller, win the day. An interesting example of this comes in The Bat. In that film the bold though inept Detective Anderson— played with comic bluster by Eddie Gribbon—charges around much of the film’s last act with two pistols drawn, to little but comedic effect. Johnny Arthur’s 1925 portrayal of the hapless sleuth-in-training in The Monster serves as an early example of the bumbling detective. Moving Picture World praised Arthur’s performance in the film, noting that “the adventures of the mail order detective provide many genuine laughs which manage to relieve the tension of the play’s more strenuous moments.”67 Arthur’s character also embodied the third archetype of note: the frightened lover. The frightened lover was renewed by the actor Paul Jones in The Cat and the Canary, where Jones’s role as comic relief is signaled near the beginning of the film. He enters the house in a comic run after having had his tire shot out, his hat flying from his head as he races down a shadowy hallway. His attempt to tell the story of his near fatal encounter is interrupted repeatedly by other members of the cast. And the fact that he is smitten with the film’s heroine is also signaled early in the film. When the lawyer notes they must wait for Annabelle West, who will in the end be the heir, Jones leaps up with 163

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FIGUR E 12. The menacing masked figure is apprehended in Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary (1927). Photo: British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, UK.

a comic, lovelorn expression and shouts “Annabelle?” Her initial lack of romantic interest is evident as she greets him: “Why, Paul! I haven’t seen you since nurse dropped you on your head.” In spite of his bumbling and frightened reactions, it is Jones who overcomes the masked figure and holds him until the police arrive (fig. 12). And in the end it is Jones who wins Annabelle’s heart. Jones asks her in the final scene: “Annabelle, the mansion is yours, but you don’t want to live here alone, do you?” The couple embrace as the film ends. Another interesting variation on the theme of superstitious folly was the comic character who must face fear in order to become a mature person. In Seven Footprints, the protagonist, James Kirkham, longs for a life of adventure and plans to use his inheritance to explore “darkest Africa.” His Uncle Joe chastises him: “The millions you inherited from your father have gone to your head!” The plot of the film involves James and his beloved, Eve, facing a house full of horrifying creatures—including a witch, a gorilla, and a disfigured villain known as “The Spider”—all foreshadowing the couple’s final confrontation with the titular Satan (fig. 13). At the final moment of confrontation, 164

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FIGUR E 13. A menagerie of horrific figures confronts James Kirkham in Benjamin Christensen’s Seven Footprints to Satan (1929). Photo: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

as James must overcome his fears and walk the seven footprints, everything is revealed as an elaborate hoax. Uncle Joe is the mastermind, and in a move reminiscent of Au Secours!, the film ends with James meeting all the actors who portrayed the monsters—who are enjoying an elaborate banquet. Uncle Joe explains, “You’ve talked so much about adventures, I thought I’d give you enough to last a lifetime!” Eve also reveals her complicity in the prank;, “I hope you’ll forgive us, but we didn’t want you to leave us for darkest Africa!” A similar conceit was at the heart of Frank Tuttle’s Something Always Happens (1928), in which “secret doors, dark rooms, shadows, fearfullooking hands with long fingers, ready to grab anyone by the throat, and mysterious happenings of all sorts make up the action.” In the end, the mysterious events are explained away as a hoax played out for the benefit of the film’s heroine, played by Esther Ralston, “who had been bored in the home of her fiancé in England, and had craved for excitement.”68 Perhaps mirroring the “moderns, sophisticated though they pretend to be,” who attended these films, many of the comic heroes in mystery thrillers were in search of the kind of excitement that could 165

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be created only by illusions and mysteries. The comic conceit of the bumbling hero, as well as the befuddled, lower-class servant and the inept detective, provided a crucial point of identification for the audience, who could enter the increasingly fantastic narratives with the emotional buffer of humor. In this way these films fulfilled their promise to provide, as a poster for The Haunted House promised, “Thrills and Laughs!”

“You’ll Scream! You’ll Shriek!” An alternate version of The Haunted House poster mentioned above had similar art but a different tagline. “You’ll Scream! You’ll Shriek!,” the poster promised, and the upper-left-hand corner bore a small but important note: “With Sound.”69 The introduction of synchronized sound had a tremendous impact on the moving picture industry and the way Americans engaged with cinema. In his “Highlights of 1927,” Motion Picture News’s editor, William A. Johnston, called the introduction of “sound” pictures “a development second to none in importance.” Johnston predicted—accurately—that sound would infiltrate every aspect of cinema: “Sound effects in photoplays; the audible news reel; musical accompaniment to the picture.” Johnston concluded his editorial, much of which focused on the struggles related to the mergers of large chains of movie theaters, by observing that the introduction of synchronized sound promised to bring renewed interest to films themselves: “The film is the thing. Unless we are willing to admit that the public is tiring of pictures, how can anything else be true?”70 Others echoed Johnston’s fear that the public might be losing its enchantment with the silent moving picture. Just two years later, as talkies were becoming more prevalent, Dr. Louis E. Bisch penned an explanation of why talkies had become so immediately popular. Bisch opened the article by recounting a conversation with an older friend who had proclaimed that “the movies have been wanting some kind of dynamite for a long time to blow them out of the rut and to boost them to the place where they belong. And the mere timing of the voice to the action did it. What a difference!”7¹ For Bisch, synchronized sound meant that audiences engaged motion pictures with two senses (hearing and sight) instead of just one (sight), and this added stimulus meant that “the whole show appears so natural, so true, so faithful, that its effect upon us is like magic.”7² The new magic of synchronized sound had a dramatic impact on 166

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films with horrific elements. Echoing Bisch’s point, film historian Robert Spadoni argues that synchronized sound had the effect of defamiliarizing the act of watching films, that is to say, the new sonic experience took on some of the marvelous and unsettling qualities that early silent-film audiences had experienced. For Spadoni, the introduction of synchronized speech and the addition of diegetic sound effects caused audiences to experience “sensations of the strangeness and ghostliness of cinema.” This uncanny experience set the stage for the emergence of the horror genre with the 1931 premiers of Dracula and Frankenstein.7³ This innovative use of synchronized sound to create a sense of the uncanny would begin as early as 1928. The emerging technology was used in several of the mystery thrillers with the express purpose of enhancing the mysterious and horrific qualities of those films. When First National Pictures announced its partnership with Western Electric to create talkies using both the disc and filmstrip methods, among the first films to be produced were three so-called mystery dramas: The Haunted House (1928), Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), and Sh! The Octopus (which was released in 1929 as The House of Horror).74 The natural fit between sound and mystery was obvious to early filmmakers and commentators. In his explanation of sound’s appeal, Bisch observed: “The principle of suspense has always been a most important mechanism in the building of a play as well as in entertainment in general.” The ability of talkies to employ “the sweet but villainous voice” of the antagonist or “the sound of raindrops on the windowpane” created a unique sense of “the suspense, the atmosphere . . . the stark realism.”75 Alvin Connors, in a 1930 piece exploring the importance of synchronized sound to the mystery thriller, observed the importance of sound as well as the limitations of the visual in creating a sense of horror. Of earlier horrific films, Connors noted: “Ghostly shadows helped create the illusion of horror, but they could not compete with the horror of the unseen, for to photograph a mystery is to minimize its suspense.” The introduction of synchronized sound, in Connors’s argument, played a fundamental role in sustaining the popularity of the mystery thriller. “For the first time a wide-eyed audience heard a chilling shriek when Louise Fazenda felt the cold breath of The Terror on her neck.” The introduction of sound meant that the tension of scenes would not be broken up by “written subtitles”; instead, “dramatic words were spoken in a manner that heighted the tenseness of a situation.”76 The popularity of talkies even led to a renewed interest in relatively recent films. The Phantom of the Opera, for instance, was re-released 167

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in 1929 with the addition of synchronized sound, as were other major films, including 1923’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and 1915’s The Birth of a Nation.77 Other recently released films were simply remade. The Unholy Three, another Chaney vehicle originally produced in 1925, was remade in 1930 and would be Chaney’s first talkie and last film before he succumbed to throat cancer on August 30 that year. Other prominent talkie remakes included The Bat Whispers (1930), a remake of The Bat, and The Gorilla (also 1930). The enthusiasm for early synchronized sound films was not without issues. The rapid growth in interest in talkies outpaced the availability of the technology to screen them. Thus, well into the early 1930s, films were often released in both sound and silent versions. In an effort to accommodate “exhibitors who have been clamoring ineffectively for the immediate installation of sound reproducing devices,” First National offered a sound-effects cue sheet to accompany The Haunted House. The production of sound effects required “merely the use of a ten cent wind whistle, a board to [be] banged on the floor for slamming door effects, and a pail of broken glass to be shaken. Other effects were secured by use of the organ, from which emanated the human shrieks and other noises required.”78 Even when theaters were equipped for sound, many early talkies made only limited use of the capacity. Several of the early talkies only offered some music and sound effects and, at times, a few sequences of dialogue. One novel approach was used at a Pittsburgh theater for the screening of The Last Warning, wherein the owner “devised the gag of having the fans write the dialogue for six silent scenes in the picture” with “prizes offered for the best conversations.”79 The introduction of synchronized sound technology enhanced the audience’s ability to engage the mysterious and unsettling nature of mystery thrillers and seemed to open the door for more innovations. Sound provided a means to expand the mysterious space of the screen beyond the visual and to signal audiences that there was more at hand than they could see. The audience could quite literally hear things that were not yet visible on the screen, and in this way the unseen-thoughheard helped, as Spadoni observes, to create a sense of the screen as a mysterious and uncanny space. The introduction of sound also expanded the possibility of the marvelous and thereby enhanced the experience of the fantastic. In important ways, the introduction of sound allowed filmmakers to push back against the visual framework of realism and incredulity and to put audiences into even longer and more pronounced states of suspension, uncertainty, and fear. As Connors noted, “There is no limit to the weird effects, both visual and audi168

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ble, of which the talkie mystery is capable. Because in every film of this type [where] healthy screams are heard, Hollywood has dubbed murder mysteries ‘the shriekies.’”80 In her 1928 report on what she dubbed “the ghoulish shriekies,” Dorothy Donnell noted the impact of sound on the mystery thrillers: “The first result of the talkie panic has been a flood of mystery thrillers on the screen.”8¹ The popularity of such films had filled studios with “quarts of prop blood being shed, bodies being discovered behind secret panels and in haunted house, and clues scattered around everywhere.” And “instead of the usual studio orchestra, weird devices for producing uncanny noises have taken their place.”8² Not only did the emphasis on horrific deeds and sounds enhance the mystery and suspense; it also increased the horror. Donnell somewhat facetiously suggested that “producers count with a stop watch the number of women who are carried out fainting, the number of children who go into hysterics.” As for the audience: “If they go home from the theater pale and shaken, if they jump at every shadow and lie awake listening to the floors creak, they will know by these tokens that they have had a good time.”8³ Sound rapidly became an integral part of the mystery thrillers and had an impact on almost all levels of production. Variety reported that Christensen went to great lengths to acquire strange sounds for The Haunted House, including “two owls, two bullfrogs, a pheasant and an Iguana.”84 Evidently, such experiments were effective. Mourdant Hall, who otherwise found the film muddled, singled out the sound effects for praise: “Added to the flashes of lightning, queer shadows and other camera stunts, there is in this up-to-date piece of spookery a variety of sounds, the dominating effects being booming thunder and a howling wind, so necessary to all mystery tales of haunted houses.”85 The popular actress Laura La Plante reportedly had to take a “scream test” for her role in The Last Warning, as screams emanating from the screen became increasingly important.86 The capacity of sound to increase the experience of horror was clearly articulated by director Bryan Foy in promotional material for his 1930 remake of The Gorilla. While acknowledging the “eerie lighting effects, trick sets, [and] camera magic” of silent mystery thrillers, Foy observed the capacity of “the talking picture to combine the great facilities for spine-tingling of the silent screen with the stage’s sound thrills.” This combination of sound and visuals allowed directors to make increasingly fantastic plots within a framework of “utterly convincing realism.” For Foy, this framework of realistic horror might prove too overwhelming for audiences. “It is because of this 169

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super-realism, for instance, that so much genuine comedy is in ‘The Gorilla.’ No audience could stand the nerve strain of unrelieved harrowing mystery presented with the realism that talkies can achieve.”87 The thrill—and to some extent the threat—of synchronized sound was evident in the filmmaker’s ability to make the appearance of the horrific even more realistic, thereby creating potentially unsettling levels of suspense. Fearing that audiences might be pushed too far in their apprehension of the horrific (or at least in their suspension within the hesitant moment of the fantastic), filmmakers such as Foy continued to employ humor as a release for the audience’s pent-up emotions. Support for the introduction of sound into the mystery thriller genre was not universal. Ruth Morris complained in Variety about The Last Warning: “Somebody decided to make it an ear as well as an eye thriller .  .  . and permitted talking sequences to create havoc with its continuity.”88 T. O. Service offered a similar criticism of the film: “Dialogue perceptibly slows up the action in places.”89 In addition to the potential of slowing the pace of the mystery thriller, there was the danger that poor sound quality could render the mystery indecipherable. Barrymore’s The Unholy Night received this kind of criticism. A writer to Exhibitors Herald-World complained that “it is a mystery picture and so deep that unless you hear every word it becomes a puzzle. We could not hear every word on account of the character talking too fast, and unless the acoustics in your theatre are perfect, the words miss a little and you lose the meaning.”90 A similar concern was offered by a theater owner in Lampasas, Texas: “The characters speak with an English accent, which makes the talking part hard to understand in the South.”9¹ Beyond the prospect that sound might interrupt the engagement with the mystery or slow the pace of the thrills, others raised the concern that sound might make horrific elements too horrific. Only a few months before he would begin production on his only talkie, Lon Chaney declared that he would never appear in a talking film. The kinds of characters he depicted were too evil to be given voice. As Chaney explained, “All the poison in its ugly, twisted soul wells to its evil lips. What does it say? Not even I can guess. But we can all imagine that its words are terrible, blasting things befitting the source from which they spring.” But the strictures of decency and existing censorship would render such evil mute: “In the talkies the character has to say—‘Well, goodness, gracious me!’ or something even less profane!”9² Donald Beaton voiced a similar concern at the time about the consequences of sound technology introduced into the mystery thrillers. 170

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Beaton feared “the great new market for the talkers being damaged by the large number of thrillers being thrown upon it.” The talking mystery thriller was, in Beaton’s estimation, potentially overwhelming to audiences who were not yet ready for the intensity of the experience. As Beaton wrote, “Too many shrieks and groans will chystalize [sic] all the vague objections [to sound technology] and turn a large number of customers away.”9³ Synchronized sound provided a mechanism for filmmakers to dramatically enhance engagement with their audience’s emotional reactions to films and allowed the space of the screen to be expanded. For Beaton and others, these emotions might prove overwhelming to audiences accustomed to a single form of sensory input, and it is notable that for both Beaton and Foy the main concern seemed to be the creation of excessive fear. Although the introduction of synchronized sound enhanced the experience of the mystery thrillers, Donald Beaton was not alone in thinking that the genre had exceeded its usefulness. In 1928, T. O. Service was already listing comedies set in haunted houses as one of the movie scenarios that were too plentiful and should be abandoned.94 Similarly, in a report on the box office popularity for Seven Footprints to Satan, a theater owner from King City, California, complained that there were “too many of these mystery things.”95 In spite of the concern that mystery thrillers had outlived their popularity, the genre would continue well into the 1940s, with several of the films discussed above being remade (though these remakes tended to emphasize humor over horror). During the late 1920s, however, the mystery thriller pushed the boundaries of the depiction of horrific elements in American film. In a way, mystery thrillers epitomized the emotional aspects of melodrama. Roland West described The Bat as containing “the three ingredients which spell the best entertainment in the world—thrills, laughs and a touch of romance.”96 These films often featured, as one reviewer described Laura La Plante’s role in The Last Warning, “a timid, fear-stricken slip of a girl, thrown into a haunted house, beset on all sides by menacing shadows, clutching hands, banging doors and all the other phantasmagoria of a mystery story.”97 And they invited audiences to have the same bodily reaction as the characters’ reactions to the mystery unfolding on the screen—chills and shrieks, with occasional roars of laughter for relief. To the excellent work of Williams, Singer, and others, I suggest that mystery thrillers be thought of as a special category of melodrama: the melodramatic-fantastic. I coin this term to capture the ways in which the inclusion of horrific and apparently marvelous elements added an171

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other dimension to the mystery and thrills presented to the audience. A mystery need not include suggestions of hauntings or curses or the demonic. For the mystery thrillers considered in this chapter, the addition of horrific elements was crucial to their framing and their reception by audiences. Conversely, the presentation of horrific elements within the framework of the mystery thriller influenced how they were booked by theaters and circulated within American culture. In this way, the popularity of the melodramatic-fantastic represented an important shift in the portrayal of horrific elements within American cinema. On one hand, the combination of mystery and the horrific increased the level of gruesomeness audiences were willing to support. As the notion of fear—chills, shivers, shrieks—became an accepted framework for cinematic pleasure, the expectations of filmmakers and their audiences shifted. The popularity of Lon Chaney throughout this period, with his grotesque makeup and macabre transformations, attested to the American public’s interest in gruesomeness and the shocking. The acceptance of the gruesome as a form of cinematic pleasure was indicated in a Screenland review of Universal’s 1928 horror spectacular The Man Who Laughs: “One of the best films of the month. Romantic. Gruesome. Appealing. Tortured. Passionate.”98 Although Lon Chaney Sr.—The Man of a Thousand Faces—was the master of the gruesome, he did not feature in any of the films characterized here as the “melodramatic-fantastic.” What these films added to Chaney’s escalation of the gruesome was the promise of the possibility of the supernatural. Unlike the films of superstitious folly, the mystery thrillers consistently entertained the possibility of the marvelous in realistic and frightening ways. The characters on the screen, and especially audiences in the theaters, were left puzzling over the frightful possibilities—that the house was haunted, that the monster was lurking, that the ghost was stalking. This introduction of the potentially marvelous within the otherwise realistic framing of American films created what Todorov describes as the “fantastic”: a pleasurable hesitation in the borderlands between the marvelous and the uncanny, the supernatural and the revealed hoax. This insertion of the fantastic moment into the depiction of the horrific stretched emotional boundaries and established that fear could be a marketable pleasure within American film. The experience of fear was amplified to what filmmakers and critics felt were the outermost boundaries, and the inclusion of humor was included expressly to relieve audiences of the tension- and terror-inducing state that these films invited them to share. These films also pushed the boundaries of the 172

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rational framework inherent to the American uncanny. Filmmakers portraying the American uncanny had already carefully established a preferred viewing position, specifically one of skepticism and incredulity, focused on rationality and American exceptionalism. But in the films of the melodramatic-fantastic, these boundaries were stretched to the extreme (even if not actually broken). Whereas earlier films positioned audiences to laugh at the credulity of the protagonists’ hysterical maid, the bumbling detective, or the timid lovelorn, the films of the melodramatic-fantastic invited audiences to share in the actors’ fears as well as their credulity. Although never breaking the bonds of incredulity, these films introduced audiences to the pleasure of suspending their own personal incredulity and entertaining—even if only momentarily—the prospects of the horrific and the marvelous. The mystery thrillers were perhaps starting to overstay their welcome, but the introduction of synchronized sound provided renewed interest. As reviews at the time noted, the addition of sound created a renewed sense of excitement in cinematic possibilities. Mystery thrillers were quick to adopt the new technology, ushering in a subgenre known as the “shriekies.” Sound allowed filmmakers to expand the mysterious space of the screen and reveal to audiences things unseen—creaking boards, loud bangs, sinister voices. This further created a sense of the screen as a potentially marvelous site filled with fantastic moments of possibility. It also provided a level of gruesome realism that the visual alone could not provide. Audiences clearly gravitated toward this fantastic gruesomeness. The introduction of sound gave audiences new and more intense bodily experiences of the horrific and fantastic and further stretched the boundaries of American rationalism and incredulity.

