Re-envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror, 1896-1934

Quanta of Fear

David Annwn Jones

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786833358
• eBook ISBN: 9781786833372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

This is a ground-breaking exploration that runs generally against the critical grain in identifying a burgeoning production of films of fear and horror before the admission of the horror film genre per se. It is a study that reveals and emphasises the formative and innovative power of film, from Georges Méliès's Le Manoir du Diable (1896) to Edgar G. Ulmer's superbly reflexive The Black Cat (1934). With its focus on twenty-one key films, and referencing other relevant productions, the present study involves an inclusive and sensitive approach. It reveals an awareness of the heterogeneity of horror production with the discussion spanning the period of the invention of movies, the expansion from single-reelers to longer and continuous productions, and the advent of talkies. Stepping beyond the bounds of Anglo-American studios, in its seven chapters the book involves the work of directors from France, Spain, England, Moravia, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Mexico and the USA, to consider and compare films that have not previously received serious attention.

1

Satanic Seizure and the Crimson Smoke of Fear

Georges Méliès’s Manoir du Diable / The Haunted Castle (1896) and Segundo de Chomón’s La Légende du Fantôme / The Legend of the Ghost (1907)

KIM NEWMAN writes of Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable / The Devil’s Mansion (1896) that its director ‘was too steeped in the pantomime tradition of amusing fantasy’ for the film ‘to figure in the history of horror’ (a point seemingly obviated by Newman’s critique being the first entry in The Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Horror) (Newman, 1996: 16). Certainly, if one applies Tom Gunning’s paradigm found in his notable essay regarding a ‘cinema of attractions’, this film would be considered as a singular if hybrid entertainment rather than a ‘film of fear’ in any sense. Abbott rightly notes how the two soldiers who enter Satan’s haunted apartments in the opening scenes are ‘terrorized and tortured’ by ghosts and witches, and this production is often recognised as the first supernatural horror film (Abbott, 2007: 50). There is, of course, no terrorisation without terror. The director’s background in magical and theatrical entertainment and lantern shows, combined with a rapidly increasing sense of the possibilities of film, enabled him to make use of a wide range of techniques to provoke anticipatory fear: these included audience prior knowledge and stages of intensifying panic. In itself, Méliès’s soldier’s temporary blackout registers the extreme type of visceral dread on show. Though generally less well known, Segundo de Chomón’s La Légende du Fantôme (1907) was a film which revealed Méliès’s influence and evolved in active competition with his oeuvre, and yet also drew on a separate repertoire of horrific effects, stemming in part at least from Chomón’s background in Spanish festivals and folklore. Beneath a veneer of darkly extravagant comedy (Manoir), and wild, infernal carnival (Légende), these films share a sense of horror inspired by visual shocks, quasi-spiritual affronts and human bewilderment in the face of devilish and ghostly illusions.

Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable / The Devil’s Mansion (1896)

In Méliès’s film, a sense of general foreboding is first generated by the prospect of the devil’s Gothic chambers as a giant bat wheels round in front of a large arched chamber, and changes suddenly into Mephistopheles garbed in dark doublet and hose. It is a cramped and awkward transformation, based on an old ‘collapsing table’ trick, and the devil has to straighten up abruptly to reach his correct and imposing height. Many have linked the devil’s association with the bat here with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which appeared a year later, though vampiric biting and blood-sucking are entirely absent from the film. The diabolism of Méliès’s film stems from a long tradition of French visual media including Eugène Le Poitevin’s Les Diables de Lithographies (1832), Diableries stereoscope cards, Phantasmagoria lantern shows, theatrical entertainments and posters. The action generally follows a very simplified and abridged version of J. M. Loaisel-Tréogate’s prose work: Le Château du Diable (1802) a comédie héroïque, first performed at the Théâtre de Molière in 1792 and published in 1802. Though Méliès stated that he was unconcerned regarding the scenario of his films and was motivated rather by the staging of tricks, several of his works actually foreground the storyline (Abel, 1994: 76).

