Horror Cinema: Fear, the Body & the Uncanny

The Foundations of Horror

Horror cinema is as old as cinema itself. Georges Méliès made The Haunted Castle in 1896 — one year after the Lumières' first public screening. The capacity of moving images to disturb, to show the impossible, to implant images that linger in the mind after the lights come up: these were recognised almost immediately as both opportunity and danger.

The first great horror cycle came from Germany. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Wiene, established the visual template for cinematic horror: distorted sets with impossible angles, deep shadows, the architecture of nightmare rendered literal. Nosferatu (1922), F.W. Murnau's unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, created the most enduring vampire image in cinema history — Max Schreck's Count Orlok, with his elongated fingers and shadow that moves independently, as a figure of genuine dread rather than romantic tragedy.

Universal Studios in Hollywood brought these European influences to mass entertainment in the 1930s. James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932): these films created the iconic monster images that have never left popular culture. Boris Karloff's monster in Frankenstein — bolts in the neck, lumbering gait, a face conveying bewilderment and pain — is as much a creation of Jack Pierce's makeup and Whale's direction as of Mary Shelley's novel. The Universal monsters were figures of sympathy as much as terror: creatures made monstrous by forces beyond their control.