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Conclusion

All that can be done in the way of horror pictures has now definitely been done. A RTHUR FOR DE, “R EV IEWS AND PR EV IEWS,” HOLLY WOOD FIL MOGR A PH, DECEM BER 10, 1932

I

N OCTOBER 1930, HAR R ISON’S R EPORTS LA MENTED the state of Universal Pictures, contending that the 1929– 1930 offerings had been “poorer than it had turned out in many a season” and noting the “waste of money that was done by Carl Laemmle’s production managers, and the mediocre product they turned out.”¹ In addition to questionable decisions by Carl Laemmle Sr., the earlier strategy of focusing on big-budget films became unsustainable in the face of the sudden, dramatic economic downturn of 1929. The Great Depression had a profound impact on Hollywood despite the studios’ desperate attempts to present the industry as continuing to boom. As Donald Crafton notes, “Though the industry tried to maintain the appearance of being depression-proof, in fact, the stock market crash hit Hollywood hard, if somewhat later than other businesses.”² Part of the impact was caused by the dramatic decline in movie attendance. Crafton observes that “in 1931 and 1932 the audience did not show up.” The lack of disposable income made going to the moving picture theater a luxury many Americans could not afford, or at least not afford at the rate they had prior to the Depression.³ There was also a dramatic decrease in the amount of money available for big productions. Universal had never reached the heights of the big five studios—Fox, Loews/ 174

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MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros.—but the combination of some poor production choices and the Depression hit Universal particularly hard. Douglas Gomery notes that “the Great Depression battered an already ailing Universal” and that the decision to put Carl Laemmle Jr. into the head office did little to improve matters. Laemmle Jr. lavished money on the expensive budgets of high-quality films such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), but the box office returns were disappointing.4 The relatively inexperienced Laemmle Jr. seemed to struggle to find a formula that would bring the studio out of its financial tailspin. Universal’s modest plans for its 1931 offerings included “two mystery stories.” According to Harrison’s Reports, one of these was a version of The Cat and the Canary to be titled The Cat Creeps, and the other was “‘Dracula,’ which will be based on Bram Stoker’s novel and play.”5 The majority of the report focused on The Cat Creeps, with nothing else offered about the Stoker adaptation. Another short article on September 15, 1930, announced that production had begun on Dracula with Tod Browning directing and Bela Lugosi, who had played Dracula on the stage, in the title role. Although there had been some speculation that Universal was seeking a more established star for the vampire role, by the time production was finished the studio executives were reported to be “highly enthusiastic over the performance of Bela Lugosi.”6 Still, there was little to suggest that Universal had particularly high expectations for Browning’s film, a fact underscored by its surprise when the film became a hit. Released on Valentine’s Day 1931, Dracula proved hugely successful.7 Photoplay reported on the studio’s reaction to its unexpected fortune: “When Universal made ‘Dracula,’ the thriller, officials knew they were taking a chance. The subject was so morbid that it might have no audience appeal. But it went over big.”8 Universal touted the film as the “world’s greatest hold over picture still grabbing all the coin in sight wherever it plays” and refocused its production strategy to capitalize on the film’s success.9 As Variety reported, Dracula’s success led the studio to “make sufficient provision of mystery specials on the coming season’s program, planning three or four, of which a Frankenstein idea and ‘Waterloo Bridge,’ will be two.”¹0 The decision to produce Dracula even with only a modest budget had been a calculated risk. Stoker’s novel, published in 1897, had been reasonably successful in its initial publication and had been republished by William Rider and Sons in 1912.¹¹ Moreover, the play— written by Hamilton Deane in 1924 and then revised by John Balderston in 1927—had been a surprise hit on American stages. Produced by 175

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Horace Liveright, the play had “made a surprise run on Broadway and cleaned up on tour.”¹² Still, in spite of these previous successes, uncertainty about the film’s prospects was well founded. Writing in June 1931, Dora Albert recounted the reasons for the studio’s hesitation: “There wasn’t a box-office name in the picture”; “the title of the picture didn’t mean a thing to anyone who hasn’t read the book by Bram Stoker or seen the play”; and “the picture could hardly be considered pleasant entertainment. It could hardly be considered entertainment at all.”¹³ Dracula’s success was more than just a boon for Universal. It marked a foundational moment, if not the foundational moment, for the horror film. As noted in the introduction, virtually every scholar interested in the horror genre, including me, has engaged the film. My purpose here is not to contest those previous readings but rather to put the film’s impact into the context of the genealogy traced throughout this book. Thus I suggest ways in which Dracula fit into the longer history of horrific elements in American cinema as well as the ways it deviated and, more to the point, the way these deviations helped to shift the frame. After a brief consideration of Dracula and its immediate legacy, I end by commenting on the implications of these genealogical efforts, their limitations, and the future directions they suggest.

“Just a real, good scare!” Commentators at the time found Dracula a difficult film to characterize. Although it shared many qualities with the mystery thrillers that remained reasonably popular at the time of its release, Dracula could not easily be characterized as one. There was no mystery in Dracula—the film’s antagonist was known from the very beginning, and the film made no mystery of his marvelous monstrousness. The only real question within the film was whether and how his evil plans could be stopped. And though Dracula provoked strong emotional reactions similar to the films utilizing what I have termed the “melodramaticfantastic,” it did not fit easily within that category. It was clear from the beginning of the film that there would be no sudden revelation of a hoax. Dracula and his horrifying brides were creatures of the undead, and in this way Dracula was an example of Todorov’s idea of the fantastic-marvelous. Indeed, the audience was made aware of the characters’ marvelous status before the main protagonists were introduced, and so in this way Dracula was the inverse of the films of superstitious folly. Indeed, Jonathan Harker’s continued refusal to believe in Drac176

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ula’s true nature marked him as foolish, whereas Van Helsing, who is the first to realize the truth, ends up becoming the film’s real protagonist. Perhaps because of these deviations, reviewers and commentators seemed to struggle to find the right language to characterize Browning’s film. It is notable how many of the terms discussed throughout this book were employed in an effort to capture the viewing experience of Dracula. Photoplay called it “a mystery story full of creeps and thrills,” and Modern Screen Magazine concurred, calling it “a weird story about creatures who are ‘undead.’ It’s thrilly and creepy.”¹4 Other commentators seemed to recognize that there was something decidedly different about Dracula. Marguerite Orndorff characterized the film as a “morbid thriller” and criticized Browning because “he wanders often from the main issue in his passion for horrid detail.”¹5 Others saw the film as appealing only to certain types of viewers. Silver Screen commended it as “good entertainment for those who like chills chasing up and down their spine,” but with the caution that “others might think this story horrible.”¹6 But the reviewers consistently highlighted the film’s overarching tone of terror. And it is notable that while Dracula contains some elements of comic relief, mainly in the person of the attendant Martin, there is relatively little in the film to lighten its dark tone. The Screenland reviewer described the film as “just a real, good scare! If you like to shiver and shake, ‘Dracula’ is your picture.”¹7 Even before the production of Dracula, there had been a clear sense that this film was something different. Universal had signed on a Pulitzer Prize winner, Louis Bromfield, to adapt the story, as it was “one of the most unique stories brought to the stage in years,” in part because of its “extraordinary” plot.¹8 A Universal promotional piece on the film’s sets focused not on any extravagant expense, as had been the case for The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but instead on their “unusual” qualities, including “a great stone structure fallen into ruin and decay, and deserted for 500 years except for its one ghostly occupant” and “cobwebs 18 feet in diameter.”¹9 In spite of such declarations about the film’s uniqueness, there was much in it that might have felt familiar. Some of the visuals harkened back to the early days of the cinema of attractions—those “horrid details” Marguerite Orndorff complained about, including an armadillo and an insect crawling out of a small coffin. The cinematography drew heavily from the German Expressionist tradition, as cinematographer Karl Freund had worked on both The Golem (1920) and Metropolis (1927). But where Dracula most notably deviated from its recent predecessors was in its fantastic plot and its unrelenting emphasis on a tone of 177

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darkness and dread. The Motion Picture Almanac for 1931 described it as a “weird mystery that borders on the fantastic.”²0 One reviewer proclaimed, “The picture is extremely weird, fantastic and morbid” and that “most of the situations are so terrifying, that they send chills up and down one’s spine.”²¹ Another insisted that it was suitable only for “those who prefer to enjoy their nightmares in the theater, rather than in bed.” Both reviewers expressed a sentiment of caution, urging readers to “see ‘Dracula’ if you must, but leave the children at home.”²² Perhaps the best evidence that Dracula somehow did not easily fit into any particular cinematic frame was its erratic treatment by censors upon its initial release. Hollywood’s Production Code Administration had no particular issue with the film. Undead creatures were not covered in the specifics of the code, and any innuendo of violence and sexuality was well hidden. On January 9, 1931, Jason S. Joy, director of studio relations for the MPPDA, wrote to Carl Laemmle Jr. to express his approval: “We enjoyed seeing ‘DRACULA’ at the studio this morning and believe it is quite satisfactory from the standpoint of the CODE and, as far as we are able to predict, from the standpoint of official censorship.”²³ Five days later James Fisher, a regular PCA reviewer, predicted no major issues with foreign censorship boards because the villain was “not really a human being so he cannot conceivably cause any trouble.”²4 Fisher’s prediction proved somewhat inaccurate. Several foreign censorship boards banned the film or called for major eliminations. British Columbia, for example, rejected the film after its call for eliminations was refused by Universal. The British Columbia Board of Censors explained: “The eliminations suggested by the Board of Censors [are] on account of the unwholesome and gruesome effect, which in their opinion would be injurious to nervous women and children.”²5 In June 1931, Singapore banned the film outright: “Gruesome: Dead persons coming out of coffins and sucking blood.”²6 Even those objecting to the film seemed to struggle to define the specific aspects that were objectionable, and for a period it seemed as if the earlier frame of the “gruesome”—heavily associated with the bodyhorror of Lon Chaney—would become the dominant frame. In a PCA memo focusing on the film’s trailer, a reviewer found no objections but noted that “this trailer seemed to me to promise to be a gruesome picture and one which I as a motion picture fan would avoid seeing.”²7 Similarly, a PCA internal memo worried about Almost Married, which was deemed “another ‘gruesome picture.’” The memo’s author saw it as another film in line with Dracula and Frankenstein and worried that “maybe we are starting a cycle.”²8 Responding to these concerns, Jason S. 178

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Joy wrote to Will Hays in December 1931 wondering if the “gruesome” pictures were “the beginning of a cycle which ought to be retarded or killed?”²9 When the Virginia Board of Censors voiced its concern about this cycle in 1932, it also adopted the language of gruesome: “Resolved: This Division recommend that during exhibitions of pictures of gruesome types, such as FREAKS, FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA, and MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE and the like, no children under the age of fourteen years attend.”³0 But the term gruesome did not quite capture the viewing experience of Dracula. The cycle of gruesome pictures in the 1920s had focused on the disfigured body, not the marvelous body. And in most of those films the monstrous figure was, to some extent, sympathetic in the end. The appeal of Dracula was different, and modern critics began to articulate it almost exclusively in relation to its capacity to evoke not simply chills and thrills but horror. Dora Albert explained the film’s appeal: “It is full of horror. It has a fascination that is almost inhuman. . . . It is causing people all over the country to shiver. It is giving them a thrill they never got before.” The sensation over Dracula was seen as unique, as pushing the boundaries of the cinematic experience. Dracula had taken the promise of the screams and shrieks of earlier films to the next level. As Albert observed, “If [a film] is a picture of horror, it must make you shiver as you never shivered before.”³¹ Of course, if Dracula had been a one-off film, the language of horror might not have settled into the public vernacular. Universal seemed, at least initially, the only studio willing to take a risk on this new frame for horrific elements. As a Variety headline on April 8, 1931, proclaimed, “U Has Horror Cycle to Self.” The other studios were “not certain whether nightmare pictures have a box office pull, or whether ‘Dracula’ is just a freak.” But Universal had found success with horrific elements in the past with films starring Lon Chaney, and therefore this seemed, at least to Variety, a natural: “Universal has gone for the horror thing in the past, Carl Laemmle being one of the few to spend money on such stories.”³² Several historical circumstances coalesced to create the conditions for this shift in the cinematic frame: Universal’s desperate effort to find a new niche; James Whale crafting Frankenstein as a strong successor to Browning’s Dracula; and the availability of Gothic properties upon which to draw. Whatever the conditions of their production, these films made a clear promise to audiences: the experience of horror. The choice of “horror” as a descriptive term was interesting in that it deviated from earlier frames. Whereas “weird” or even “gruesome” described the qualities of the film—its setting, characters, plots, 179

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and visuals—and “mystery” suggested the way in which the film would be engaged, “horror” emphasized the audience’s reaction. The promoters of Dracula had struggled to find the right framing (see introduction). In spite a long list of taglines focused explicitly on the horrific, the producers instead chose one more closely connected to the mystery melodramas that preceded it: “The Story of the Strangest Passion The World Has Ever Known.” By the time Whale’s Frankenstein was released in November, the new rhetorical frame of horror had emerged. Variety reported on Universal’s new productions as part of its “horror repertory,” and when Lamar Trotti, Jason Joy’s assistant, reported to the PCA about Frankenstein he judged it to be “a horror picture suitable for adults [but] far too exciting for children.”³³ When Paramount entered the cycle with its 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jason S. Joy cautioned that “we cannot estimate what the reaction will be to this, or to the other horror pictures.”³4 In 1932, the British Board of Film Classification added the “H” classification (for horror), and when Singapore reiterated its ban on Dracula in 1936 the reason was simple: “Because it is a horror picture.”³5

“I cannot see what ‘entertainment’ there is in pictures that are designed for the sole object of making one’s flesh creep” The success of Dracula and the films that followed was viewed by many as an anomaly, and for some it was a dangerous one. M. A. Lightman, president of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America, cautioned that “drastic consequences will result to juvenile and family attendance if a flood of ‘horror’ pictures is put out as a result of the success of the two or three such films already released.” In spite of their literary precedents, these films were deemed inappropriate for the silver screen, especially during times of great economic and social turmoil. Lightman argued: “All that is necessary now, on top of other trials and tribulations, is to start frightening our children patrons to a point of hysteria and have them jumping about in their beds at night.”³6 Similarly, the editor of Boy’s Cinema questioned the appeal of this new cycle: “I cannot see what ‘entertainment’ there is in pictures that are designed for the sole object of making one’s flesh creep.”³7 A letter writer from Montgomery, Alabama, agreed: “Why can’t pictures of frenzied horror such as ‘Dracula’ be eliminated entirely from the screen? Life is hectic enough without tormenting us with pictures of this kind.”³8 Perhaps because of this pressure, Universal in November 1931 announced that its 180

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planned production of Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories from The Suicide Club would be “the final production in the ‘horror cycle.’”³9 Yet the cycle did not end. In spite of social controversies and renewed scrutiny by censorship boards around the globe, the horror cycle continued. Although it has ebbed and flowed over the intervening decades, the American screen has not been empty of horror films for any great length of time since they gained prominence in 1931. As I have tried to demonstrate throughout this book, the horrific elements in Dracula were not unprecedented. Many of the elements that made Browning’s film so terrifying were present in Méliès’s Haunted Castle—castles, cobwebs, bats, and other frights. The emergence of cinema, especially for Americans, occurred within a broader context of superstition and the supernatural. The early films circulated during the time that stage magicians conjured illusory spirits and mediums claimed to conjure real ones. The prevalence of lingering superstitions and renewed interest in the otherworldly was utilized by early filmmakers, who recognized that the new magic of cinema easily mapped upon the old magic of the stage and the séance. Filmmakers such as Blackton, Chomón, Edison, and Méliès used the culturally understood logic of superstition and the supernatural to make trick films that amazed and shocked audiences while still being readily intelligible. The endurance of these superstitious beliefs was seen by some as a challenge to the new vision of America, a vision purged of Old World myths and founded instead upon the scientific and rational belief in progress. As American filmmakers became more vested in crafting a uniquely American cinema—in both industrial and cultural terms— they pushed back against the Old World framing of the marvels of cinema. Those Old World beliefs and their various myths and figures were deemed “weird” and were increasingly associated with a kind of backward foreignness. Those who maintained such beliefs—often depicted as foreigners, people of color, women, the lower classes, effeminate males—were marked as un-American, or at least not yet fully American. Attaining full status as a real American—strong, successful, white, male—required relinquishing lingering superstitions and bravely facing the apparently marvelous, confident in the knowledge that skepticism and strength would win the day. As American audiences were drawn deeper into these films, sharing the psychological space of the protagonists, a viewing ethic of incredulity was forged. The apparently marvelous was always already an illusion, and those who fell for it were either objects of ridicule or damsels in distress in need of rescue. When marvels did appear on the screen, they were often framed 181

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within stories of the past, especially the literary epics that were part of the cultural heritage. The appearance of monstrous creatures such as Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein’s Monster were, at best, cautionary tales of scientific progress gone too far, but for the most part they were framed as lessons from great literature. This cover of literary merit allowed filmmakers to escalate the levels of shock and gruesomeness, and the ability to realistically depict the gruesome became a key element in the cinematic arts. Lon Chaney became a movie star in large part as a cinematic phantom, a malleable body twisted into grotesque shapes in the service of great literature and shocking stories. The mystery thrillers, building upon Chaney’s legacy, took the escalation of shocks and thrills to another level. Instead of simply viewing the shocking, audiences were invited into the fantastic and uncertain space of mystery. Popular mystery thrillers capitalized not only on the question of whodunit but also on the possible supernatural nature of the antagonist. These films utilized what I have labeled the “melodramatic-fantastic” as a way of engaging the audience’s emotional responses through the prospect of the supernaturally horrific. The emphasis on the shock of horror, however, was carefully balanced against the relief of comedy, as audiences were brought to the edge of terror only to be relieved: first by comic relief and, in the end, by the unmasking of the monster and the restoration of the rational world. Tod Browning’s Dracula was largely crafted out of the horrific cinematic elements that preceded it. It employed the shocks and horrors of past films and borrowed visually and thematically from throughout this long history—from The Haunted Castle, from Caligari, from Hyde. This is not to diminish Browning’s film but to seek to put it in context. Of course, the film was unique in the way it ushered in such a dramatic shift in the rhetorical framing of horrific elements, and the scholarship related to horror films is filled with interesting explanations of its power. Dracula drew heavily upon timeless Gothic and even psychoanalytic tropes to engage taboo subjects of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Robert Spadoni suggests that the use of synchronous sound also helped to create an eerie atmosphere, something filmmakers had been doing for years in the mystery thrillers (see chapter 5). Additionally, the film itself was deeply invested in the anxieties of its time—fear of immigrants, especially those from Eastern Europe, shifting sexual mores, and so on. The social turmoil caused by the Great Depression also created an atmosphere of anxiety that led audiences to be receptive to a horrific tale of the undead rising from their graves. The American viewing ethic of skepticism and the notion of the American uncanny 182