This dark Mephistopheles (Jules-Eugène Legris) strides around raising his hand to his head as if to take possession of the stage like a theatre magician winding up an infernal spell. He conjures a huge cauldron on a stand. He draws a magic circle on the earth with his sword, and a dwarf shoots into view in a great blast of smoke, which continues to swirl around the stage through the following action. This devilish dwarf works the bellows below and an attractive woman in a simple toga-like costume with cloak (Jehanne D’Alcy) rises slowly (clearly ascending some steps) inside the cauldron with her arms raised. Mephistopheles points for her to descend and she suddenly appears, by way of a jump cut, on the main stage. He whispers in her ear and escorts her to a door to the left. An open grimoire suddenly appears in the dwarf’s hands and Mephistopheles leafs through it. He points to the cauldron stand and the dwarf disappears into it, and then makes the cauldron vanish. He seems to hear a disturbance and gestures to the right of the stage, covers himself in his magical cloak and vanishes. This opening scene serves as a prelude to a strange, inscrutable plan, a series of trucs (stage tricks) thickening the sense of mystery.

Two cavaliers now enter from behind the arch on the right walking straight towards the camera. The taller one (Georges Méliès) with a lion blazon on his chest gestures to the pair’s surroundings as if leading a tour of a deserted mansion. In Loaisel-Tréogate’s Le Château, two cavaliers, Raoul and Robert, his valet, enter a dilapidated building in the country rumoured to be associated with the devil, witches and necromancy. After huge human arms (we remember Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)) and a hand draped in white appear in the air over their heads, they are confronted by a very beautiful Amazon in armour who at first smiles at the men seductively. The Amazon conjures up some warriors who dance to a tune: ‘une ronde courte et rapide’ (‘a short and rapid round-dance’) and then vanish taking Raoul with them (Loaisel-Tréogate, 1802: 22). Raoul is accordingly isolated. In Scene VII, of the play the trespassers are prevented from leaving the chateau by six demons and evil genies which torment the mortals, throw them onto the ground and disappear.

Méliès’s screenplay for his three-minute (60-metres) film is deeply indebted to Loaisel-Tréogate’s play. The frisky playfulness of the comédie héroïque source (a satirical drama in the manner of stage versions of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897)), is sensed throughout the film’s early sequences and the two bravos of Le Manoir also inherit the fear felt in the play by Raoul and Robert. For example, in the film the intruders seem jovially relaxed, (in the play, they have been drinking wine), the taller one patting his companion familiarly on the shoulder. Yet this mood is quickly dispersed and, at each stage of the dynamic filmic developments which follow, dread increases. Through jump-cuts, a series of increasingly sinister dwarfs, a paramour, witches and servants is produced, including one who attacks the effete cavalier intruders with a pitchfork. Savagely comic though this undoubtedly is, one cavalier (presumably Raoul) runs around in a most disorientated and deranged manner: trying to leave, feigning dizziness and caricaturing his fright by wobbling his legs, before, finally, exiting.

In terms of fear the now isolated second bravo’s progress rewards careful viewing. This actor knowingly employs a range of comic theatrical cues: shouting to an implied audience, gesturing to chairs, rolling his sleeves up and, after a first chair disappears, drawing himself up folding his arms and scolding (wagging his finger at) the aberrant furniture; this is not quite the belly-laugh humour of John Cleese in Fawlty Towers (1975) berating and hitting his car with a wrenched sapling, but we can see the comic lineage). A series of chairs – to left and right – vanish, one morphing into a skeleton; and, though this transformation retains a veneer of humour, that is dispelled altogether when its bony frame is abruptly replaced with the hovering bat, a foreboding signifier, we have seen, of the devil who goes, as the Bible tells us ‘to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it’ (Job 1:7).

It is a most powerful feature of anticipation in horror films when the spectator knows more about a frightening predicament, because of our prior knowledge, than the protagonist; (we, the viewers, anticipate that the bat is the devil returned in disguise). This is a version of that kind of repetition in horror films which Noël Carroll calls ‘erotetic narration’ (1990: 130). The quick succession of tricks based on stage illusions and given all the spontaneity and abruptness of film, unnerves the spectator, but the moment when the bravo strikes out at the seated skeleton only to find he’s fumbling powerlessly with a large bat which then suddenly morphs again into the devil, quickens the sense of impotent panic. The fear is nuanced and increases in stages, like quick changes in a dance (a prime stimulus for changing rhythms in drama), the real source of dread circling back again through the film, like the bat’s opening ellipses through air, to materialise inside the cavalier’s trembling fingers.

