Silent Screams: Genuinely Creepy Horror Movies From the Pre-Sound Era
People have always seemed to enjoy scary tales, and that enjoyment has carried over into different methods of delivering those frights that have come along throughout history, from the oral tradition of telling spooky stories around the campfire, to acting them out in plays, to writing them down in novels. That love of horror stories continued when motion pictures came along near the turn of the 20th century.
Of course, it took a little bit of adjustment for movie creators and especially for audiences before what could be identified as purposeful efforts to make horror movies began developing. After all, the presentation of these “moving images” was so revolutionary and unlike what anyone had previously experienced that just the process in general could seem a bit frightening in its own right.
Even something as seemingly innocuous (maybe even boring) to us today as the few-second footage of an arriving train that was shot by cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895 (seen below) was enough to scare audiences shitless and have them scrambling from their seats to avoid what surely must have looked and felt to be a locomotive about to come right out of the screen at them.
As audiences grew more sophisticated and became accustomed to this unique perspective, so did filmmakers, who began experimenting with techniques on telling cinematic tales that were purposely geared to give viewers a creepy experience.
One early example is this surreal 1903 short, The Infernal Cauldron, from Georges Méliès, another French pioneer of early cinema, especially in the fantasy realm. Here he used special effects and neat camera tricks to briefly bring audiences into hell as a demon throws souls into the titular cauldron.
Big-screen horror stories began running longer and continued to become more sophisticated as the early 1900s progressed.
There were original concepts, as well as adaptations of written stories, including the earliest movie adaptations of the “big three” titles from among classic supernatural/Gothic horror literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
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Here are a few of the creepiest films from the silent era, productions that, despite being at least 100 years old, have enough imagination and ingenuity in their efforts toward creating the genre that we would ultimately recognize as “horror movies” that they can still offer unnerving experiences.
Just as filmmakers of the silent era sometimes went to extreme lengths in their stuntwork as they continued to pioneer this new manner of storytelling, so too did the makers of these frightening films (at much less risk to their life and limb than some of the stunt performers faced). In a weird way, too, these movies’ distant separation from us in time seems to enhance their often otherworldly feel.
Note: These films are in the public domain, so you should be able to find them on YouTube, the Internet Archive or various streaming services.
Frankenstein (1910)
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Frankenstein is among the most adapted novels in screen history, so the fact that this 1910 title stands as the first adaptation shows just how old the movie is. Also driving home its age are its “produced by” credit for none other than Thomas Edison, and how it was made just 92 years after the publication of Shelley’s novel. That’s still a long time, yet it is theoretically possible that someone born in 1818, the year of Frankenstein‘s publication, could have still been around when its first film version was released. Kind of mind-blowing.
Despite its age, the Edison Studios-produced Frankenstein — which had been presumed lost until the 1960s, and has since been pieced mostly back together, like the doctor’s creation itself — is impressive, especially with the stop-motion effects during the creation sequence. Bits of that scene somehow remind me of the “resurrection” sequence that was featured in Clive Barker‘s Hellraiser 77 years later.
An actor named Augustus Phillips played Frankenstein here, while Charles Ogle had the honor of being the first actor to portray Frankenstein’s monster in a film (he’s pictured above).
The video below features a nice version, accompanied by a modern score.
L’Inferno (1911)
It wasn’t just Americans and the French who were dabbling in and experimenting with the wonderful new technology of motion pictures, and sometimes using it to creepy effect, at this time. L’Inferno, based on the first part of the 14th-century narrative poem The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, was the first full-length Italian film (it runs around 80 minutes).
The production uses elaborate set designs and cool optical effects to visualize Dante and his guide Virgil’s trip through hell. The scene below shows the frozen center of hell, where Satan spends eternity casually munching on those souls unfortunate enough to have ended up there.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
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Of course the Germans were also producing dark and creepy films during the silent era. One of the most notable was this quintessential production of German Expressionist cinema, directed by Robert Wiene and led by Werner Krauss as the title character, a mad hypnotist who uses a brainwashed sleepwalker named Cesare (played by Conrad Veidt, who, among other works, would later famously portray Major Strasser in 1942’s Casablanca) to commit murders.
The film also helped inspire the formation of a 1980s British minimal synth group who called themselves Das Kabinette and created a cool song related to the movie:
The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920)
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Another German Expressionist horror classic, this title is set in medieval Prague and features a Frankenstein-like story whose title creature dates back from much longer ago and is drawn from Jewish folklore.
The film’s cinematographer, Karl Freund, was also a cinematographer on another silent German Expressionist classic, Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis (1927). He then went on to a nice film career in America, where he was involved in some other iconic horror titles: He was the cinematographer for 1931’s Bela Lugosi-led Dracula and directed 1932’s Boris Karloff-led The Mummy. On a completely different note, Freund later was the cinematographer for I Love Lucy, and his work on that classic 1950s show was an influence on future sitcoms.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had only been published 34 years before this film’s release, yet by that time there had already been at least eight film adaptations of the tale produced between 1908 and 1914.