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were intimately tied to a sense of American exceptionalism, a concept deeply troubled by the dramatic and prolonged economic and political turmoil of the Great Depression. In an earlier work, I proposed the notion of “resonant violation” as a way of explaining the cultural power of innovative horror films, the kind of film that redirects the genre into a new cycle.40 The core of the idea is that these films—such as Dracula, The Thing from Another World (1951), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and so on—simultaneously resonate with their contemporary social anxieties while also violating generic expectations. Putting Dracula into the genealogy constructed in this book highlights the degree of this violation. Dracula dramatically violated the carefully constructed viewing ethic of incredulity and the overarching assurance of the American uncanny. Indeed, Dracula seems to have more than simply violated the preceding cinematic frame but rather to have ruptured it. One interesting rhetorical dynamic within the promotion and reception of Browning’s film was the recurring suggestion that somehow the film would escape the screen upon which it was projected. The film’s closing curtain speech, which Marguerite Orndorff dismissed as “facetious,” depicted the actor Edward Van Sloane, who portrayed Van Helsing, suggesting that vampires and other supernatural entities actually existed. Universal’s press book contained several stories, concocted by Gladys Hall, suggesting that Lugosi (fig. 14) had encountered real vampires in his homeland in the Kingdom of Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania, not far from Transylvania), that he lived in a haunted house, and that he may in fact have been a vampire. “Thus Bela Lugosi. Thus DRACULA. Thus the Horror Man, the Mystery Man of Holly wood, with the lore of demonology, the dark secrets of the state of trance a part of his daily life.”4¹ Photoplay’s answer columnist picked up the joke, responding to a Buffalo, New York, writer by noting: “How I shudder when I have to answer questions about Bela Lugosi. If I don’t say the right things about him, he’s liable to pop out of an ink-well or the waste-basket and chase me.”4² Some theater owners also took up this notion. One particularly adventurous promoter in Minnesota sent envelopes filled with dirt to patrons along with a note: “You’re Wrong If You Think This Is Ordinary Dirt! This Is ‘Dirt of Satanic Power!’ It Sustains the Life of a Monster who Feasts on Lovely Youth! This Monster Is Count Dracula, the Un-Dead Vampire! By Night He Seeks Young Victims with Soft White Throats. By Day He Must Return to His Earthen Bed!”4³ Evidently some audience members were taken in by these wild stories. Silver Screen’s answer column reported “a num183

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FIGUR E 14. Bela Lugosi portrays the iconic vampire in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). Photo: British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, UK.

ber of fans have written to SILVER SCREEN to ask if it’s true that Bela Lugosi went raving mad as the result of playing the part of Dracula.”44 The horror unleashed by Dracula was presented as dangerous, with the potential of spreading beyond the safe confines of the theater, and in a way these fears were justified. The shift in the presentation of horrific elements caused by the popularity of Dracula, and solidified by Frankenstein and the films that followed, constituted a substantial shift in American culture and cinema, one that continues to the present day. And in one sense the most pronounced aspect of this shift was to give the cinematic provocation of unbridled fear a name: the “horror film.” It was the introduction of this language that gave producers, critics, and audiences a clear framework within which to understand the filmic texts that circulated. And so we must return to a question posed in the introduction: What made the Frankenstein of 1931 and the Hyde of 1932 “horror films,” whereas their predecessors had not been? The answer is simple: Dracula made them horror films by provoking a shift in the rhetorical framing of horrific 184

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elements. And it was this shift that not only named a new classification of films but also changed the nature of cinema itself. The floodgates of the horrifying, the fantastic, and the marvelous were now opened, and the experience of cinema no longer needed to promise comfort or even a happy ending. After 1931, the dark space of the theater had, in essence, become even darker and more dangerous. IN THE FOR EGOING PAGES, I H AVE ATTEMPTED TO trace a genealogy of horrific elements on American screens from 1896 until the emergence of the language of horror films in 1931. At one level, this has been a prehistory of the elements that would come to constitute the horror genre, as well as an examination of how these elements were produced, framed, and understood by their audiences at the time. At another level, the treatment of horrific elements on American screens provides some sense of the development of American cinema. American filmmakers, critics, and promoters were clear in their desire to forge a uniquely American cinematic vision, and with this vision came an emphasis on realism, verisimilitude, cause and effect, and psychological motivation. In the hands of American film producers, cinema became a space not of fantastic illusion but one where the belief in such illusions was dispelled. In other words, the marvel of cinema was used to inculcate a viewing ethic of skepticism and incredulity. Of course, this emphasis on incredulity and rationality was not arbitrary. They were the key elements in the evolving sense of an American epistemology. America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was eager to differentiate itself from its largely European ancestry and to create a more unified sense of national culture to which others were expected to conform. This national culture developed in ways that equated “American” with a mixture of other qualities, including: rationality, masculinity, whiteness, education, and financial success. Early moving pictures played a role in this cultural development and were explicitly called on to craft an American perspective that venerated that privileged point of view. Indeed, early cinema received considerable attention from the public elite and moral guardians because it was seen as having a uniquely powerful connection to those who dwelled at the margins of this newly conceived American culture—the working class, immigrants, and the uneducated. Moving pictures were a way of drawing these audiences into the American point of view with the promise that rationality and incredulity would lead to romantic, financial, and cultural success. The horror genre emerged out of the cracks in that promise. With 185

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the onset of the Great Depression, the promise of American progress and exceptionalism was, if not broken, at least fractured. Browning’s Dracula, along with the thousands of films that have followed it, exists at precisely these points of cultural fracture. The ongoing evolution of the genre has been driven at least in part by the constantly evolving sets of cultural tensions and crises that give it energy and meaning. The genealogy I have traced may serve to provide a clearer sense of how intimately intertwined the elements of horror are with the promises and pitfalls of American cinema and culture. The treatments of horrific elements before 1931 were, of course, driven by many factors: global politics, economic conditions, technological developments, the artistic visions of individuals, and others. My goal has been not to encompass all of these factors but rather to trace a line through the complex conditions of cinematic and cultural history and to focus on the ways that horrific elements were framed and made meaningful. For me this has been an exercise in rhetorical criticism, in that its focus has been on the way these horrific elements were depicted, discussed, and contested. My effort has been driven not by some overarching theory or proposition but rather by the historical texts themselves—the films, memos, magazine articles, promotional materials, and other sources. In other words, my aim is to tell the story of horror’s prehistory in its own terms, attending to the language used by those who made, viewed, and discussed these early films. Although the cultural treatment of horrific elements has changed and developed over the ensuing decades, some of the tendencies persist. American culture continues to demonstrate anxiety around those racialized, sexualized, and classed Others, and we continue to depict those we perceive as different from us as irrational, superstitious, and fearful. Our American culture continues to valorize the incredulous hero and to cultivate a culture of skepticism. At the time of this writing, the American culture has developed remarkable levels of skepticism—doubting the science behind climate change, the reports of venerable news agencies, and even the statements of the nation’s intelligence communities. And this deep-seated skepticism continues to play out along class lines, just as it did in the early years of cinema. The upper classes and educated elites look at the rural working class as gullible—just as the rural working class scorns elites for naively living within ivory towers.45 Of course, cinematic treatments of the horrific did not create America’s cycle of cynicism, but the horror film has long trafficked in the

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need to discern. For most early treatments of the horrific, the need was to see through the marvelous to find the reality hidden behind it. Ever since the watershed year 1931, the need has been to see through the rational to find the fantastic lurking beneath it. The underlying premise of the horror film and its predecessors may well be this emphasis on our ways of looking and the consistent warning not to be too confident in our discernment. The story of the horror film can be understood as the development of these practices of looking and the ability of filmmakers to undercut those practices—to trick, to confound, and to shock increasingly sophisticated audiences. This story has not been simple or linear. A careful student of film history might point to moments where an older frame for horrific elements is present in a later period, and any knowledgeable film historian will be able to point to numerous exceptions. Edison’s 1913 The Haunted Bedroom featured a real ghost during the period I have characterized as generally eschewing the supernaturally marvelous. Similarly, Victor Schertzinger’s 1926 The Return of Peter Grimm depicted the real ghost of the title character during a period dominated by mystery thrillers. To these potential objections, I can simply note that my attempt at explaining a genealogy has sought only to trace a line through the complex set of cinematic and cultural artifacts that engaged notions of the supernatural and horrific. That line cannot hope to be completely inclusive any more than it can hope to be completely linear. Cultural history rarely works along such clean and linear paths. Another limitation of this kind of genealogical work is the number of other cultural trends that it passes without being able to fully engage the numerous intersecting lines. Throughout this genealogy are points of contact with other cultural practices—industry, politics, literature, theater, art. I have attempted to acknowledge these points of intersection and even lingered on them. But there is clearly much more work to be done. A final notable omission is the way horrific elements were treated within different national contexts. By focusing on the reception in America I have not meant to suggest that other national audiences had identical experiences or had radically different experiences. The question of how horrific elements circulated in other national contexts, and the role they played in the construction and transformation of the collective mythology of other nations, are questions I leave for others to resolve. My work here has been more limited in its ambitions: to trace a line through American cultural and cinematic history by following the de-

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piction, circulation, and reception of horrific elements in film; to examine the kinds of rhetorical work these elements performed within the emerging, contested, and dynamic notion of American identity; and to question how these images folded themselves into the American dream and helped to form the basis for the American cinematic nightmare.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. The popularity of horror films and the ways they have captured major portions of box-office receipts are discussed more fully in Stacey Abbott, “High Concept Thrills and Chills: The Horror Blockbuster,” in Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, ed. Ian Conrich (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 27–44. 2. “Best of 2014: Biggest Box Office Surprises,” Hollywood Reporter, December 31, 2014, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/best-2014-biggest-box-office -760726; “James Wan Returns for ‘Conjuring’ Sequel,” Variety, October 21, 2014, variety.com/2014/film/news/james-wan-conjuring-sequel-1201335656. 3. Leslie Hahner and Scott Varda, “Paranormal Activity and the Horror of Abject Consumerism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30 (2013): 362. 4. David Sims, “Get Out Is a Funny and Brilliantly Subversive Horror Film,” The Atlantic, February 23, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain ment/archive/2017/02/get-out-jordan-peele-review/517524. 5. A. O Scott, “In ‘The Babadook,’ a Frightfully Unwelcome Guest,” New York Times, November 27, 2014, nytimes.com/2014/11/28/movies/in-the-baba dook-a-frightfully-unwelcome-guest.html. 6. “‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’ Has a Definite Bite,” Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies /la-et-mn-a-girl-walks-review-20141121-column.html. 7. For more on the shifting historical nature of the horror film, see Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996); Kendall R. Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005); Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). 8. It is worth noting that not all these films or classic monsters were Uni189

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versal Studios creations, but the connection between this cycle and Universal remains in popular culture. 9. Variety, “U Has Horror Cycle All to Self,” Variety, April 8, 1931, 2. 10. For more on the development of Dracula, see David. J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, rev. ed. (New York: Faber and Faber, 1993). 11. Ed Thomas, “Dracula Press Book,” box 13/13274, Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 12. Duke Wellington, “Theater Promotion for Frankenstein,” Poster Painters Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 13. Bruce Kawin, Horror and the Horror Film (London: Anthem, 2012), 4. 14. See Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23 (1984): 6–18. 15. James Naremore, “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea,” Film Quarterly 49 (1995–1996): 14. 16. Andrew Tudor, Theories of Film (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1974),145. 17. Roy Kinnard, Horror in Silent Films: A Filmography, 1896–1929 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), 1. 18. Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 12. 19. Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 20. Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, and National Identity (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008), 2. 21. Paul Wells, The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch, (London: Wallflower, 2000), 3. 22. Tom Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London: Routledge, 2004), 44–50. 23. Donald C. Bryant, “Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39 (1953): 415. 24. David Blakesley, introduction to Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, ed. David Blakesley (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 3. 25. Casey Ryan Kelly, Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 19. 26. Cara Finnegan, Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 4. 27. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3. 190

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28. Simon Popple and Joe Kember, Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory (London: Wallflower, 2004), 30. 29. André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, “American Cinema Emerges (1890–1909),” in American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 9. 30. Tom Gunning, “Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7 (1994): 189. 31. Barbara Klinger, “Film History\Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies,” Screen 38, no. 2 (1997): 109. 32. Particularly comprehensive reviews are provided by Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 33. Gunning, “‘Now You See It,’” 42–43. 34. Maxim Gorky, “Review of Lumière Programme,” in Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 408. 35. Quoted in Gunning, “The Origins of Film Genres,” iris 19 (1995): 59. 36. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, introduction to Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London: Routledge, 2004), 77. 37. Michael Marks Davis, The Exploitation of Pleasure: A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1911), 34. 38. John Collier, “Cheap Amusements,” Charities and the Commons 20 (April 1908): 74. 39. Thomas Armat, “My Part in the Development of the Motion Picture Projector,” reprinted in A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, ed. Raymond Fleming (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 21. 40. Quoted in Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 69. 41. Anthony Slide, “The Evolution of the Film Star,” Films in Review 25 (1974): 591–594. 42. Janet Staiger, “Seeing Stars,” Velvet Light Trap 20 (1983): 13. 43. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 14, 296. 44. Rick Altman, “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today,” in Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, ed. Janet M. Gaines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 15. 45. Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 3. 46. Tom Gunning, “Those Drawn with a Very Fine Camel’s Hair Brush,” iris 20 (1995): 46. 47. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 219. 48. Steffen Hantke, “Academic Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of American Horror Cinema: Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety,” College Literature 34 (2007): 200. 191

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Notes to Pages 11–18

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49. Joe Tompkins, “The Cultural Politics of Horror Film Criticism,” Popular Communication 12 (2014): 33. 50. Carolyn Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 163. 51. Leo Baudry, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 110. 52. Phillips, Projected Fears. 53. See Altman, Film/Genre, 90. 54. Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990). 55. Julian Hanich, for instance, insists that the collective experience of the horror film can be pleasurable “because it consists of precious moments of subjective intensity including remarkable metamorphoses of the lived-body and the foregrounding of time as well as valuable instances of collectivity.” See Julian Hanich, Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (New York: Routledge, 2010), 24. 56. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 41. 57. Tom Gunning, “Non-continuity, Continuity, Discontinuity: A Theory of Genres in Early Films,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Baker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 87. 58. Gunning, “Those Drawn,” 52. 59. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 152. 60. Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 595. 61. Marcia Butzel and Ana M. López, “Mediating the National: Introduction,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14 (1993): 2. 62. Alan Williams, introduction to Film and Nationalism, ed. Alan Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 1. 63. Ibid., 8. 64. Gaudreault argues that prior to the institutionalization of cinema in 1910, the term “kinematography” is more appropriate, drawn as it is from the vocabulary of the time. For clarity, I will generally simply use “early cinema” to denote this period but will strive to clarify the specific period of cinematic practice under discussion. 65. Paula Marantz Cohen, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19. 66. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 67. Altman, Film/Genre, 198. 68. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” in Film and Na192

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Notes to Pages 18–23

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tionalism, ed. Alan Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 53. 69. Ibid., 62. 70. Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). 71. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). 72. Phillips, Projected Fears. 73. Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Arnold, 2002), 18. 74. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 265. 75. I understand this poetics more in relation to Aristotle’s other treatise on the use of language, On Rhetoric, with a focus on tracing the complex relationship between texts and contexts. 76. Bordwell, Making Meaning, 265. 77. Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 36.

CH APTER 1: SUPER STITION AND THE SHOCK OF AT TR ACTION 1. Maxim Gorky, “Review,” in Kino: A History of the Russian and the Soviet Film, ed. Jay Leda (New York: MacMillan, 1960), 407. 2. Quoted in Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 12. 3. “The Cinematographe,” Daily Iowa Capital, December 1, 1896, 7. 4. “Keith’s New Theater,” Boston Sunday Post, September 6, 1896, 11. 5. “Latest Wonder,” Bedford Mail, February 26, 1897, 1. 6. Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–43. 7. Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellers, Angelika 2 (1997): 8. 8. Ibid., 11. 9. Ibid., 9. 10. Ibid., 13. 11. “The Cinematographe,” 7. 12. Quoted in Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text 34 (1989): 37. 13. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4. 193

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Notes to Pages 23–29

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14. Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film, C. 1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 1. 15. Paul Stob, William James and the Art of Popular Statement (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 3, xvi. 16. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, “Introduction,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern American, 1860–1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), vii. 17. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 17. 18. Frederick Henry Quitman, A Treatise on Magic, or, On the Intercourse between Spirits and Men with Annotations (Albany, NY: Balance Press, 1810), 26. 19. “Human Progress,” New York Times, September 12, 1874, 6. 20. Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, vol. 2 (London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852), 190. 21. George Cruikshank, A Discovery Concerning Ghosts: With a Rap at the “Spirit Rappers” (London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1864), 2. 22. Anthony Todd Thomson, The Occult Sciences: The Philosophy of Magic, Prodigies, and Apparent Miracles, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847), 38, 39, 255. 23. “A Diamond of Ill Omen,” New York Times, October 22, 1875, 4. 24. Anonymous, Ventriloquism Explained: And Juggler’s Tricks, or Legerdemain Exposed with Remarks on Vulgar Superstitions (Amherst, MA: MS, JS and C. Adams, 1834), vi. 25. Richard Alfred Daven, Sketches of Imposture, Deception, and Credulity (London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1837), i. 26. Professor Hoffman, Modern Magic: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring (Philadelphia: David McKay, n.d.), 557, 551. 27. J. S. Forsyth, Demonologia: Or, Natural Knowledge Revealed; Being an Exposé of Ancient and Modern Superstitions, Credulity, Fanaticism, Enthusiasms (London: John Bumpus, 1827), ix. 28. Rufus Blakeman, A Philosophical Essay on Credulity and Superstition: And Also on Animal Fascination, or Charming (New York: D. Appleton, 1849), 3. 29. T. Shekleton Henry, Spookland: A Record of Research and Experiment in a Much-Talked-of Realm of Mystery (Chicago: Clyde Publishing, 1902), 74. 30. Ansbach, Mysteries of Magic (Hillsdale, NJ: Ansbach, 1905), 5. 31. Ventriloquism, 149. 32. Spirit Rapping in England and America; and, Table Turning and Table Talking (London: Clarke, Beeton and Co., n.d.), 47. 33. Signor Blitz, Fift y Years in the Magic Circle: Being an Account of the Author’s Professional Life (Hartford, CT: Belknap and Bliss, 1871), 157. 34. Alexander Herrman, Herrman’s Black Art: A Treatise on Magical Sciences, Witchcraft, Alchemy, Necromancy, Mesmerism, Etc. (New York: Street and Smith, 1890), 13–14.