One might appreciate how such carefully staged increments in trepidation might fit the overall schema of Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attraction’, but there is no lack of narrative drive or progression in the action here. Increasing fear is written over the lone cavalier’s body and its gestures. He flinches, waves with an impotent movement of his arm at these visions and falls to one knee when Mephistopheles appears. The devil conjures up the dwarf who waddles towards the frightened valet before vanishing into a crumpled cloak. The hapless cavalier makes a bolt for the central doorway, but is immediately repulsed by an oncoming group of sheet-covered phantoms blocking his way and looming through the arch. It is at this point of crisis that the bravo breaks down completely. His hands are raised in prayer and desperate entreaty and, finally, he brings them to his head as if in doubt of his sanity. He blacks out as in a seizure and, momentarily, all comedy and control seem forgotten.

The shrouded phantoms disappear and the devil leaps over the prone body. As the cavalier recovers his senses, he catches a glimpse of Mephistopheles behind him and gestures right and left in alarm. It is clear that the barrage of trucs has not been a random series but has been specially designed to disorientate the cavalier and as affronts to his sense of space and reality. It is at this point – in the bravo’s state of lowest abasement – that Mephistopheles brings forth the maid from a doorway at the left, holding her by the hand and flipping this towards the surprised valet. As the tall cavalier scans her from head to toe and clearly admires her, her figure is clearly illuminated by a strong, static light shining on her from head height from the centre left of frame. He kneels to her beauty and, clearly drawing on the Faust and Marguerite story, kisses her hand, at which gesture, she immediately changes into a buxom wench, a shrouded and broom-stick-carrying witch. Méliès obviously intended this moment to shock us: the valet has backed away, waving his arms in revulsion, to leave the witch alone at centre stage still bathed in intense light. Laurent Mannoni and Donata Pesenti have written that the films of Méliès were impregnated with the spirit of the Phantasmagoria magic lanternist Étienne-Gaspard Robertson (Mannoni and Pesenti, 2009: 138). The transformation of a young, attractive woman into a witch was one of the best-known slipping-slides associated with magic lantern shows, and Méliès’s application of this projection into his cinematic repertoire gave it a new, highly mobile power.

The arousal and repulse of male lust by supernatural beings (usually succubi and witches) had been a staple of French visual culture for at least a century by the time these images were projected, yet none of that familiarity would have prepared the audience for the cinematic impact of this infernal substitution (Jones, 2014: 62–70).

The devil now lurks knowingly in background shadow, this demonstration of his power to mislead mortal men obviously being one of his major stratagems here. The cavalier draws his sword and tries to attack the witch but now, nightmarishly, four more witches appear like Macbeth’s accusers and, as the shorter cavalier reappears, they chase him in a tight circle, probably in the same kind of ronde courte et rapide mentioned above. This panicky friend now runs straight through the set from mid-ground to back, and with a shock jumps from an open balcony in the rear (which we have experienced so often as a blank or painted wall) and disappears. Moving to centre stage, the witches dance their round dance again, slide to the floor and vanish. The cavalier tries to leave through the arch but the devil obstructs him, the bravo once again cowering back. Remembering something he has already glimpsed on the wall to the left, the human now points and leaps towards this object and brings down a large crucifix, its presence doubled by the sharp lighting sending its shadow across the set. Mephistopheles seems momentarily to crumple as the illuminated cross moves towards the centre of the upper frame. The valet follows the devil slowly as he retreats to the rear of set, his eyes set constantly on the raised symbol.

The menace of Mephistopheles in the final scenes and the insouciance of his designs are no less palpable in this section of the film than at the beginning. There is no doubt there would be laughter throughout the action and the visual trucs, yet the fact that many of these filmic tableaux and encounters were familiar from playlets, magic acts and magic lantern shows did not mean that their recombination in the new medium in film were any the less mysterious, unpredictable or shocking. At least from the moment of the cavalier’s first collapse in the film, the laughter must also have been nervous, uncertain and disjointed, tinged with doubt. Mephistopheles might here be seen to be going about his merry frolics as Méliès termed these antics elsewhere, yet his purposes remain enigmatic and threatening, even if all that is threatened is the sanity of a knockabout, effete cavalier.