This was the first one to gain much popularity with audiences, though, thanks to John Barrymore‘s performance as the titular doctor and his sinister alter-ego. When Jekyll transforms into Hyde, Barrymore largely relies on actual acting and movement, and less on makeup effects. (The acting legend also portrayed a giant spider in a dream sequence, for good measure.)
While this movie version of Stevenson’s story does not pop into people’s minds as readily as later productions, like the 1931 version led by Oscar winner Fredric March and the 1941 adaptation starring Spencer Tracy, do, it is still a noteworthy entry in the horror genre.
Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)
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This delightfully weird-ass title may be a 102-year-old silent film from Sweden, and it might start out a bit slow, but don’t let that lull you into thinking it is not scary.
A wonderfully bizarre, fictionalized documentary purporting to show the evolution of witchcraft and the superstitions surrounding it in Europe from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, Häxan features some visually stunning and truly horrific special effects sequences and costumes/makeup (including the ones director Benjamin Christensen himself donned for his portrayal of Satan, as seen in the picture above).
Made in the pre-Code era, and from Europe, to boot, Häxan does not shy away from nudity and gruesome imagery. Just how over-the-top it all comes across is likely up to the individual viewer; a review of the film that appeared in Variety around the time of its release stated that “Many of [the film’s] scenes are unadulterated horror. … Wonderful though this picture is, it is absolutely unfit for public exhibition.”
I can’t think of a better summation to make people actually want to go see it!
Anyway, here’s a modern trailer for Häxan that compiles some of its many creepy scenes, set to Camille Saint-Saëns‘ 1874 symphonic poem “Danse macabre”:
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
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Director F.W. Murnau’s masterful 1922 silent German Expressionist film classic — an unofficial (and unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which had been published just 25 years earlier and which resulted in the producers getting successfully sued by Stoker’s heirs — features an iconic physical performance, enhanced by wonderful makeup effects, from Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok, one of the great monsters in screen history.
The shadow of Schreck’s vampire is a long one, cast over everything from Werner Herzog‘s terrific Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) to the presentation of the vampire Barlow in the 1979 TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King‘s Salem’s Lot, and more.
Writer/director Robert Eggers‘ take on Nosferatu hits theaters in December 2024, and I’m sure that is going to be a fascinating experience. But this original remains immortal.
Remind The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
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The legendary Lon Chaney leads this classic from Universal Pictures and producer Carl Laemmle as the title “phantom” in what is one of the earliest and still most renowned film adaptations of Gaston Leroux’s novel, which had only been published 15 years before this movie’s release.
Even people who have never seen this production are likely very familiar with Chaney’s legendarily horrifying, self-devised makeup for this role. But it is still worth checking out the film if you haven’t because Chaney goes beyond just letting the makeup do the work. His embodiment of the deformed (emotionally as well as figuratively) phantom haunting the Paris Opera House effectively makes him the first Universal monster, even if he is sometimes left off the list with others like Dracula, Frankenstein’s creation, the Wolf Man, the Mummy and the Gill-Man.
A Page of Madness (1926)
Japanese cinema has given us plenty of wonderful horror films, from Kwaidan (1964), Kuroneko (1968) to Ringu (1998) and Dark Water (2002), to name just a few. But “J-horror” might have started with the silent movie A Page of Madness.
I had not been aware of this Japanese horror production until I saw it at the Milwaukee Film Festival a few years ago. Very experimental and avant-garde — certainly for its time, but even now (from a technical perspective, it feels like it was made a lot more recently than 1926) — the film is quite a trip, with a story set in an insane asylum and told through startling and impressively achieved imagery and cinematic techniques that often evoke the feel of a nightmare.
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London After Midnight (1927) (lost film)
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Despite being one of those unfortunately lost films from the silent era, this mystery/horror film’s character portrayed by Lon Chaney is still somehow recognized by many, a tribute to how effectively the actor embodied the role (with the help of makeup effects bordering on self-abuse, including sharpened teeth and wire fittings used to keep his eyes open in a hypnotic stare).
London After Midnight was produced and directed by Tod Browning, who would go on to helm other creepy classics like Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932). That aspect makes me want to see this movie even more, and while maybe it is sitting in a basement or attic somewhere, I’m not holding out hope for its discovery. The closest we can see have been some attempted reconstructions over the years, and collections of still frames from the production, like the ones in this nicely put-together montage:
Sounds like a unique experience as R.E.M, Pixies & Pearl Jam may also be getting the same treatment.
Remind