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Notes to Pages 29–34

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35. E. H. Caylor, The Late Dr. Sedgwick and the Spirit Medium (Based on Fact) (Dayton, OH: United Brethren Publishing, 1900), 85. 36. William Goodwin, Lives of the Necromancers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), 306. 37. Thomson, The Occult Sciences, 62, 69. 38. H. Mattison, Spirit Rapping Unveiled! An Exposé of the Origin, History, Theology, and Philosophy of Certain Alleged Communications from the Spirit World, by Means of Spirit Rapping, “Medium Writing,” “Physical Demonstrations,” Etc. (New York: Mason Brothers, 1853), 3; Thomas Mitchell, Key to Ghostism: Science and Art Unlock Its Mysteries (New York: S. R. Wells, 1880), iii. 39. Blitz, Fift y Years, 157; Blakeman, A Philosophical Essay, 203. 40. “Modern Marvels,” New York Times, November 16, 1870, 4. 41. Ibid. 42. Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism in Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1969); Moore, In Search of White Crows, 7. 43. J.  H. Brown, Spectropia: Or, Surprising Spectral Illusions, Showing Ghosts Everywhere, and of any Colour (London: Griffin and Farran, 1864), 7; Thomson, The Occult Sciences, 255–256. 44. Gunning, “Phantom Images,” 42. 45. Marcel Marceau, “Preface,” in Marian Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), xi. 46. Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 5. 47. Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 6. 48. Ibid., 27. 49. Moore, In Search of White Crows, xiv. 50. Quitman, A Treatise on Magic, 41–42. 51. David P. Abbott, Behind the Scenes with the Mediums, 3rd ed. enlarged (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1909), 219; Giuseppe Lapponi, Hypnotism and Spiritism: A Critical and Medical Study, trans. P. Gibbs (London: Chapman Hall, 1906), 53, 115. 52. Barnouw, The Magician, 3; Eugene Burger, “Foreword,” in Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), ix. 53. Anonymous, Magic and Mystery Unveiled: Exhibiting Plainly the Dark Secrets of Ancient and Modern Magic (New York: Published for the Trade, 1883), 7. 54. Lionel T. Scott, Twists and Fancies of the Modern Magician (Kansas City, MO: A. M. Wilson, n.d.), 4; Louis C. Haley, The Dramatic Art of Magic (Madison, WI: n.p., 1910), 39, 48. 55. Magic and Mystery, 6. 56. In 1902, Henry Ridgely Evans noted that the proliferation of such in-

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Notes to Pages 34–39

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struction manuals had “come to stay” and noted that even with so many “textbooks on conjuring” on the market “the literature is on the increase.” See Henry Ridgely Evans, Magic and Its Professors (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1902), 4. 57. Herrman, Herrman’s Black Art, 14; Ansbach, Mysteries of Magic, 5. 58. Anonymous, Parlour Magic (London: Whitehead, 1838), 1; Anonymous, The Art of Conjuring Made Easy, or, Instruction for Performing the Most Astonishing Sleight-of-Hand Feats: With Directions for Making Fireworks (Devonport, UK: Samuel and John Keys, n.d.), 2. 59. W.  H.  J. Shaw, Magic and Its Mysteries (Blue Island, IL: M.  N. Smith, 1893); Anonymous, The Black Art Fully Exposed and Laid Bare (New York: Frank M. Reed, 1874). 60. Brown, Spectropia, 7. 61. Tony Denier, The Great Secret or Shadow Pantomimes, or, Harlequin in the Shades: How to Get Them up and How to Act Them (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1868). 62. Henry Dircks, The Ghost! As Produced in the Spectre Drama, Popularly Illustrated by the Marvellous Optical Illusion Obtained by the Apparatus Called the Dircksian Phantasmagoria (London: E and FN, 1863), 6. 63. Ibid., 29. 64. Ibid., 31. 65. Ibid., 61, 64. 66. Musser, The Emergence, 15. 67. X. Theodore Barber, “Phantasmagorical Wonders: The Magic Lantern Ghost Show in Nineteenth-Century America,” Film History 3 (1989): 734. 68. Quoted in Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 24. 69. Quoted in Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 26. 70. “Wonderful Display of Optical Illusion,” New York Post, November 4, 1803, 3. 71. J. L. Marcy, The Sciopticon Manual, Explaining Lantern Projections in General, and the Sciotpicon Apparatus in Particular (Philadelphia, James A. Moore, 1877), 50. 72. Anonymous, The Art of Projection and Complete Magic Lantern Manual (London: E. A. Beckett, 1893), 158. 73. Ibid., 2. 74. Gunning, “Phantom Images,” 46, 53. 75. See, for example: Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); John Harvey, Photography and Spirit (London: Reaktion Books, 2007); Louis Kaplan, “Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography,” Art

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Notes to Pages 39–43

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Journal 62.3 (2003): 18–27; and Karl Schoonover, “Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and Photography,” Art Journal 62.3 (2003): 30–41. 76. Cara Finnegan, Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 15. 77. Nead, The Haunted Gallery, 4. 78. Finnegan, Making Photography Matter, 48. 79. Tom Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London: Routledge, 2004), 42. 80. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 50. 81. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 53. 82. Gunning, “‘Now You See It,’” 49. 83. Ibid., 49. 84. Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans. and ed. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 189. 85. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 673. 86. No. 105, Edison Films, July 1901, Complete Catalogue. 87. Edison Studios, Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel, Library of Congress video, 1:37 (March 5, 2015), http://lccn.loc.gov/00694325. 88. The Library of Congress digital print did not contain the ending of the original version. The catalog description is used in its place here. 89. Henry, Spookland, 14. 90. Randy McNutt, Cal Steward, Your Uncle Josh: America’s King of Rural Comedy (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2011), 1, 35. 91. Tim Gracyk, Popular American Recording Pioneers, 1895–1925 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 74. 92. Edison Studios, Uncle Josh’s Nightmare, Library of Congress video, 2:37 (March 5, 2015), http://lccn.loc.gov/00694326. 93. J. Charles Wall. Devils (London: Metheun, 1904), 1. 94. Edison Studios, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, Library of Congress video, 2:21 (March 5, 2015), http://lccn.loc.gov/00694324. 95. Lynne Kirby, “Male Hysteria and Early Cinema,” Male Trouble, ed. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 79. 96. “Edison Exhibition Kinetoscope,” New York Clipper, June 25, 1904, 407. 97. J. M. Peebles, Demonism of the Ages, Spirit Obsessions so Common in Spiritualism, Oriental and Occidental Occultism (Battle Creek, MI: Peebles Medical Institute, 1904), 24. 98. David P. Abbott, Behind the Scenes with the Mediums, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1909), 276.

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Notes to Pages 43–52

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99. Giuseppe Lapponi, Hypnotism and Spiritism: A Critical and Medical Study, trans. P. Gibbs (London: Chapman Hall, 1906), 108. 100. James Morgart, “Gothic Horror Film from The Haunted Castle (1896) to Psycho (1960),” in The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (New York: Routledge, 2014), 377. 101. Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-up? Or the Trick’s on Us,” Cinema Journal 28 (1989): 95. 102. Gunning, “‘Now You See It,’” 45. 103. “Star Films,” New York Clipper, June 27, 1903, 432. 104. Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 61. 105. John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 3. 106. Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 15. It is interesting that Ezra includes science fiction, a genre that would not exist for decades, though Méliès’s use of horrific elements seems to be contained within the féeries and the “trick” films. 107. As Musser notes, “Undoubtedly the world’s leading filmmaker during the first years of the new century was the Parisian Georges Méliès, whose pictures had been duped by every major American producer.” See Musser, The Emergence of American Cinema, 364. 108. Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 69. 109. Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1912), 197. 110. Quoted in Ezra, Georges Méliès, 14. 111. Morgart, “Gothic Horror Film,” 377. 112. “Méliès ‘Star’ Films,” New York Clipper, July 18, 1903, 500; “Geo. Méliès ‘Star’ Films,” New York Clipper, October 17, 1903, 820; “The Damnation of Faust,” New York Clipper, January 9, 1904, 1114. 113. Katherine Singer Kovács, “Georges Méliès and the Féerie,” Film before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 244. 114. Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, “The Grand-Guignol: Aspects of Theory and Practice,” Theatre Research International 25 (2000): 267. 115. Brian May, “Preface,” in Diableries, ed. Brian May, Denis Pellerin, and Paula Fleming (London: London Stereoptic Company, 2013), 7. 116. George Sand, La diable a Paris (M. Levy Frères, 1857). 117. Georges Méliès, “Kinematographic Views” (appendix), in Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 141. 118. Ezra, Georges Méliès, 51.

CH A P TER 2: W EIR D AND GLOOMY TA LES 1. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 63–64. 198

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Notes to Pages 52–61

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2. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 2. 3. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 372. 4. Bowser, The Transformation, 21. 5. Michael Aronson, Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905–1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 112. 6. For more see Simon Popple and Joe Kember’s Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory (London: Wallflower Press, 2004). 7. Robert Anderson, “The Motion Picture Patents Company: A Reevaluation,” in The American Film Industry, rev. ed., ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 142. 8. Tom Gunning, “1902–1903: Movies, Stories, and Attractions,” in American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 114. 9. Abel, Red Rooster, 20. 10. Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). 11. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 59. 12. For more on the moral panic related to early cinema, see Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 13. John Collier, “Letter to Charles F. Powlison dated 11/19/10,” box 19, National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Special Collections, New York Public Library, New York. 14. Noel J. Kent, America in 1900 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 96. 15. “Report for the Executive Committee dated 2/3/10,” box 118, National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Special Collections, New York Public Library, New York. 16. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, “Cinema and Reform,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London: Routledge, 2004), 135. 17. Some discussions of the nickelodeon panic can be found in Francis Couvares, Movie Censorship and American Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1966); Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema; Kendall R. Phillips, Controversial Cinema: The Films That Outraged America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). 18. “weird, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, www.oed.com. 19. “weird, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oed .com. 20. Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy, “Introduction: Old and New Weird,” Genre 49 (2016): 117. 21. It seems likely that the prominence of the term weird to describe films 199

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using the horrific may well have set the stage for the naming of the magazine, and in this way both the literary and fi lmic traditions may speak to the same historic moment in American culture. 22. H. P. Lovecraft and S. T. Joshi, Supernatural Literature and Horror (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 23. 23. Eileen Bowser, “1907: Movies and the Expansion of the Audience,” in American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 187. 24. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Group, 2003), 141. 25. Ibid., 144. 26. Ibid., 147. 27. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 23. 28. Mladen Dolar, “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October 58 (1991): 7. 29. Anonymous, The Art of Projection and Complete Magic Lantern Manual (London: E. A. Beckett, 1893), 158; “Local Lines,” Fremont Eagle, February 22, 1900, 5. 30. “Massachusetts,” New York Clipper, April 18, 1903, 186. 31. “Magician’s Vanishing Playing Cards,” New York Clipper, August 20, 1904, 588; “The Rage of London,” New York Clipper, September 2, 1905, 713. 32. “A New Music Pub. Company,” New York Clipper, October 17, 1903, 818. 33. Josephine Gro., “When Edgar Allan Poe Recited ‘The Raven,’” New York Clipper, October 31, 1903, 1. 34. “Méliès ‘Star’ Films,” New York Clipper, July 18, 1903, 500. 35. “Geo. Méliès ‘Star’ Films,” New York Clipper, October 17, 1903, 820. 36. “How the Cinematographer Works,” Moving Picture World, December 14, 1907, 660. 37. Littell McClung, “How He Works and How He Gets Many Wonderful Results,” Moving Picture World, August 29, 1908, 157. 38. “Selig Films,” Moving Picture World, October 19, 1907, 534. 39. “The Ghost Holiday,” Moving Picture World, September 21, 1907, 458; “Cave of the Spooks,” Moving Picture World, November 21, 1908, 410; “Cave of Spooks,” Moving Picture World, December 5, 1908, 449. 40. “Scullion’s Dream,” Moving Picture World, February 22, 1908, 147. 41. “Towards the Moon: or, A Child’s Dream,” Revised List of High Class Original Films (n.p.: 1908), 180. 42. “A New Comic Mysterious Film,” Moving Picture World, December 7, 1907, 650; “Mike the Model,” Revised List of High Class Original Films, 193. 43. “The Witch,” New York Clipper, December 22, 1906, 1173; “The Haunted Hotel,” New York Clipper, February 22, 1907, 44. 44. “Ghost Story,” Moving Picture World, December 12, 1908, 477. 45. “Just Retribution,” Moving Picture World, April 18, 1908, 354. 200

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Notes to Pages 66–71

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46. Clyde Martin, “Playing the Pictures,” Film Index, November 19, 1910, 27. 47. The Witch and the Cowboys was evidently also titled The Witch of the Ranch and was described as “a weird story of man’s superstition and fanatic brutality.” The intertwining of the western with superstitious themes will be more fully explored in chapter 3. “Western Features by the American Film Manufacturing Company,” Moving Picture World, June 3, 1911, 1261. 48. Clarence E. Sinn, “Music for the Picture,” Moving Picture World, August 12, 1911, 370. 49. Clarence E. Sinn, “Music for the Picture,” Moving Picture World, September 2, 1911, 618. 50. Charles R. Morris, “The People’s Theater at Portland,” Motography 6, November 1911, 210. 51. W. Stephen Bush, “The Compelling Harmony of the Whole,” Moving Picture World, July 22, 1911, 103. 52. “The Haunted Room,” Moving Picture World, January 6, 1912, 62. 53. “See ’Em As Ghosts,” Moving Picture World, April 12, 1913, 150. 54. “The Oysterman’s Gold,” Moving Picture World, July 3, 1909, 12. 55. “A Touching Mystery,” The Nickelodeon, November 15, 1910, 279. 56. “Ashley Miller,” Edison Kinetogram, May 1, 1912, 14. 57. “Balaoo,” Moving Picture World, May 17, 1913, 686. 58. Frederick Starr, “The World Before Your Eyes,” Moving Picture World, February 20, 1909, 194. 59. “Romantic Italy,” Moving Picture World, September 4, 1909, 319. 60. “Views of Genoa, Italy,” Moving Picture News, December 12, 1911, 45. 61. “On the Frontier of Thibet,” Motography 5, June 1911, 146. 62. “The Moving Picture Educator,” Moving Picture World, August 24, 1912, 866. 63. Antonia Lant, “The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein  and Gaylin Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 79. 64. John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995). 65. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 145. 66. “Biograph Ad,” Variety, February 13, 1909, 35. 67. “Stories of the Films,” Moving Picture World, February 13, 1909, 177. 68. Selig Promotional Supplement No. 158 (Chicago: Selig Polyscope Co., June 10, 1909), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 69. “The Moonstone,” Moving Picture World, June 19, 1909, 834. 70. Promotional Flier for The Moonstone, Selig Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 71. “The Idol’s Eye,” Moving Picture World, October 29, 1910, 1011. 72. “The Idol’s Eye,” Moving Picture World, November 12, 1910, 1119. 201

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Notes to Pages 71–77

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73. W. Stephen Bush, “SHE,” Moving Picture World, December 23, 1911, 976. 74. She (1911), Thanhouser Film Co., http://www.thanhouser.org/tcocd /Filmography_files/she.htm. 75. Bush, “SHE,” 976. 76. “The Vengeance of Egypt,” Moving Picture World, November 2, 1912, 412. 77. “The Vengeance of Egypt,” Moving Picture World, October 19, 1912, 251. 78. A.  L. Barrett, “Moving Pictures in Fairyland,” Moving Picture News, October 7, 1911, 13. 79. “The Evil Philter,” Moving Picture World, December 18, 1909, 851. 80. “The Mask of the Red Death,” Moving Picture News, September 23, 1911, 28; “Blood Vengeance,” Moving Picture World, January 13, 1912, 127. 81. Promotional Flier for The Witches’ Cavern, Selig Material, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 82. “The Totem’s Mark,” Moving Picture World, September 23, 1911, 890. 83. “The Shark God” Moving Picture News, April 26, 1913, 23. 84. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, “European Cinemas,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (New York: Routledge, 2004), 329. 85. Quoted in Abel, Red Rooster, 120. 86. Harrison Dent, “Tricks and Magic in Pictures,” Motography 5, April 1911, 35. 87. C. H. Claudy, “Impossibilities in the Plot,” Moving Picture World, July 1, 1911, 1495–1496. 88. John B. Rathburn, “Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting,” Motography 9, June 14, 1913, 428. 89. Abel, Red Rooster, 136. 90. “Klein Ad,” New York Clipper, August 20, 1904, 588. 91. “The Ghost of the Oven,” The Nickelodeon, November 1, 1910, 251. 92. “Richelieu,” Variety, June 8, 1910, 13. 93. “A Few Words on Film Merits,” Moving Picture News, September 14, 1912, 20. 94. “Pathé Advertisement,” Moving Picture World, August 3, 1912, 464–465. 95. “Foreign Films in the American Market,” New York Dramatic Mirror, February 12, 1913, 29. 96. “David Horsley Relates His Impressions of Trade Conditions in Europe,” Moving Picture News, September 13, 1913, 8. 97. “Miatt-Patents Department,” Moving Picture News, August 9, 1913, 22. 98. Rathburn, “Motion Picture Making,” 428. 99. Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 79. 100. D. W. Griffith’s The Devil (1908) is an interesting example here. In the film, an artist is lured into an illicit affair with his model by the Devil, who, 202

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Notes to Pages 77–85

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though not clearly visible to the other characters, wields an influence seen by the audience. The film seems coded as Southern European at least in terms of the costumes and the influence of supernatural forces as the crucial driving force of the narrative. In the end, the wife catches her husband and seeks revenge by pursuing her own illicit affair, ending with the husband shooting her and then himself. In the end the Devil is triumphant. 101. Quoted in Abel, Americanizing, 208. 102. Keil, Early American Cinema, 31. 103. “Incidental Story Permits of Interesting Photographic Illusions,” Film Daily, September 26, 1918, 4. 104. “Musings of ‘The Photoplay Philosopher,’” Motion Picture Story Magazine, June 1912, 137. 105. “The Plot That Failed,” Moving Picture World, June 26, 1909, 873.