We remember that Méliès’s Manoir was shot only a few months after the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) and, while it has been established, by Martin Loiperdinger and others, that reports of a terror-stricken audience running away from the projection of the approaching train, are probably an urban myth, even ‘Cinema’s founding myth’, there is no doubt that these very early films produced confused, fearful reactions in audiences (Loiperdinger, 2004: 89). Nearly seventy years later, members of a film audience, some of them ex-combatants in the Second World War, ducked their heads as a gladiator’s trident seemed to come straight at the camera in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). If that audience, with all their experience of evolving cinematic technique (and well before computer-generated imagery), felt the visual jolt of that action, the transformations of Le Manoir must have held considerable visceral shock only a year after the invention of the medium.

Robert, a cavalier’s valet (Georges Méliès), repulses Mephistopheles (Jules-Eugène Legris) with a crucifix in Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable / The House of the Devil (1896).

Méliès uses the centrepiece of the devil’s cauldron many times in his films, perhaps most emphatically in The Infernal Cauldron (1903), where young women are burnt and their remains are stirred by imps wielding pitch-forks inside the vessel. Pamela Hutchinson writes accurately of the ‘portrait of inexplicable, psychotic sadism’ which is ‘compelling, cruel and strangely attractive’ in this film (2016: 54). Perhaps Méliès’s Manoir is most similar in atmosphere and motifs to The Devil in the Convent (1899), where St George and a whole crowd of cross-wielding choristers are required to oust the devil from a nuns’ chapel. The Infernal Cauldron (1903) seems more intense and bloodthirsty in its devilry than Le Manoir, and The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906) more technically inventive than the earlier film. Yet the psychotic sadism which Hutchinson notes, and the abjection of the cavaliers, the torture and terror which Stacey Abbott describes and the traumatic switch from attractive maid to witch are all part of the horror quanta generated by Le Manoir.

This account by no means exhausts the range of horror effects present in this section of this short film. In exploring these incidences or quanta of fear in contextual interaction with other features and in examining how they contribute to the field of production, we gain a far richer sense of horror film development.

Segundo de Chomón’s La Légende du Fantôme / The Legend of the Ghost (1908)

La Légende du Fantôme is sometimes characterised in cinematic reference works as a ‘comedy’ or a horror fantasy. Yet the film, as in the older definition of commedia, is far from a simple series of humorous set-pieces or trucs. There is a clear narrative in this work: fear and unease in De Chomón’s film are processual, part of an extended quest, the journey of the film itself involved in broaching forbidden and magical environments. Critics have also increasingly noted the Gothic and horror-themed action and settings of this film: ‘Filled with horror imagery ranging from a battalion of skeletons in a ruined cemetery, to a cavalcade of demons parading in devilish cars through Hell, to a ghost that flies across the night sky as the result of a witch’s curse’ (Kiss, 2013).

Joan M. Minguet Batllori also notes the way in which De Chomón increasingly placed the trick elements in La Légende du Fantôme at the service of a supernatural narrative: in ‘a film with more than thirty shots, which us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1: Satanic Seizure and the Crimson Smoke of Fear: Georges Méliès's Manoir du Diable / The Haunted Castle (1896) and Segundo de Chomón's La Légende du Fantôme / The Legend of the Ghost (1907)
• 2: Torture Rooms and the Diva of Death: D. W. Griffith's The Sealed Room (1909), Alice Guy Blaché's The Pit and the Pendulum (1913) and Nino Oxilia's Rapsodia Satanica / Satanic Rhapsody (1915)
• 3: Omnibus to Hell and the Inescapable Carriage: Richard Oswald's Unheimliche Geschichten / Tales of the Uncanny (1919), Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921) and Paul Leni's Das Wachsfigurenkabinett / Waxworks (1924)
• 4: Tickets to the Madhouse: Abel Gance's Au Secours! / Help! (1923), Rex Ingram's The Magician (1927) and Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (1927)
• 5: Experimental Delirium: Benjamin Christensen's Häxan / Witchcraft through the Ages (1922), Castleford Knight's Prelude to Rachmaninoff in C Sharp Minor (1927), Jean Epstein's (with Buñuel) La Chute de la Maison Usher / The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932)
• 6: Mind the Gap! Fear on the Verge and after Sound: Benjamin Christensen's Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), Roland West's The Bat Whispers (1930) and Jack Conway's The Unholy Three (1930)
• 7: Sadean Masterpieces, Dread and Slaughter: Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack's The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Victor Halperin's White Zombie (1932), Ramón Peón's La Llorona / The Wailing Woman (1933) and Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934)
• Afterword
• Glossary of Film Terms
• Filmography
• Bibliography