Supernatural Horror in Film: Pre-20th Century
Exploring the Beginnings of the Horror Genre in Moving Pictures
Oct 10, 2008
It’s likely you’ve heard the following story: that when the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière premiered their Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat to a Parisian audience in 1895, many of that audience believed the oncoming image of the train was about to crash through the auditorium, causing people to run from the screening in fear for their lives.
It’s also likely that this is exaggerated, perhaps based on a sudden impulse in the audience to flee rather than producing the act itself before rational thought could intervene. Who knows?
However, there is almost certainly a degree of truth in the story and besides being an elegant demonstration of Lovecraft’s assertion that “the strongest emotion of mankind is fear” it also offers a contender for the title of ‘First Horror Film’ (where on a conceptual level trains were often cited by poets and academics in the Victorian period as the symbol of an increasingly materialistic, Mammon-worshipping, society).
Origins of Horror in Film and Cinema
Let’s be honest: at a time when literature was written with an absurd degree of craft and excellence, the first steps of the infant medium of film at the turn of the 20th century must, by comparison, represent the single greatest ‘dumbing-down’ of a culture throughout human history, however sensational the effect and however much the gap would be closed over the next century with the improvement of film and subsequent dumbing-down of literature itself.
Early films like Arrival of a Train were single scene shots often less than a minute long. They depicted everyday events – traffic, people walking, animals, entertainers, sporting contests - and are referred to as actualitiés.
But before the Lumière brothers invented their portable cinematograph (variations of which existed across contemporary Europe and the Atlantic, including that of British inventor Robert W. Paul and Birt Acres); before the ‘peep-show’ kinetoscope was finalized by Thomas Edison in 1889 and an Edison company photographer, William K. L. Dickson, invented a 35mm form of celluloid film; before Louis Le Prince made his Roundhay Garden Scene, regarded as the earliest surviving motion picture, in 1888; before Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotographic gun was made in 1882 and before Eadweard Muybridge, using stereoscopic cameras, determined that the stride of a galloping horse did altogether leave the ground in 1878; there were still antecedents for the invention of film and cinema.
Experiments in projecting images had been carried out since the 1770’s, most famously by Belgian inventor Etienne-Gaspard Robert. Robert created the Phantasmagoria, a pseudo-horror show in which shifting images of skeletons and spectres were projected by a form of ‘magic lantern’ (which Robert called the Phantascope) before an audience.
The abiding nature of the Horror theme can be seen even here, inherited from a richer backlog of historical literature and mankind's unconscious state.
The First Horror Film
Arguments as to what is the first true horror motion picture seem to be contested on a patriotic basis, rendering most opinions suspect. However, following Lovecraft’s criteria (albeit loosely during this period of film-making) leaves little room for doubt.
Discounting Arrival of a Train as a conceptual Horror, there are two leading candidates, one American, one French. The American claim lies with a scene entitled The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, made by the Edison company in 1895, featuring a woman being decapitated (a quite neatly accomplished effect that can be seen on Youtube Here).
The French candidate, made in 1896 by Georges Melies, is a three-minute film called Le Manoir du Diable (a.k.a The House of the Devil) and was intended to be comical. This scene features the summoning of ghosts and witches from a cauldron at the behest of the devil, who is himself vanquished by a crucifix-brandishing cavalier (a portion of this and the arrangement of the set can also be seen on Youtube Here).
Horror, of course, does not need to be qualified by supernatural elements and there's a legitimate argument as to whether or not Queen of Scots is indeed the first Horror film. However, a film featuring a violent act does not exclusively render it a Horror, anymore than a film with supernatural elements that are not intended to that end, with some degree of both being a frequent requisite of many genres.
Although Queen of Scots could be categorized as Horror of that ‘mundanely gruesome’ kind (which Lovecraft acknowledged has it’s place), there’s ample room to wonder if it should be filed under ‘historical drama’ or as a documentary ‘reconstruction’.
But whatever the intention of Melies’ House of the Devil, there's no doubt that this must be categorized as Horror, featuring as it does those traditional supernatural elements that, without any external subjective judgement, represent the ghouls of our nightmares.
It is to Georges Melies then, that this series of articles will account the first true horror film in The House of the Devil.
A final thought, however, with Horror being the most subjective of genres, takes us back to the idea of a ‘conceptual Horror’. No one has cited another of the Lumiére brothers' films as a potential candidate – the actualité of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.
Again, the Victorian intelligentsia saw the growth of industry and heard the watchword of their times – Utilitarianism – with soul-shrinking horror. So can the sight of droves of people wandering out from the background of an industrial factory be considered Horror? There’s no answer to that, except that maybe it would have been more apt if the scene showed the same droves of people walking into the factory.
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Next in this series: Supernatural Horror in Film: Georges Melies.
Several sources and websites have been cross-referenced for this article, including various pages of Wikipedia, Killriculum.co.uk, Film History by Decade by Tim Dirks, The Missing Link, and Filmreference.com.
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