CH A P TER 3: SUPER STITIOUS JOE AND THE R ISE OF THE A MER ICAN U NCAN N Y 1. Bannister Merwin, “The Future of the Photoplay,” Moving Picture World, June 1, 1912, 806. 2. Merwin, “The Future,” 805. 3. Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 193. 4. Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 31. 5. Julian Johnson, “The Shadow Stage,” Photoplay, August 1917, 86. 6. “The Call of the Blood,” Moving Picture World, October 5, 1912, 34. 7. “The Ghost of Self,” Moving Picture World, January 17, 1914, 289. 8. Eileen Bowser, History of the American Cinema: The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 55. 9. Keil, Early American Cinema, 34. 10. Lux Graphicus, “On the Screen,” Moving Picture World, December 10, 1910, 1291. 11. C.  H. Claudy, “It ‘Went Over.’” Moving Picture World, February 4, 1911, 231. 12. J. Stuart Blackton, “A Glimpse into the Past,” Moving Picture World, March 10, 1917, 1528. 13. Noël Burch, “Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 487. 14. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). 15. “Tricked into Giving His Consent,” Moving Picture World, October 10, 1908, 287. 203

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Notes to Pages 85–92

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16. “Baby’s Ghost,” Moving Picture World, February 17, 1912, 616. 17. “The Haunted House,” Moving Picture World, May 10, 1913, 596. 18. “The Ghost of a Bargain,” Cinema News and Property Gazette, March 12, 1913, 60. 19. “A Deal in Real Estate,” Moving Picture World, March 28, 1914, 1695. 20. Notes of Hampton Del Ruth on Haunted House Story, n.d., box H7-2, folder 148, Mack Sennett Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 21. Brent E. Walker, Mack Sennett’s Fun Factor: A History and Filmography of His Studio and His Keystone and Mack Sennett Comedies (Jefferson, NC: Wallflower Press, 2010), 343. 22. “Musings of ‘The Photoplay Philosopher,’” Motion Picture Story Magazine, June 1912, 137. 23. “He Wouldn’t Go Under a Ladder,” Moving Picture World, June 2, 1909, 879. 24. “Seven Years Bad Luck,” Moving Picture World, April 19, 1913, 300. 25. “Princess Films Ad,” Reel Life, November 1, 1913, 26; “Superstitious Mary,” Motion Picture News, March 29, 1913, 28. 26. An Evil Power (1911), Selig Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA (Digital Collections). 27. “Photoplay Deals with the Occult,” Motography, November 15, 1913, 341–342. 28. “The Soul Mate,” Moving Picture World, December 26, 1914, 1840. My friend Lindsey Decker points out that the fact that Harold is a white male may be the reason his potentially mystical power of foresight is not seen as ridiculous or dangerous. 29. “Love and Spirits,” Motography, December 26, 1914, 913. 30. Moya Luckett, Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907–1917 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 56. 31. “Beware of Strangers,” Moving Picture World, February 10, 1917, 876. 32. Gilson Willets, “Notes on Beware of Strangers,” folder 30, Selig Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 33. Here I want to be clear that I am not working in a comparative mode and do not mean to suggest an actual distinction between American production or viewing practices and those in other emerging national cinemas. Rather, I mean to argue that these uncanny films were explicitly marked as American in both their production and the discussions of them. 34. Rose O’Salem-Town (1910), dir. D.  W. Griffith, https://archive.org /details/RoseOSalemTown. 35. Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 22. 204

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Notes to Pages 92–99

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36. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 1. 37. Bernd Herzogenrath, “The American Adam Revisited: American Literature, (National) Identity, and the Logic of Belatedness,” in Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam, ed. Viorica Patea and Maria Diaz (Salamanca, ES: Edicions Universidad de Salamanca, 2001), 65. 38. Nanna Verhoeff, “Moving Indians: Deconstructing the Other in Moving Images (1895–1915),” European Review of Native American Studies 21 (2007): 46. 39. “Rose O’Salem Town,” Moving Picture World, October 8, 1910, 813. 40. “Rose O’Salem Town,” Nickelodeon, October 1, 1910, 201. 41. “The Ghost,” Moving Picture News, August 9, 1913, 26. 42. “The Haunted House,” Moving Picture News, August 19, 1911, 13. 43. “Ghosts at the Circle X Ranch,” Moving Picture World, June 1, 1912, 856. 44. “The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel,” Reel Life, October 18, 1913, 9. 45. There is evidently some question about how much involvement DeMille had with the directing of The Ghost Breaker. For more on this issue, see Henry Nicollela, “The Ghost Breaker (1914),” in American Silent Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Feature Films, 1913–1929, ed. John Soister and Henry Nicolella (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 219. 46. Ibid., 219. 47. W. Stephen Bush, “The Ghost Breaker,” Moving Picture World, December 19, 1914, 1692. 48. “‘The Ghost Breaker’ Pleases,” Motography, December 19, 1914, 834. 49. Ibid. 50. Quoted in Nicollela, “The Ghost Breaker,” 219. 51. Quoted in ibid., 222. 52. Ben Singer notes that the “girl detective” serials often depicted their heroines as having “traditionally ‘masculine’ qualities: physical strength and endurance, self-reliance, courage, social authority, and freedom to explore novel experiences outside the domestic sphere.” See Ben Singer, “Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly,” Camera Obscura 8 (1990): 90. 53. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 129. 54. H.R. 10384, Pub. L. No. 301, 39 Stat. 874, 64th Congress (February 5, 1917). 55. Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 7. 56. Daniel Bernardi, “Introduction,” The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 5. 57. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 54. 205

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Notes to Pages 99–106

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58. Gerard R. Butters Jr., Black Manhood on the Silent Screen (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 34, 35. 59. “A Persistent Suitor,” Moving Picture World, January 2, 1909, 15. 60. “Their Christmas Turkey,” Moving Picture World, December 28, 1912, 1338. 61. “George Washington Jones,” The Kinetogram, October 1914, 14. 62. “The Evil Eye,” Moving Picture News, October 25, 1913, 47. 63. “The Ghost of the Hacienda,” Motography, September 20, 1913, 211. 64. “The Devil Fox of the North” and “The Legend of the Phantom Tribe,” Moving Picture World, February 28, 1914, 1090. 65. “Vitagraph Notes,” Moving Picture News, June 21, 1913, 23. 66. Cornelius O’Shea, “An Appeal to the Savage,” Moving Picture World, July 8, 1911, 1570. 67. Louis Reeves Harrison, “Your Program,” Moving Picture World, February 14, 1914, 785.

CH AP TER 4: LITER A RY MONSTER S AND UPLIFTING HOR ROR S 1. Tom Gunning, “From the Opium Den to the Theatre of Morality,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London: Routledge, 2004), 147. 2. “The Psychic Force and Value of the Moving Picture,” Moving Picture World, June 24, 1911, 1. 3. Jas. S. McQuade, “Chicago Letter,” Moving Picture World, December 11, 1915, 1992. 4. For a more comprehensive history of film censorship, see Ira Carmen, Movies, Censorship, and the Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1967). 5. Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio Industrial Commission, 236 US 230, US Supreme Court (1915), 238. 6. “Pearce, of Maryland, Succeeds Neff as League Head,” Moving Picture News, July 18, 1914, 19. 7. “Nation Board Plans Big Campaign,” Motion Picture News, August 22, 1914, 28. 8. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916), 155. 9. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 18. 10. “The Wonders of a Picture Factory,” Motography 6, July 1911, 1. 11. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 19. 12. “The Moving Picture as a Moralizer,” Motion Picture Story Magazine, April 1911, 122. 206

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Notes to Pages 106–114

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13. “Public Opinion Controls,” Moving Picture World, April 22, 1911, 874. 14. Robert E. Pearson and William Uricchio, “How Many Times Will Caesar Bleed in Sport: Shakespeare and the Cultural Debate about Moving Pictures,” The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London: Routledge, 2004), 157. 15. James. S. McQuade, “Fourth Annual Convention,” Moving Picture World, February 7, 1914, 681. 16. Pearson and Uricchio, “How Many Times,” 158. 17. “Uplifting the Drama, as the Office Philosopher Sees It,” New York Times, July 16, 1911, 15. 18. Noted in Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 144. 19. Karen Laird suggests that one reason the adaptation of Shelley is so limited is the pledge not to include the repulsive aspects of the source novel. See Karen Laird, The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848–1920 (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 116. 20. Edison Studios, Dramatic Assembly #287, Frankenstein, February 14, 1910. Museum of Modern Arts, New York. 21. For more discussion of the film’s production see, Frederick C. Wiebel Jr., Edison’s Frankenstein (Albany, GA: BearManor, 2010). 22. “Frankenstein (Dramatic),” Kinetogram, March 15, 1910, 3. 23. “Bijou Theatre Ad,” Austin Daily Herald, June 2, 1910, 5. 24. Edison, Scenario #287. 25. “Frankenstein (Dramatic),” Edison Dramatic Synopsis #287. 26. Edison Incidental Music #287, Frankenstein, February 11, 1910 (New York: Museum of Modern Art). 27. Diego Saglia, “‘The Frightened Stage’: The Sensational Proliferation of Ghost Melodrama in the 1820s,” Studies in Romanticism 54 (2015): 270. 28. In ibid., 270. 29. For more on the adaptations of Dante’s epic poem in early cinema, see Amilcare Iannucci (ed.), Dante, Cinema, and Television (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 30. “Dante’s Inferno,” Moving Picture World, July 22, 1911, 145. 31. “Paradise and Purgatory,” Moving Picture News, April 20, 1912, 8. 32. Inez Hedges, Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Struggles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 13. 33. “Legend of Sleep Hollow,” Moving Picture News, August 20, 1912, 40. 34. “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Moving Picture World, May 4, 1912, 427. 35. H. F. Hoffman, “Motion Picture Backgrounds,” Moving Picture World, August 6, 1910, 288. 36. “The Vivisectionist,” Moving Picture World, July 10, 1915, 308. 37. “Letter to Orrin G. Cox,” August 25, 1914, National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Children and the Motion Pictures, box 19, New York Public Library, New York. 207

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Notes to Pages 115–119

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38. Bowser, The Transformation, 45. 39. In Gillian Cookson, “Engineering Influences on Jekyll and Hyde,” in Robert Louis Stevenson Reconsidered: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Wiliam B. Jones Jr. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 117. 40. Ibid. 41. Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 122. 42. Stephen Karschay, Degeneration, Normativity, and the Gothic at Fin De Siècle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 43. Thomas L. Reed Jr., The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Victorian Alcohol Debate (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 9. 44. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” New York Times, May 10, 1887, 5. 45. Andrew A. Erish, Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 27. 46. “The Modern Dr. Jekyll,” Moving Picture World, December 31, 1909, 960. 47. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Moving Picture World, March 7, 1908, 194. 48. “Lecturing the Pictures,” Moving Picture World, February 24, 1912, 712. 49. “The Observer,” Picture Play, July 1920), 41. 50. “Barrymore in Classic,” Kansas City Star, April 13, 1920, 2. 51. Margaret MacDonald, “A Trip to New Rochelle,” Moving Picture News, January 20, 1912, 30. 52. “Barrymore in Film Classic,” Kansas City Star, April 13, 1920, 2. 53. For more on Barrymore and his career, see Michael A. Morrison, John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 54. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Manitoba Free Press, April 7, 1921, 17. 55. For more on this shift in acting styles, see Roberta Pearson’s insightful work: The Eloquent Gesture: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 56. “The Jekyll-Hyde Work,” New York Times, April 4, 1920), X7. 57. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Hutchinson News, October 18, 1920, 6. 58. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Moving Picture World, September 23, 1910, 685. 59. “Thanhouser Films ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’” Moving Picture World, January 13, 1912, 128. 60. “Answers to Inquiries,” Motion Picture Story Magazine, June 1913, 160. 61. “Martin Theatre,” Lock Haven Express, September 29, 1920, 4. 62. Robert H. Zeiger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 2. 63. James Chapman, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present (London: Reaktion Press, 2003), 77. 64. Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: American in the World Film Market, 1907–1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 100.

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Notes to Pages 119–127

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65. Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 5. 66. Pierre Sorlin, “Cinema and the Memory of the Great War,” in The First World War and Popular Cinema: 1914 to the Present, ed. Michael Paris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 13. 67. For a much more thorough analysis of this film see, David Robinson, Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari, 2nd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2013). 68. “California Chatter,” Motion Picture Magazine, August 1921, 99. 69. “Riot over Germany Feature Picture: ‘Cabinet of Caligari’ Egged on Coast,” Variety, May 13, 1921, 41. 70. “Across the Silversheet,” Motion Picture Magazine, August 1921, 70. 71. “Foreign-Made Movies for American Theaters,” Dearborn Independent, December 3, 1921, 12. 72. Ibid. 73. “On the Camera Coast,” Motion Picture Magazine, November 1921, 70. 74. Frederic J. Haskin, “The Foreign Film Invasion,” Portsmouth Daily Times, May 30, 1921, 8. 75. Frederick F. Schrader, “Popularity of Foreign Film Productions with American Screen Magnates, Arouses Actors to Real Action,” The Lima News and Times-Democrat, June 26, 1921, 19. 76. “Millions,” Wid’s Daily, May 16, 1921, 4. 77. I am embarrassed to note that in an earlier work, Projected Fears, I cavalierly minimized the cultural importance of the early German horrific films— Caligari, Golem, and Nosferatu—based on the rejection of these films in California. In a way, the current book is an effort to rectify my earlier dismissal. 78. “‘Caligari’ Scores at Capitol, New York,” Motion Picture News, April 23, 1921, 2695. 79. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Motion Picture News, April 16, 1921, 2617. 80. Quoted in “Newspaper Opinions,” Wid’s Daily, April 6, 1921, 4. 81. Quoted in ibid., 82. Dorothy Thompson, “German Movies Are Queer to Americans,” Berkeley Daily Gazette, October 6, 1922, 14. 83. “6th St. Theatre,” Coshocton (Ohio) Tribune, October 21, 1921, 2; “Answer Man,” Motion Picture Magazine, July 1921, 113. 84. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Motion Picture News, April 16, 1921, 2617. 85. “Films Viewed and Reviewed,” Visual Education, June 1921, 33. 86. S. S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 197. 87. Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 123. 88. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton University Press, 1966), 71. 89. “We Need Film Competition,” Motion Picture Magazine, August 1921, 58.

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Notes to Pages 128–132

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90. Herbert Howe, “A Trip through Europe’s Filmland,” Picture-Play Magazine, March 1921, 84. 91. Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Film, trans. P. Morris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 48. 92. Quoted in “Miscellaneous Notes,” Visual Education, September 1921, 28. 93. Thompson, “German Movies,” 14. 94. Ibid. 95. “Speaking of Picture Values,” Exhibitors Trade Review, January 7, 1922, 379. 96. Howe, “A Trip,” 21. 97. “Letters,” Motion Picture Magazine, November 1921, 81. 98. Charles Miller, “Of the Past—The Present—And the Future,” Wid’s Daily, April 24, 1921, 79. 99. “Another One Which Exhibitors Should Judge for Themselves,” Wid’s Daily, June 26, 1921, 2. 100. For more on the production and reception of Murnau’s film, see Cristina Massaccesi, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Leighton Buzzard, UK: Auteur, 2015). 101. “Foreign Films Here,” The Film Daily, February 10, 1924, 10. 102. Caroline Bell, “The Next Big Spectacle,” Picture Play Magazine, March 1925, 95. 103. “Universal Orders First Structural Steel Set,” Universal Weekly, August 9, 1924, 18. 104. “‘Phantom’ Has First Showing,” Variety, August 29, 1925, 25. 105. “Laemmle Sails for Europe, Announces 12 Spring Jewels,” Universal Weekly, July 19, 1924, 27. 106. Quoted in I.  G. Edmonds, Big U: Universal in the Silent Days (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1977), 135. 107. Malcolm H. Oettinger, “You Get What You Want,” Picture Play Magazine, May 1923, 60–61, 90. 108. Ian Conrich, “Before Sound: Universal, Silent Cinema, and the Last of the Horror-Spectaculars,” in The Horror Film, ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 43. 109. Ibid., 44. 110. The Man Who Laughs will not be extensively explored here as it comes a bit later during the period that I explore later. Additionally, the fi lm receives considerable attention in Conrich’s essay. 111. “Carl Laemmle Addresses Invisible Audience,” Universal Weekly, November 1, 1924, 16. 112. The rise of Will Hays is deeply tied to both the uplift movement and to a series of Hollywood scandals, most notably the trial of comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle for rape and murder. For more on this period of controversy and scandal, see Greg D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics,

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Notes to Pages 132–137

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and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and my Controversial Cinema: The Films That Outraged America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). 113. “The News Reel,” Picture Play Magazine, March 1923, 86. 114. “Universal to Film ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ Hugo’s Great Novel,” Universal Weekly, September 2, 1922, 27. 115. “Watch This Column,” Photoplay Magazine, May 1925, 15. 116. “Famous Authors’ Books and Plays in Universal’s Perfect Thirty-Six,” Universal Weekly, March 29, 1924, 14. 117. “Cathedral of Notre Dame to Be Built by Universal,” Universal Weekly, December 9, 1922, 15. 118. “Around the World at Universal City,” Picture Play Magazine, August 1923, 55. 119. George Landy, “At Universal City,” The Photodramatist, February 1923, 30; “Prosperous Conditions on Coast,” Motion Picture News, April 21, 1923, 1889. 120. “Construction Plans for ‘Phantom of the Opera’ Promise to Eclipse All Past Engineering Feats,” Universal Weekly, September 6, 1924, 27. 121. “The Phantom of the Opera,” Universal Weekly, November 29, 1924, 8. 122. “Universal Moviegrams,” Universal Weekly, October 18, 1924, 10. 123. “To Devise a Phantom” and “Rasch Ballet in Phantom,” Moving Picture World, August 22, 1925, 830. 124. “More and More Spectacular,” Picture Play Magazine, April 1925, 78. 125. “Lon Chaney to Be Starred in ‘Phantom of the Opera,’” Universal Weekly, 28 June 1924), 12. 126. Myrtle Gebhart, “Would You Know Lon Chaney?,” Picture Play Magazine, April 1923, 58. 127. Ibid., 59. 128. Doris Denbo, “The Phantom of Hollywood,” Picture Play Magazine, April 1925, 88. 129. Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 210. 130. Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 110. 131. Gebhart, “Would You Know,” 84. 132. Denbo, “The Phantom,” 100. 133. “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Exhibitors Trade Review, September 15, 1923, 717. 134. “Carl Laemmle Starts Something,” Picture Play Magazine, April 1923, 26. 135. “A Chicago Hunchback,” Motion Picture Magazine, June 1924, 120. 136. “The Phantom of the Opera,” Picture and Picturegoer, February 1925, 52, 53. 137. “Western Campaigns Put over Phantom,” Moving Picture World, January 2, 1926, 86.

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Notes to Pages 137–143

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138. “Universal Orders First,” 18. 139. “The Phantom of the Opera,” Photoplay, May 1925, 45. 140. “Phantom of the Opera,” Variety, September 9, 1925, 35. 141. “Phantom,” Moving Picture World, February 13, 1926, 665. 142. Conrich suggests these films resonate strongly with the public anxiety over Darwinian theories of human evolution and our connection to a deeper, bestial nature. 143. One additional piece of evidence that the Phantom’s “reveal” was meant to have special meaning comes from the score sent out to theaters screening the film. The notes called for the moment of the unmasking to be accompanied by a “Tympani roll [that] should be produced immediately followed by the Phantom Theme under Title ‘I Shall Prove To You.’” In “Music Score Compiled by G. Hinrichs and M. Winkler, Original Compositions (excerpt Love Theme) by G. Hinrichs For PHANTOM OF THE OPERA,” (n.d.) Rudy Behlmer Papers, folder 162, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. 144. Telegram to Carl Laemmle, April 29, 1925, Rudy Behlmer Papers, folder 163, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

CH A P TER 5: MYSTER IES IN OLD DA R K HOUSES 1. George Kleine, “Copy of Mr. Kleine’s Letter to the Chicago Tribune,” Motion Picture World, April 20, 1907, 102. 2. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Lethbridge (Alberta) Daily Herald, June 28, 1921, 9; “Report on Picture,” March 9, 1925, Rudy Behlmer Papers, folder 162, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. 3. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revisited,” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42. 4. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 44. 5. Ibid., 45, 48. 6. Quoted in ibid., 302. 7. See, for example, Donald McCaffrey and Christopher P. Jacobs, Guide to the Silent Years of American Cinema (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 70. 8. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44 (1991): 4. 9. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 44. 10. “The Bat,” Motion Picture News, March 27, 1926, 1418. 11. “The Cat and the Canary,” Photoplay, July 1927, 54; “The Cat and the Canary,” Motion Picture News, May 20, 1927, 1965.

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Notes to Pages 143–151

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12. “Columbia Supplying Popular Demand,” Motion Picture News, September 19, 1925, 1385. 13. Quoted in “Metro’s ‘The Monster’ Is Given a Chorus of Praise from Critics,” Moving Picture World, March 7, 1925, 88. 14. “Roland West Buys Picture Rights to ‘The Bat,’” Motion Picture News, September 26, 1925, 1481. 15. For more thoughtful analysis of the first Red Scare and its impact on American culture, see Howard Abramowitz, “The Press and the Red Scare, 1919–1912,” in Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America, ed. Ronald Edsforth and Larry Bennett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 61–80; Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2011); and Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955). 16. “Editorial,” Saturday Evening Post 192, November 1, 1919, 28. 17. Uncredited review of The Cat and the Canary, Chamberlin Scrapbooks #23, Manuscript Collection #123, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 18. Mourdant Hall, “Mr. Leni’s Clever Film,” New York Times, September 18, 1927, 5. 19. Uncredited review of The Cat and the Canary. 20. Hall, “Mr. Leni’s Clever Film,” 5. 21. “The House of Horror,” Harrison’s Reports, June 22, 1929, 99. 22. “The House of Horror,” Photoplay, May 1929, 57. 23. T.  O. Service, “The Unholy Night,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 12, 1929, 40. 24. P. G. Vaughan, “The Last Warning,” Exhibitors Herald-World, March 30, 1929, 69. 25. “Ballot Stops Show,” The Film Daily, February 3, 1929, 6. 26. “Studio Gossip,” Exhibitors Daily Review, October 1, 1928, 6. 27. Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 1. 28. Charlene Bunnell, “The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 81. 29. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990). 30. Lotte Eisner sees Leni’s filmmaking as amplifying Weine’s work on Caligari and infusing the Expressionistic aesthetic with a more playful attitude to evoke mystery. See Eisner’s The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 115. 31. “Decker Back Again,” Motion Picture News, December 18, 1926, 2318.

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Notes to Pages 151–155

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32. Paul Gulick, “Shadows as a Movie Motif,” Amateur Movie Makers, March 1927, 10. 33. Eisner, Haunted Screen, 125. 34. William A. Johnston, “Hollywood at First-Hand,” Motion Picture News, April 22, 1927, 1433. 35. Gulick, “Shadows,” 11. 36. Johnston, “Hollywood,” 1432. 37. “Using Chester Conklin to Restore Shattered Nerves,” The Film Spectator, December 15, 1928, 4. 38. Mourdant Hall, “Synthetic Spookery,” New York Times, December 23, 1928, 7. 39. “Chaney’s Newest an Absorbing Film,” Helena Independent, December 9, 1927, 2. 40. “When Ghosts Go Visiting,” Picture Play Magazine, June 1927, 73. 41. Quoted in “Metro’s ‘The Monster’ Is Given a Chorus of Praise,” 88. 42. “The Bat,” Photoplay, May 1926, 48. 43. “The Gorilla,” Motion Picture News, December 2, 1927, 1755. 44. Selig advertisement, Billboard, May 27, 1905, 48. 45. “Heart Throbs,” Photoplay, May 1928, 133. 46. Quoted in “Newspaper Opinions, New York,” Film Daily, March 21, 1926. 47. J. F., “Chicago Personalities,” Exhibitors Herald-World, January 19, 1929, 66. 48. Donald Beaton, “As They Appeal to the Youth,” The Film Spectator, December 8, 1928, 10. 49. Uncredited review of Seven Footprints to Satan, Chamberlin Scrapbooks #15, Manuscript Collection #123, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 50. Harry Houdini, A Magician among the Spirits (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), xvi. 51. Cathy Gutierrez, Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 170. 52. “Which, Indeed?” Motion Picture Magazine, January 1927, 121. 53. The policy brochure that circulated was undated, but an announcement of a set of standards was made by the League in 1921. See “Lecture Course on Motion Pictures,” Educational Film Magazine, December 1921, 16. 54. “Policy and Standards of National Motion Picture League,” National Board or Review, Correspondence and Papers, box 20, Children and the Motion Pictures, New York Public Library, New York. 55. Quoted in “The Bat,” Motion Picture News, June 19, 1926, 2908. 56. George T. Pardy, “The Bat,” Motion Picture News, March 27, 1926, 1418. 57. T. O. Service, “The Gorilla,” Exhibitors Herald-World, January 7, 1928, 62. 58. Hall, “Synthetic Spookery,” 7. 214

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Notes to Pages 155–161

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59. Pardy, “The Bat,” 1418. 60. Quoted in “The Gorilla,” Motion Picture News, December 23, 1927, 1994. 61. “The Terror,” Exhibitors Daily Review, August 18, 1928, 3. 62. Freddie Shader, “The Last Warning,” Motion Picture News, January 12, 1929, 139. 63. John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 64. Marguerite Orndorff, “The Theatrical Field,” The Educational Screen, September 1926, 418. 65. “Using Chester Conklin to Restore Shattered Nerves,” 4. 66. “The Gorilla,” Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, January 7, 1928, 62; quoted in “The Gorilla,” Moving Picture News, December 31, 1927, 2102. 67. “Metro’s ‘The Monster’ Is Given Chorus of Praise from Critics,” 88. 68. “Something Always Happens,” Harrison’s Reports, March 31, 1928, 51. 69. “Posters Slides,” Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 70. William A. Johnston, “Highlights of 1927,” Motion Picture News, December 30, 1927, 2014. 71. Louise E. Bisch, “Why You Like the Talkies,” New Movie Magazine, December 1929, 30. 72. Ibid., 31. 73. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound and the Origin of the Horror Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 121. 74. “1st National Signs with W. Electric,” Motion Picture News, July 21, 1928, 205. 75. Bisch, “Why You Like,” 114. 76. Alvin Connors, “For Crime out Loud,” Talking Screen, March 1930, 62–63. 77. “Reissuing of ‘Birth’ and Other Big Films Planned,” Film Daily, March 5, 1929, 2. 78. “Sound Pictures for Unwired Houses,” Motion Picture News, September 29, 1928, 989. 79. “Fans Write Dialogue for Six Silent Scenes of Film,” Exhibitors HeraldWorld, March 16, 1929, 56. 80. Connors, “For Crime,” 87. 81. Dorothy Donnell, “Gorifying the American Screen,” Motion Picture Classic, December 1928, 18. 82. Ibid., 19. 83. Ibid., 88. 84. “Weird Effects,” Variety, August 22, 1928, 20. 85. Mourdant Hall, “Sound and Spookery,” New York Times, December 17, 1928, 23. 86. “Eleventh Hour Flashes from the Film Studios,” Motion Picture Classics, December 1928, 8. 215

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Notes to Pages 162–169

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87. “Revolution Has Come in Film Thrillers Says Director,” First National Promotional Document. The Gorilla. Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 88. Ruth Morris, “Uncommon Chatter,” Variety, January 16, 1929, 49. 89. T.  O. Service, “The Last Warning,” Exhibitors Herald-World, January 26, 1929, 46. 90. J. H. Jenkins, “This and That,” Exhibitors Herald-World, December 28, 1929, 68. 91. “The Unholy Night,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 26, 1929, 68. 92. Murray Irwin, “The Last of Mr. Chaney?” Talking Screen, March 1930, 45. 93. Beaton, “As They Appeal,” 10. 94. T.  O. Service, “And, Then, Too,” Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, July 14, 1928, 53. 95. “Seven Footprints To Satan,” Exhibitors Herald-World, March 16, 1929, 63. 96. “The Bat,” Motion Picture News, May 29, 1926, 2574. 97. “The Last Warning,” Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, April 28, 1928, 66. 98. Rosa Reilly, “The Man Who Laughs,” Screenland, July 1928, 50.

CONCLUSION 1. “Universal Pictures,” Harrison’s Reports, October 11, 1930, 161, 164. 2. Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926– 1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 181. 3. Ibid., 443. 4. Douglas Gomery, “The Economics of the Horror Film,” in Horror Films: Current Research on Audience Preferences and Reactions, ed. James B. Weaver and Ron Tamobrini (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 55. 5. “Universal Pictures,” Harrison’s, 164. 6. Ralph Wilk, “A Little from the ‘Lots,’” Film Daily, October 28, 1930, 6. 7. Clive Hirschhorn reports that Dracula was their top-grossing film of 1931. Clive Hirschhorn, The Universal Story: The Complete History of the Studio and Its 2,641 Films (New York: Crown, 1983). 8. “Cal York’s Monthly Broadcast from Hollywood,” Photoplay, May 1931, 82. 9. “Ride with a Winner,” Variety, June 2, 1931, 28. 10. “U’s Full Program Set; Surprise of ‘Dracula,’” Variety, April 8, 1931, 7. 11. For a comprehensive and engaging account of the story’s many variations, see David Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). 12. “Liveright Advising,” Variety, July 16, 1930, 52.

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Notes to Pages 170–176

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13. Dora Albert, “What Gets Your Movie Money?,” Silver Screen, June 1931, 77. 14. “Dracula,” Photoplay, April 1931, 8; “Dracula,” Modern Screen Magazine, June 1931, 11. 15. Marguerite Orndorff, “The Theatrical Field,” The Educational Screen, April 1931, 118. 16. “Dracula,” Silver Screen, June 1931, 10. 17. “Dracula,” Screenland, May 1931, 85. 18. “Sign Bromfield to Write ‘Dracula’ Script for Universal,” Hollywood Filmograph, July 26, 1930, 19. 19. “Most Unusual Sets in U History Used to Film ‘Dracula,’” Exhibitors Herald-World, November 29, 1930, 37. 20. Motion Picture Almanac 1931 (Chicago: Quigley Publishing, 1932), 262. 21. “Dracula,” Harrison’s Reports, February 21, 1931, 31. 22. “Dracula,” New Movie Magazine, May 1931, 92. 23. “Dracula,” Production Code Administration Correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. L. Trotti, “Dracula—Universal—Trailer,” Production Code Administration Correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 28. Internal correspondence, December 4, 1931, Production Code Administration Correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 29. Jason S. Joy, letter to Will H. Hays, December 5, 1931, Production Code Administration Correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 30. James Fitzgerald, memo to C.  C. PettiJohn, May 27, 1932, Production Code Administration Correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 31. Albert, “What Gets Your Movie Money?,” 77. 32. “U Has Horror Cycle to Self,” Variety, April 8, 1931, 2. 33. Lamar Trotti, “Frankenstein,” November 1, 1931, Production Code Administration Correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 34. “U’s Wild Cycle,” Variety, November 17, 1931, 6; Jason S. Joy, letter to B.  F. Schulberg, December 1, 1931, Production Code Administration Correspondence, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 35. “Dracula,” Production Code Administration Correspondence, Marga-

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Notes to Pages 176–180

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ret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 36. “Warning Is Issued by Lightman against Too Many Horror Films,” Film Daily, December 28, 1931, 1, 8. 37. “‘Horror’ Films,” Boy’s Cinema, November 21, 1931, 2. 38. Ethel S. Cook, “Dracula,” Photoplay, June 1931, 146. 39. “Last of U Horror Cycle,” Film Daily, November 19, 1931, 2. 40. Kendall R. Phillips. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 6–8. 41. Gladys Hall, “The Human Love of Horror,” Manuscript Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 42. “Questions and Answers,” Photoplay, December 1931, 112. 43. “Glaser’s Heavy Ad Campaign Is Getting Box Office Results,” Motion Picture Herald, June 6, 1931, 57. 44. “Answers,” Silver Screen, September 1931, 69. 45. Rita Felski captures this cultural trend in her excellent book The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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Notes to Pages 180–186

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures.

Abbott, David P., 38, 52 Abel, Richard, 21, 61, 62, 82, 83, 85 actors, emergence of, as movie stars, 15–16, 141 adaption, literary, 9, 115, 121, 160. See also literary monsters; specific book or film advertising and promotion, 2–4, 10, 157, 159, 185; for Beware of Strangers (1917), 97–98; for The Bewitched Traveler (1904), 83; for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), 130, 134– 135; censorship and, 112, 119; for The Craving (1918), 85; for The Damnation of Faust (1903), 59; for Don Juan and Charles V (1912), 84; for Dracula (1931), 2, 135, 177, 180, 183; for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), 147–148; for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1924), 124; for early films, 55, 58, 74; for The Evil Eye (1913), 107; for The Evil Philter (1909), 79; An Evil Power (1920), 96; of fear, 159; foreign locations as, 74, 79–80; for Frankenstein (1910), 2–3, 116–117, 144; for The Ghost and the Hacienda (1913),

107; for The Golem (1920), 134; for The Haunted Hotel (1907), 71; for The Haunted House (1928), 166; for The Hindoo Dagger (1909), 75, 76; for The Hold-up of the Leadville Stage (1905), 158; for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), 135, 137–143; for The Infernal Caldron and the Phantasmal Vapors (1903), 58; for Inferno (1911), 118; for The Last Warning (1929), 154, 168; for Latino films, 107; for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1912), 118–119; literary adaptations and, 121; for Méliès’s fi lms, 55, 58–59, 69, 71; for Mexican Legend (1909), 107; for Mike the Model (1907), 71; movies stars as, 15–16; for Paradise (1912), 118; for The Phantom of the Opera (1925), 135– 136, 137, 138–143, 148; prizes as, 143, 154, 168; for Purgatory (1912), 118; of race, 107, 108; for A Sister to Salome (1920), 124; taglines, 65–66, 71, 166, 180; of uplifting films, 108, 112–113, 116–117, 118, 119, 137; use of weird in, 65, 68, 69; for When Ghost Meets Ghost (1913), 72–73; for The Witch

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advertising and promotion (continued) (1906), 71; for The Witch’s Revenge (1903), 58 African Americans, 106–107, 152 Albert, Dora, 176, 179 Altman, Rick: on early cinema, 15; on genre, 4, 18, 19, 20; on narrative style, 16; on national community, 23 Amateur Movie Makers, 155 Ambrosio Films, 80 American Adam, 99–101, 103 American exceptionalism, 68, 75, 98– 99, 100, 173, 183 American Film Manufacturing Company, 71, 107 “American films,” defined, 15, 127–129, 134, 181 American Legion, 129 American Progressivism, 127–128 American rationalism, 7, 8, 16, 66, 68, 79, 173 American realism: audiences and, 136, 144, 154–155; gruesomeness and, 137, 141–142, 173, 182; set design and, 132–134; shift toward, 82, 83, 84– 85, 88–89, 185; suspense and, 154– 155, 168–169; synchronized sound and, 168–170; uplift movement and, 113, 137 American uncanny, 87–109, 173, 182– 183, 204n33; defined, 7–8; emergence of, 89; masculine identity and, 98–109; mise en chaîne of, 94– 95; mystery thrillers and, 149; racial susceptibility to superstition, 104– 109; rhetorical frame of, 144–145 Amirpour, Ana Lily, 1 “An Appeal to the Savage” (O’Shea), 108 anarchism, 152–153 Anderson, Benedict, 23 Anderson, Carolyn, 23 Anderson, Robert, 63 Annabelle (2014), 1 220

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Ansbach (writer), 39 apocalyptic horror, 128–135 Apparition, The (1903), 69 Arabian Theater, An (1912), 74 Arbuckle, Rosco “Fatty,” 210n112 Aristotle, 193n75 Armat, Thomas, 15 Armat Moving Pictures Company, 15 Aronson, Micheal, 62 Arthur, Johnny, 163 “art of amusement,” 115, 117 Art of Conjuring Made Easy, The (publication), 39 Association of Edison Licensees, 82 atavism, 120 Atlas films, 73 audiences, 174–176, 181; bodily responses from, 50, 111, 143–145, 148– 150, 157, 158–161, 169, 173, 192n55; censorship and, 129–130, 160–161; educating, 41–42, 97–98; emotional responses from, 55, 160–161; Eurocentism and, 106; first encounters of, with moving pictures, 26, 28; growing sophistication of, 83– 85, 88–89, 136, 144; immigrant, 108; participation of, 154–155; popularity of foreign films among, 129–130; prizes for, 143, 154, 168; record attendances, 130; riots among, 129– 130; viewing ethic of, 145. See also social class Au Secours! (Help!) (1924), 150–151, 165 Australia, 1 Avery, Charles, 94 Ayres, Sydney, 96, 97

Babadook, The (2014), 1 Baby’s Ghost (1912), 92 Badger, Charles, 94 Badreux, Jean, 26 Baggot, King, 121, 124 Balaoo (1913), 73

Index

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Balderston, John, 2, 175–176 Barber, X. Theodore, 41 Barnouw, Erik, 37, 38 Barrett, A. L., 79 Barrymore, John, 121, 122, 123, 126, 139, 140, 154, 170 Bat, The (1926), 151, 152, 158–159, 161– 163, 168, 171 Bat Whisperer, The (1930), 168 Baudry, Leo, 18 Beaton, Donald, 159, 170–171 Bell, Caroline, 135 Benson, Thomas, 23 Berenstein, Rhona, 5 Bernardi, Daniel, 106 Beware of Strangers (1917), 97–98, 105 Bewitched Traveler, The (1904), 83 Bewitch Inn, The (1897), 58 Binder, J. W., 112, 113 Biograph Company, 15, 70, 75–77, 106 Birth of a Nation, The (1915), 168 Bisch, Louis E., 166–167 Bison Motion Pictures, 107 blackface, 77, 107 Blackton, J. Stuart, 51–52, 55, 89, 181 Black Witch, The (1906), 77 Blake, Linnie, 6, 23–24 Blakeman, Rufus, 33, 35 Blakesley, David, 9 Blitz, Signor, 34, 35 Blood Vengeance (1912), 80 bodily performances, 138, 139–145, 178, 182 “body genres,” 148–150 bolshevism, 152–153 Booth, Walter, 51, 55, 145 Bordwell, David, 25 Bowser, Eileen, 61, 62, 66, 88, 114, 119 Boy’s Cinema, 180 Brandt, Joe, 151 British Board of Film Classification, 180 British Columbia Board of Censors, 178 Bromfield, Louis, 177 221

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Brown, J. H., 36, 39–40 Browning, Tod, 156, 158, 175, 179, 182 Bryant, Donald, 9 budgets, 1, 136–137, 174–176 Bunnell, Charlene, 155 Burch, Noël, 45–46, 88, 89 Burger, Eugene, 38 Burstyn v. Wilson, 112 Bush, W. Stephen, 72, 77, 104 Bushby, W. F., 145 Butter, Gerard, Jr., 106 Butzel, Marcia, 22

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1920), 4, 113, 128–136, 133, 155–156, 182, 209n77 Capitol Theater (New York), 130 Carroll, Noël, 19, 53, 155 Casper the Friendly Ghost, 19 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole), 24, 58 Cat and the Canary, The (1927), 8, 148, 151, 153, 158, 163, 164, 175 Cat Creeps, The (1931), 175 Catholicism, 24 Cave of the Spooks (1908), 70 Caylor, E. H., 34 Celtic Gothic literature, 24 censorship: audiences and, 129–130, 160–161; emerging morality and, 110–113, 119; of foreign films, 130, 132, 178–179; nickelodeon boom and, 65, 110 Champion Film Company, 81 Chaney, Lon: bodily performance of, 138, 139–145, 178, 182; death of, 168; gruesomeness and, 16, 135, 141–144, 160, 172, 178, 182; in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), 135, 138, 139– 145; legacy of, 182; in The Monster (1925), 151–152; in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), 135, 136, 137, 139–145, 140; popularity of, 172; stardom of, 160; talkies and, 168, 170; in The Unholy Three (1925), 168

Index

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Chapman, James, 127 Chicago Daily Tribune, 104 children, effects of film on, 64, 82, 160– 161, 180 Child’s Dream, A (1907), 70 Chinese culture, 108 Chomón, Segundo de, 52, 55, 63, 70, 145, 181 Christensen, Benjamin, 151, 154, 161, 169 “cinema of attractions,” 7, 13, 44–45, 46–47, 63–64, 68 cinematic texts, defined, 6 Civil War, 22–23, 29–31, 35, 43 classical narrative style, 16, 81, 89–90 Claudy, C. H., 83, 88 codes, film, 8–9, 178 Cohen, Paula, 22 Collier, John, 14, 64 Collins, Wilkie, 76 colonialism, 99–101 Columbia Pictures, 151 Columbia University, 160–161 comedy/comedy genre, 157–166; American uncanny and, 92, 98, 109; blackface and, 107; categorization and, 55; as counterpoint to horror, 161, 182; as “genre of discontinuity,” 7, 53; haunted houses and, 94, 103–14, 171; language of, in promotion, 58, 71– 72; musical comedy, 140; romantic comedies, 91, 92; rural, 48, 86; slapstick, 13–14, 85, 153, 161–162; spiritualism and, 97; use of the weird and, 72–73, 161. See also magic tricks/ trick films comedy-thrillers, 103–14, 150, 153, 157–166 Comic Relief (Morrell), 162 Conjuring, The (2013), 1 Conklin, Chester, 161, 163 Connors, Alvin, 167, 168–169 Conrich, Ian, 136–137, 212n142 Cookson, Gillian, 119–120 222

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copyright, 62, 135 Cox, Orrin, 119 Crafton, Donald, 174 Craving, The (1918), 85 credulity, 31–36; American values and, 98–109; cultural dynamics of, 7, 43–44, 50, 54–56, 60, 65, 83, 90–91, 94–95, 106–107; dangers of, 38–41, 102; demise of, 85–86, 89–91; error of, 94–95; excessive, 49–50, 60, 65, 93–95, 104–105; social class and, 102, 105–106; sound technology and, 168–169. See also skepticism; susceptibility Cruikshank, George, 32 Cruze, James, 121, 125 Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (Hulfish), 52

Daily Iowa Capital, 26, 28 Damnation of Faust, The (1903), 59 Dante, 118 Darwin, Charles, 120, 212n142 Daven, Richard Alfred, 33 Davis, Michael Marks, 14 Dawley, J. Searle, 116 Deal in Real Estate, A (1914), 93–94, 154 Deane, Hamilton, 2, 175–176 DeBauche, Leslie Midkiff, 128 Decker, Lindsey, 204n28 deCordova, Richard, 141 Del Ruth, Hampton, 94 DeMille, Cecille B., 103, 104, 109 Denbo, Doris, 140–141, 142 Denmark, 120–121 Dent, Harrison, 82 Der Freischütz (opera), 118 Der Januskopf (1920), 121 Devil (as character), 48–52, 58, 59, 118. See also Satan Devil, The (1908), 202n100 Devil Fox of the North, The (1914), 107 Devil in a Convent, The (1899), 48, 58

Index

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Devils (Wall), 48–49 Dewey, John, 162 Diableries, 59 Dickey, Paul, 103 Dircks, Henry, 40–41 discursive frame, 3, 4–6, 25 Dixie Duo Down South (1910), 106 Dolar, Mladen, 67 Done in Oil (1917), 94, 105 Don Juan and Charles V (1912), 84 Donnell, Dorothy, 169 Dracula (1931), 2, 8, 109, 135, 167, 175– 185, 184 Dracula (play), 2, 175–176 Dracula (Stoker), 175–176 Drawing Lesson, The (1903), 69 dreams and hallucinations, 70, 85, 124 Dream Woman, The (1914), 119 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908), 4, 5, 120, 121, 125 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1910), 120, 124 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912), 120–121, 122, 125 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913), 121, 124, 125–126 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), 121, 122– 124, 123, 126, 147–148 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), 5, 180, 182, 184–185 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (play), 68, 120, 125 duality, 119–126

Éclair Company, 74, 107, 118–119 Edison Studios: depictions of race by, 106–107; films of, 4, 8, 46–55, 47, 48, 49, 73, 88–89, 95–96, 104, 106–107, 115–118, 142, 145, 187; licensing, 82; patent rights and, 15, 62–63; technology and, 28; uplift movement and, 115–116; use of cultural logic by, 181. See also specific films education, 33–34, 48, 97–98 223

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Educational Screen, 162–163 Egypt, 74, 75, 77–79 Eisner, Lotte, 156, 213n30 Enchanted Well, The (1903), 58 English Gothic literature, 24 Enigmarelle, 68 Essanay Studios, 88 Eurocentrism, 106 Europe, 24, 32, 79–84, 99–101, 127– 129, 137, 159, 185. See also Old World myths; and specific countries Evil Eye, The (1913), 107 Evil Philter, The (1909), 79–80 Evil Power, An (1911), 96, 105 Exhibitor’s Daily Review, 162 Exhibitor’s Herald-World, 159, 163, 170 Exhibitors Trade Review, 142 Ezra, Elizabeth, 56, 60, 198n106

fairy tales, 63, 71–72, 79, 107 familiarity, effects of, 45–47 Famous Players–Lasky, 121, 122 “fantasmagoria,” 41–42 fantastic-uncanny, 91, 149–150, 154, 157, 172–173, 176–177 Faust and Mephistopheles (1898), 48 Faust myth, 118 Fazenda, Louise, 162–163, 167 fear/fearlessness, 19, 37–38, 101–104, 159 Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film Conference (1978), 11 féerie plays, 59 Fields, W. E., 143–144 Film Daily, 85, 154 film industry. See motion picture industry Film Service Association, 82 Film Spectator, The, 159, 163 Finger Prints, 157–158 Finnegan, Cara, 10, 43 First Amendment, 112 First National Pictures, 167, 168 Fisher, James, 178

Index

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folklore, 14, 36, 46, 79, 81, 85–86, 87, 131. See also Old World myths “folly of superstition”: credulity and, 86, 94–97, 145–146; Dracula as inverse of, 20; mystery thrillers vs., 172; notion of uncanny and, 20; social class and, 105, 108–109; as theme, 8, 16, 86, 161–165; the weird and, 161 Ford, Francis and John, 85 foregrounding, 44–45 foreign as weird, 7, 67–68, 69, 73–81, 131 foreign film industry, 81–86; American identity and, 127–130; censorship of, 130, 132, 178–179; demand for new films and, 63; as economic threat, 129–130; experimental films, 113; popularity of, 129–130, 137. See also specific countries, films, and filmmakers Forsyth, J. S., 33 Foster, Gwendolyn, 106 Fox sisters, 28–29, 37 Fox Studios, 174–175 Foy, Brian, 169–170 France, 14–15, 32, 59, 63, 83–84. See also specific companies, films, and filmmakers Frankenstein (1910), 4, 5, 8, 115–118, 144, 145 Frankenstein (1931), 2, 3, 5, 8, 167, 179– 180, 182, 184–185 Frazer, John, 56 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 27, 67, 75, 90, 162 Freund, Karl, 177 Friday the Thirteenth (1913), 96 From Caligari to Hitler (Kracauer), 24

Gance, Abel, 150–151 Gaudreault, André: on cinema as sociocultural, 11–12, 17, 114; on “cinema of attractions,” 7, 13, 44–45, 46–47; on genealogy of cinematic forms, 25; on kinematography period, 15, 224

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192n64; on Méliès’s magic views, 59; on shift from spectacle to narrative, 63–64 Gaumont Film Company, 78–79, 83 Gebhart, Myrtle, 139–140, 142 genre, study of, 4, 17–21. See also specific genres George Washington Jones (1914), 107 German Expressionist tradition, 128– 137, 156, 177, 209n77 Germany, 4, 24, 79–80, 121, 128–137, 156, 177 Get Out (2017), 1 Ghost, The (1913), 101–102 Ghost Breaker, The (1914), 103, 104, 105, 109, 163 Ghost Holiday, The (1907), 70 Ghost of a Bargain, The (1912), 93, 94, 102, 154 Ghost of Self, The (1914), 88 Ghost of the First Wife, The (Marcy), 42 Ghost of the Hacienda, The (1913), 107 Ghost of the Oven, The (1910), 83 ghosts, 4, 7, 19, 72–73, 85, 91–98. See also spiritualist movement Ghosts at Circle X Camp (1912), 102 Ghost Story (1908), 71 Gilmore-Long Music Publishing Company, 68 “girl detectives,” 205n52 Girl Walks Alone at Midnight, A (2014), 1 “Globe Trotters” (1913 report), 108 Goddard, Charles, 103 Goldwyn Distributing Company, 130 Golem: How He Came into the World, The (1920), 4, 131, 134–135, 177, 209n77 Gomery, Douglas, 175 good vs. evil, 85 Goodwin, William, 34 Gorilla, The (1927), 158, 161, 162, 163, 168 Gorilla, The (1930), 168, 169–170 Gorky, Maxim, 13, 26 Gothic horror genre, 2, 8, 57, 131, 142, 156, 182

Index

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Gothic literature, 24, 57, 58–59, 69, 113, 155 Grand-Guignol Theater, 59 Great Britain, 32, 83, 159, 180 Great Depression, 174–176, 182–183, 186 Great Northern, 120–121, 124 Great Secret of Shadow Pantomimes, The (publication), 40 Grey, John, 94 Gribbon, Eddie, 163 Grieveson, Lee, 14, 64, 82 Griffith, D. W., 16, 76, 98–101, 103, 202n100 gruesomeness: American realism and, 137, 141–142, 173, 182; censorship and, 178–179; Chaney and, 16, 135, 141–144, 160, 172, 178, 182; demise of, 85; evasion of, 124; growing interest in, 8–9, 108, 109–110, 119, 159–160, 172–173, 178–180; justification of, 116; literary merit and, 182; melodrama and, 148; weird films and, 83, 84, 131 Gulick, Paul, 155–156 Gunning, Tom: on “cinema of attractions,” 7, 13, 44–45, 46–47, 63–64; on classical narratives, 16; on early photography, 27, 42–43; on emerging morality in cinema, 110; on film as sociocultural, 11–12; on French film companies, 63; on genre as a concept, 17, 18, 20; on “genre of discontinuity,” 7, 53; on nineteenth century visuality, 36, 45; on “the staccato jolts of surprise,” 55; on trick films, 7, 53; on the uncanny in early photography, 27 Gutierrez, Cathy, 159

Haggard, Rider, 77 Haley, Louise, 38 Hall, Gladys, 183 Hall, Mourdaunt, 153, 156, 161 225

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Hallowe’en in Coontown (1897), 106 hallucinations and dreams, 70, 85 Hand, Richard, 59 handbooks, magic, 36, 37, 38–40, 41– 42, 52 Hanich, Julian, 192n55 Hantke, Steffen, 18 Harker, Jonathan, 176–177 Harrison, Louis Reeves, 109 Harrison’s Reports, 154, 174, 175 Haskin, Frederick J., 130 Haunted Bedroom, The (1913), 187 Haunted Castle, The (1896), 57, 58, 181, 182 Haunted Curiosity Shop, The (1901), 51, 53, 55, 145 Haunted Hotel, The (1907), 51–52, 55, 71 Haunted House, The (1908), 52, 55, 145 Haunted House, The (1911), 102 Haunted House, The (1913), 92–93, 149 Haunted House, The (1928), 151, 156, 158, 159, 161, 163, 166, 167, 168, 169 Haunted Rocker, The (1912), 91, 149 Haunted Room, The (1912), 72 Haydon, J. Charles, 121 Hays, Will, 137, 179, 210n112 Hazards of Helen, The (series), 105, 205n52 Hedges, Inez, 118 Help! (Au Secours!) (1924), 150–151 Henry, T. Shekleton, 33, 48 Herman, Arthur, 120 Herrman, Alexander, 34, 39 Herzogenrath, Bernd, 99–100 He Wouldn’t Go under a Ladder (1909), 95 Higson, Andrew, 23 Hindoo Dagger, The (1909), 75–76 Hoffman, H. F., 119, 121 Hold-up of the Leadville Stage, The (1905), 158 Hoover, J. Edgar, 152–153 horrific elements, 4, 26–60; audience reaction to, 53–54; cultural tensions

Index

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horrific elements (continued) and, 36–44; cultural trauma and, 24, 160; defined, 36; effects of nickelodeon boom on, 62–68; filmmakers and, 44–56; national identity and, 5–6, 24, 185–186; origins of, 13, 18–20, 27–28; theatrical productions and, 40–42 horror genre: collective experience of, 192n55; criticism and, 18–20; definitions of, 4–5, 19, 53, 184; origins of, 2–5, 185–186; popularity of, 1–2; promotional language of, 2–4; sales, 1 Horsley, David, 84 Houdini, Harry, 159 House of Horror, The (1929), 154, 157, 158, 167 Howe, Herbert, 132, 134 human duality, 119–126 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1911), 4 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1923), 4, 113, 135–146, 168 Huygens, Christiaan, 41 hypnotism, 73

iconography, 57 Idol’s Eye, The (1910), 77 imagination, 28, 43–44 immigrants/immigration: cultural anxiety of, 105–106, 181; depictions of, 66, 80, 98; human dualities and, 125; nickelodeon boom and, 64–65, 82, 108; in post–Civil War era, 29; rise of spiritualism and, 35. See also Old World myths Immigration Act of 1917, 105–106 “Impossibilities of Plot, The” (Claudy), 83 impression, 27–28 Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), 15, 77, 121, 124 India, 74, 75–77, 108 226

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individuality, 102 Infernal Cake-Walk, The (1903), 58 Infernal Caldron and the Phantasmal Vapors, The (1903), 58–59 Inferno (1911), 118, 121 Inn Where No Man Rests, The (1903), 55, 58, 69 interiority, 89 Invisible man (as character), 2 Ireland, Frederick, 68 Irving, Washington, 118–119 Italy, 80, 108

Janowitz, Hans, 128 Jentsch, Ernest, 19–20, 27–28 Johnston, William A., 156, 166 Jones, Darryl, 24 Jones, Paul, 163–164 Joy, Jason S., 178–179, 180 Julian, Rupert, 137, 143 Just Retribution (1908), 71

Kalem Pictures, 16, 92, 107 Kansas City Star, 122 Karschay, Stephen, 120 Kawin, Bruce, 4 Keil, Charlie, 63 Keith’s New Theater (Boston), 26 Kellar (magician), 68 Kelly, Casey, 10 Kelly, Kitty, 104 Kember, Joe, 11 Kemble, E. W., 133 Kent, Noel, 64 Keystone Films, 94 Kiel, Charlie, 88 kinematography, 15, 22, 28, 54, 192n64 Kinetogram, 117 King, Claire Sisco, 23–24 Kinnard, Roy, 5, 13 Kirby, Lynne, 50 Kleine, George, 147

Index

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Kleine Optical Company, 83 Klinger, Barbara, 12 knowledge, post–Civil War concepts of, 30–31 Kovács, Katherine Singer, 59 Kracauer, Siegfried, 24, 132 Krämer, Peter, 14, 64, 82 Krauss, Werner, 128

Laboratory of Mephistopheles, The (1897), 48 Laemmle, Carl, Jr., 121, 175, 178, 179 Laemmle, Carl, Sr., 15, 136, 137, 138, 145, 174, 179 Laird, Karen, 207n19 Lant, Antonia, 75 lantern projections, 41–42 La Plante, Laura, 169, 171 Lapponi, Giuseppe, 38, 52 Last Warning, The (1929), 151, 156, 158, 159, 162, 171; advertising and promotion for, 154, 168; synchronized sound and, 168, 169, 170 Latinos, 106, 107 Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The (1912), 118–119 Legend of the Phantom Tribe, The (1914), 107 length, film, 14 Leni, Paul, 137, 148, 151, 153–154, 155– 156, 158, 164, 213n30. See also specific films Leroux, Gaston, 73, 136, 137, 138 Levine, Caroline, 155 Lewis, R. W. B., 99 Lichtman, Al, 136 Lightman, M. A., 180 Linder, Max, 150 literary monsters, 8, 103, 135–146; “art of amusement” vs. “sensation of horror” and, 117; emerging morality and, 110–115; human duality and repression in, 119–126; “monster ef227

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fect” and, 109, 117; music and, 118; uplift framework for, 115–119 Liveright, Horace, 175–176 Loews Studios, 174–175 London after Midnight (1927), 156 López, Ana, 22 Los Angeles Times, 1 Love and Hypnotism (1912), 73 Love and Spirits (1914), 97 Lovecraft, H. P., 66 Lowenstein, Adam, 6, 23–24 Lowes/MGM, 174–175 Loyal American Film League, 130 Lubin, Sigmund, 73, 93–94, 107 Luckett, Mona, 97 Lugosi, Bela, 141, 175, 183, 184 Lumière brothers, 13, 26, 28 Lux Films, 71, 84, 92

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 72 MacDonald, Margaret, 122 Mackay, Charles, 32 MacKenzie, John, 75 Magician among the Spirits, A (Houdini), 159 Magician and the Cinema, The (Barnouw), 37 Magician and the Ghost (Marcy), 42 magic-lantern projection, 41–42 magic tricks/trick films: demise of, 63–64, 82–86, 87–88; early fascination with, 33–34; elements in, 4, 7, 14; as “genre of discontinuity,” 7, 53; handbooks on, 36, 37, 38–40, 41–42, 52; narrative development in, 13–14, 16; photography and, 27, 41–44, 55; rise of, 14; shadow pantomime, 40; stage magic, 37–39, 56–59; use of the term weird to describe, 69, 82 Making Meaning (Bordwell), 25 manifest destiny, 85 Manitoba Free Press, 122 Mansfield, Richard, 122

Index

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Man Who Laughs, The (1928), 136–137, 172, 210n110 Marceau, Marcel, 36–37 Marcy, L. J., 42 Martin, Clyde, 71 marvelous, the: attraction to, 7; demise of, 85–86; effects of familiarity on, 45; love of, 34–35, 36–37, 60, 85; uncanny vs., 90 masculine identity, 98–109, 141–142, 181, 205n52 Mask of the Red Death, The (1911), 80 Mattison, H., 34 May, Brian, 59 McClung, Littell, 69 McKinley, William, 152 McQuade, James S., 111 McTeague (Norris), 54–55 mediums, spiritual, 37–39, 52, 54, 96– 98, 107, 159 Meigs, Marion, 119 Méliès, Georges: advertising and promotion for films by, 55, 58–59, 69; films of, 48, 55–60, 58, 63, 67, 69, 70, 77, 79, 83, 102; folklore and, 79; painted backdrops and, 132; stage magic/tricks and, 37, 53, 59–60, 181, 198n106; technology and, 12, 28. See also specific films melodrama, 73, 85, 98, 120, 125, 147– 153, 157, 159, 171–173. See also mystery thrillers “melodramatic-fantastic,” genre of, 147–150, 157, 158, 160, 171–173, 176, 182 Merry-Go-Round (1923), 139 Merwin, Bannister, 87, 88 Metropolis (1927), 177 Mexican Legends (1909), 107 Meyer, Carl, 128 MGM, 175 Middle East, 108 Mike the Model (1907), 71 Miller, Carolyn, 18 228

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Miller, Charles, 134 Miller’s Theater (Los Angeles), 129 Misadventures of a Baby Carriage, The (1907), 70 mise en abyme, 50, 70 mise en chaîne, 64, 67–68, 82–83, 85, 88, 89, 94–95, 108–109 mise-en-scène, 4, 19–20, 64, 87, 89, 111, 131, 132–133, 156 Mitchell, Thomas, 34–35 Modern Dr. Jekyll, The (1909), 120 Modernist painting techniques, 133–134 modernity, emergence of, 29–31, 35–36 Modern Magic (Professor Hoffman), 33 Modern Screen Magazine, 177 Monopol Film Company, 118 Monster, The (1903), 58, 77, 151–152 Monster, The (1925), 151–152, 157, 158, 163 “monster effect,” 117 monstration, 44–47, 63–64, 66–68 Moonstone, The (1909), 76 Moore, R. Laurence, 29, 35–36, 37 morality, cinema and, 110–115 Morgart, James, 50–51, 53, 57 Morrell, John, 162 Morris, Charles F., 72 Morris, Ruth, 170 Motion Picture Almanac, 178 Motion Picture Directors’ Association, 129, 130, 134 Motion Picture Exhibitors League, 112 motion picture industry: American vs. European, 127–130; budgets in, 1, 136–137, 174–176; classical period of, 89–90; economic aspects of, 15–16, 129–130, 174–176, 182–183; effects of nickelodeon boom on, 61–68, 69– 70, 82, 108, 110; first decade of, 11– 17, 21, 22, 56; “precinema” and, 31; sales in, 1, 136; transitional period of, 78–81, 85–86, 90. See also foreign film industry Motion Picture Magazine, 129, 131, 132, 160

Index

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Motion Picture News, 138, 151, 155, 161– 162, 166 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 137, 178 Motion Pictures Patent Company (the Trust), 15, 62–63 Motion Picture Theater Owners of America, 180 Motography, 65, 104, 114 movie stars, emergence of, 15–16, 141 Moving Picture News, 65, 79, 84, 102 Moving Picture Story Magazine, 114, 115 Moving Picture World: on cinematographers, 69; debut of, 15–16; on Éclair Company, 74; on emerging morality in cinema, 110–111; on ghost stories, 94; on immigrant audiences, 108; on power of science, 109; on realism, 88; review of Blood Vengeance (1912), 80; review of Cave of the Spooks (1908), 70; review of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1910), 124; review of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913), 124; review of The Gorilla (1927), 163; review of The Haunted House (1913), 92; review of The Idol’s Eye (1910), 77; review of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1912), 118–119; review of Love and Hypnotism (1912), 73; review of The Modern Dr. Jekyll (1909), 120; review of The Monster (1925), 163; review of The Moonstone (1909), 76, 77, 78–79; review of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), 139; review of The Plot that Failed (1909), 86; review of Rose O’Salem-Town (1910), 100–101; review of Tommy’s Playmate (1912), 84; review of The Vengeance of Egypt (1912), 78–79; on training screenwriters, 87; use of the term weird as a descriptor, 69 Münsterberg, Hugo, 112–113 Murnau, F. W., 121, 134–135 Murphy, Timothy, 66 229

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Murray, Charles, 163 music, 8, 68, 69, 71–72, 118, 166–171, 212n143 musical comedy, 140 Musser, Charles, 11, 31, 41, 46, 62 Mutual v. Ohio, 112, 135 Mystery of the Haunted Hotel, The (1913), 102–103, 105, 163 mystery thrillers, 8, 148–173, 182, 187; as category of melodrama, 171–172; comedic approach to, 153, 157–166; difficulty in producing, 153; elements of, 150–157, 171; synchronized sound and, 166–171 Mystic, The (1925), 158 mysticism, 76, 98

Naremore, James, 4 narrative cohesion, 45–46, 72, 89 narrative(s): classical, 16, 81, 89–90; shift from monstration to, 44–47, 63–64, 66–68; symbolism of, 27; uncanny, 7–8, 19–20, 182–183; use of improbable elements in, 83 narrative structures, 20, 23 National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, 112, 119 National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, 64 national cinema, 21–25, 182–183, 185–188 national identity, 7, 23, 185–188; American values and, 98–109; cultural repression and, 75; filmmaking style and, 128; history of genre and, 21; in horrific elements, 5–6, 24, 185– 186; human dualities and, 125; immigration law and, 105–106; manifest destiny, 85; post–Civil War, 22–23, 29–31 National Motion Picture League, 160–161 Native Americans, 99–101, 107

Index

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Nead, Lynda, 29, 42 Nelson, Geoffrey K., 35 News-Bee (Toledo), 162 New York American, 158 New York Child Welfare Committee, 64 New York Clipper, 51 New York Daily News, 130, 158–159 New York Dramatic Mirror, 84 New York Evening World, 163 New York Herald, 131 New York Post, 131 New York Sun, 131 New York Times, 1, 31–32, 33, 35, 115, 117, 122–123, 152, 153 New York Tribune, 131 Nickelodeon, 83, 101 nickelodeon boom, 14, 61–68, 69–70, 82, 108, 110 Nicollela, Henry, 103 Nightmare, A (1896), 57 “non-closure,” 45–46 Norris, Frank, 54–55 Nosferatu (1922), 4, 131, 135, 209n77 Noys, Benjamin, 66

Occult, The (1913), 97, 105, 204n28 Oettinger, Malcolm, 136 “old dark house” genre, 4, 20, 43, 51–52, 89, 147–173 Old World myths: effects of World War I on, 127; folklore and, 14, 36, 46, 79, 81, 85–86, 87, 131; as foreign and exotic, 7, 67–68, 69, 73–83, 131, 186; rise of spiritualism and, 35–36; science and, 31, 35, 181; shedding of, 24, 29, 31–32, 98–105, 181 On Rhetoric (Aristotle), 193n75 On the Frontier of Thibet (1911), 74 “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (Jentsch), 27 optical illusions, 36, 41–42 Ordover, Nancy, 106 230

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Orientalism, 74–81, 98, 108 Orndorff, Marguerite, 177 O’Shea, Cornelius, 108 Other, the, 67–68, 74, 79, 86, 101, 105– 106, 108–109, 182, 186 Oysterman’s Gold, The (1909), 73

Paradise (1912), 118 Paramount Studios, 175, 180 Paranormal Activity (2009), 1 Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), 1 Pardy, George, 161–162 Parker, Gilbert, 133 Parlour Magic, 39 patents, 15, 62–63 Pathé Frères: criticisms of, 83; depictions of race in works by, 107; films of, 15, 70, 71–72, 77, 79–80, 83, 84, 107; as leader of trick films, 82; popularity of, 63. See also specific films Pearson, Roberta, 115 Peebles, J. M., 52 Penalty, The (1920), 142 People’s Theater (Portland), 72 “Pepper’s Ghost,” 40–41 Perez, Gilbert, 132 Perils of Pauline, The (series), 105, 205n52 periodicals, growth of film, 15–16 Persistent Suitor, A (1909), 106–107 phantasmagoria, 40–42 Phantom of the Opera, The (1925), 4, 113, 135–146, 140, 148, 149, 167–168, 212n143 Philadelphia Inquirer, 161 Philbin, Mary, 139, 140 Photodramatist, The, 138 Photographing a Ghost (1898), 54 photography, 27, 41–44, 55, 59 Photoplay, 143, 151, 154, 158, 175, 177, 183 Picture Play Magazine, 121, 138, 139, 157 Pictures and Picturegoer, 143 Pied Piper of Hamelin, The (1911), 71 Pillar of Fire, The (1899), 58

Index

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Plot that Failed, The (1909), 86 Poe, Edgar Allen, 69, 119, 131–132 poetics, 25, 193n75 Popple, Simon, 11 Powers Picture Plays, 107 Prawer, S. S., 132 Princess Films, 96 prizes, for audiences/fans, 143, 154, 168 Production Code Administration (PCA), 8, 178–179 progressivism, 127–128 projectors, patents of, 15 promotion. See advertising and promotion propaganda, 22 pulp fiction, 66 Purgatory (1912), 118

Quitman, Frederick Hamilton, 31, 37–38

race, 66, 67, 75–76, 77, 106–107 Ralston, Esther, 165 Rasch, Albertina, 139 Rathburn, John, 83 rationalism. See American rationalism “Raven, The” (Poe), 69 realism. See American realism Red Scare, 152–153 Reed, Thomas, Jr., 120 repression, 20, 24, 27, 67–68, 75, 86, 119–126 “resonant violation,” 183 Return of Peter Grimm, The (1926), 158, 187 revelation, 55, 144–145 reviews. See specific reviewers or magazines Rex Motion Picture Company, 93 rhetorical criticism, 9–11 Rich, Vivian, 97 Richelieu (1910), 84 231

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rights’ management, 62 riots, 129–130 Rix, Alice, 13 RKO, 175 Robertson, Étienne Gaspar, 41 Rockwell, Gladys, 124 romantic comedies, 91, 92 Romantic Italy (1909), 74 Rose O’Salem-Town (1920), 98–101, 103, 104 Royle, Nicholas, 67 Rylander Theater (Americus, GA), 143–144

Sadoul, Georges, 132 Saglia, Diego, 118 Said, Edward, 75 sales, 1, 136 Satan (as character), 48–52, 58, 59, 118 Satan’s Rival (1911), 71–72 Saturday Evening Post, 152–153 Saving Sign, The (1913), 107 Schertzinger, Victor, 187 science and technology: Darwinian theory and, 120, 212n142; duality and, 125–126; influence of, 109; kinematography, 15, 22, 28, 54, 192n64; magic-lantern projection, 41–42; old World myths and, 31, 35, 181; patents, 15, 62–63; photography, 27, 41– 44; progress and, 120, 144, 182; rationality and, 127, 181; skepticism and, 186; sound technology, 16–17, 166– 171, 212n143 science fiction genre, 198n106 Scott, A. O., 1 Screenland, 172, 177 screenwriting, 87–88 Scullion’s Dream (1908), 70 Sculptor’s Nightmare, The (1908), 70 séances, 38, 42, 48, 52, 159 Self-Other relationship, 24 Selig, William, 77, 120

Index

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Selig Polyscope Company: depictions of race in works by, 107; films of, 70–71, 76–77, 80–81, 83, 96–98, 107, 120, 121, 125, 158. See also specific films semiotic frame, 4 “sensation of horror,” 117 Service, T. O., 154, 161, 170, 171 set design, 132–134, 138–139, 153, 155–156 7 Castles of the Devil, The (1901), 48 Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), 8, 154, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165, 167, 171 Seven Years Bad Luck (1913), 95–96 sexuality, 67, 178, 182 Shader, Freddie, 162 shadow pantomime, 40 Shakespeare, 72, 115, 118 Sharkey, Betsy, 1 Shark God, The (1913), 81 She (1911), 77–78, 121 Shelley, Mary, 115–116, 118, 207n19 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 65 “shocks,” 55 “shriekies,” 173 Sh! The Octopus (1929), 167 Silent Era, 103 Silver Screen, 177, 183–184 Simmon, Scott, 99 Sims, David, 1 Singapore, 178, 180 Singer, Ben, 148, 171, 205n52 Sinn, Clarence E., 71–72 skepticism: American culture and, 186; American films and, 127, 182–183, 185; melodramatic-fantastic and, 173; mystery thrillers and, 153, 154– 155; optical illusions and, 41–42; science and, 186; stage magic and, 37. See also American exceptionalism; American rationalism slapstick, 13–14, 85, 153, 161–162 Smith, George Albert, 54 Snow, Marguerite, 77 social class: nickelodeon boom and, 64–65, 82; rise of spiritualism and, 232

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33–34, 35, 40; rural life and, 48, 102, 105; skepticism and, 37, 41–42, 186; susceptibility and, 33–34, 40, 48, 65, 102, 111; uncanny otherness and, 67–68 social movements, 29 Solomon, Matthew, 37, 54, 56, 59 Something Always Happens (1928), 158, 165 Sorlin, Peter, 128 Soul Mate, The (1914), 97 sound technology, 8, 12, 16–17, 166–171, 173, 212n143 Spadoni, Robert, 16–17, 167, 168, 182 Spaulding, Frank, 115 “Spectre Drama,” 41 Spectropia (Brown), 36, 39–40 Spenser, Herbert, 162 spirit photography, 42–44 spiritualist movement, 28–44; debunking, 96–98; early photography and, 27, 42–43; estimated numbers in, 34; origins, 28–29, 30–34; post–World War I renewal of interest in, 158– 160; stage magic vs., 37–38 spiritual mediums, 37–39, 52, 54, 96– 98, 107, 159 stage magic, 37–39, 56–59 Staiger, Janet, 16 Stamp, Shelly, 105 Star Films, 55 Starr, Frederick, 74 state censorship, 111–112 stereopticon photos, 59 stereotypes, 18, 104–109 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 119–120, 121, 181 Stewart, Cal, 48 Stob, Paul, 30 Stoker, Bram, 2, 135, 175–176 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 119–126 Strong, Josiah, 82 Studlar, Gaylyn, 141

Index

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subjectivity, 23, 192n55 Suicide Club, The (Stevenson), 181 Sullivan, Thomas Russell, 120, 125 Superior Feature Film Company, 118 supernatural, 7–8, 13, 16, 20, 187; demise of, 87–91, 93, 94–95, 98, 144, 145, 154–155; French films and, 57– 60, 63; Gothic literature and, 58– 59, 69; interest in, 29, 34, 35–36, 109, 159–160; shift to narrative films and, 63–64, 67–68. See also magic tricks/ trick films; Old World myths; weird, the superstition, 7–8, 29–36, 181; American values and, 7, 98–104; comedy as counterpoint, 161; familiarity with, 46; framing of, 16; national identity and, 24; nickelodeon boom and, 65–67; persistence of, 34; shift from, 127, 181; susceptibility to, 48– 51, 104–109. See also “folly of superstition”; Old World myths; spiritualist movement Superstitious Joe (1913), 95, 102, 104 Superstitious Mary (1913), 96 susceptibility: race and, 107–108; social class and, 33–34, 40, 48–51, 65, 102, 111; women and, 105 symbolism, 27 synchronized sound, 166–171

taglines, 65–66, 71, 166, 180. See also weird, the Talbot, Frank A., 53, 56 talkies, 166–171 technology. See science and technology Telegram and Mail, 152 telepathy, 73 temporality, 45 Terrible Night, A (1896), 57 Terror, The (1928), 157, 158, 162, 167 Thanhauser Company, 71, 72–73, 77– 78, 102–103, 120–121, 122, 124 233

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theaters: as dark space, 185; design of, 75; expansion of, 14, 84; music and, 68, 69, 71–72, 118, 166–171, 212n143; nickelodeon boom and, 14, 61–68, 69–70, 82, 108, 110; riots and, 129. See also audiences “theatre of marvels,” 36–37 Théâtre Robert-Houdin, 56 theatrical productions, use of horrific elements in, 40–41 Their Christmas Turkey (1912), 107 Thirteen Club (1905), 106 13th Chair, The (1929), 158 Thompson, Dorothy, 131, 133 Thompson, Kristin, 127 Thomson, Anthony Todd, 32, 34, 36 Todorov, Tzvetan, 7, 20, 90, 91, 149, 154–155, 172, 176–177 Tommy’s Playmate (1912), 84 Tompkins, Joe, 18 Totem’s Mark, The (1911), 81 Touching Mystery, A (1910), 73 Towards the Moon (1907), 70 transformation, individual, 120, 124, 125, 126, 144–145 trauma, cultural, 24, 160 travel films, 74 Treasures of Satan, The (1902), 58 Tricked into Giving His Consent (1908), 91–92 trick films. See magic tricks/trick films Trip to the Moon, A (1902), 56 Trust, the (Motion Picture Patents Company), 15 Tudor, Andrew, 4–5 Tuttle, Frank, 165

uncanny, the: defined, 27; Freud’s notion of, 20, 27, 67, 75, 90; Jentsch’s notion of, 27–28, 67; marvelous vs., 90; narrative(s) and, 7–8, 19–20, 182–183; relationship between perception and cognition, 27–28; re-

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uncanny, the (continued) pression and, 20, 27; Royle’s notion of, 67; Todorov’s notion of, 7, 20, 90, 91, 149, 154–155, 172, 176–177. See also American uncanny Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), 49, 50 Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel (1900), 46– 55, 47 Uncle Josh’s Nightmare (1900), 48 Unholy Night, The (1929), 154, 158, 170 Unholy Three, The (1925), 168 Unholy Three, The (1930), 168 Union Features, 73 Universal Studios, 134–140; effects of the Great Depression on, 174–176; film codes and, 8–9; industry competitions and, 15; “Universal Monsters,” 2, 4, 12; use of promotional language, 2, 3. See also specific films Universal Weekly, 138, 143 Unusual Sacrifice, An (1912), 73 uplifting movement, 110–146; advertising and promotion of, 108, 113, 116– 117, 118; American Progressivism and, 127–128; emerging morality and, 110–115; entertainment vs., 110, 114, 119; framework of, 115–119, 127– 135, 137; purpose of, 113–115 Urban-Eclipse, 74 Uricchio, Robert, 115 US Office of War Information, 22 US Supreme Court, 112, 135

Vanishing Lady, The (1896), 57 Vanity Fair, 133 Variety, 2, 83, 84, 129, 136, 143, 169, 170, 175, 179, 180 vaudeville, 114 Veidt, Conrad, 128, 137 Vengeance of Egypt, The (1912), 78–79 Verhoeff, Nanna, 100 Victor films, 101–102 234

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violence, 126 Virginia, 179 visual culture, 29, 31, 42, 44 Visual Education, 131 Vitagraph, 71, 79, 84, 86, 91, 108 Vivisectionist, The (1915), 119

Walker, Brent E., 94 Wall, J. Charles, 48–49 Walpole, Horace, 24, 58 Warner Bros., 175 Warren, H. B., 103 Water Sprite, The (1908), 79, 80 Weber, Carl Maria von, 118 Weine, Robert, 213n30 weird, the, 65–86, 179–180, 181; demise of, 81–86; as foreign and exotic, 7, 67–68, 69, 73–81, 131; as genre, 73; as gloomy and un-American, 68, 69; music and, 68, 69; racial stereotypes and, 104–109; terminology of, 17, 66–69, 89, 117, 199n21 “weird fiction,” 66 Weird Tales, 66, 199n21 Wells, Paul, 6 West, Roland, 151–152, 171 Western Electric, 167 western genre, 21, 71, 76, 80, 83, 84–85, 99, 107 Whale, James, 179–180 When Ghost Meets Ghost (1913), 72–73 When the World Sleeps (1910), 119 white supremacy, 108–109 Wid’s Daily, 130 Wiene, Robert, 128, 155 Willets, Gilson, 98 Williams, Alan, 22 Williams, Linda, 148–149, 158 Wilson, Burstyn v., 112 Wilson, Michael, 59 Witch, The (1906), 71 Witch and the Cowboys/Witch on the Range, The (1911), 71, 80, 83, 201n47

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Witches’ Cavern, The (1909), 80 witches/witchcraft, 4, 7, 32, 36, 58, 71, 81, 83, 85, 98–101 “Witch of Atlas” (Shelley), 65 Witch of the Everglades, The (1911), 107 Witch’s Revenge, The (1903), 58 women, depictions of, 66, 105 Wood, Robin, 21 “World before Your Eyes, The” (Starr), 74

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World War I, 127–128, 141, 159 World War II, 22 Wulze, Harry, 94

Yerbysmith, E. A., 139 “Your Program” (Harrison), 109

Zeiger, Robert, 127

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