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

By David Annwn Jones

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781786833372

Book preview

cover.jpg

RE-ENVISAGING

THE FIRST AGE OF

Cinematic Horror

1896-1934: QUANTA OF FEAR

HORROR STUDIES

Series Editor

Xavier Aldana Reyes, Manchester Metropolitan University

Editorial Board

Stacey Abbott, Roehampton University

Linnie Blake, Manchester Metropolitan University

Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas

Fred Botting, Kingston University

Steven Bruhm, Western University

Steffen Hantke, Sogang University

Joan Hawkins, Indiana University

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne

Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin

Johnny Walker, Northumbria University

Preface

Horror Studies is the first book series exclusively dedicated to the study of the genre in its various manifestations – from fiction to cinema and television, magazines to comics, and extending to other forms of narrative texts such as video games and music. Horror Studies aims to raise the profile of Horror and to further its academic institutionalisation by providing a publishing home for cutting-edge research. As an exciting new venture within the established Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism programme, Horror Studies will expand the field in innovative and student-friendly ways.

RE-ENVISAGING

 THE FIRST AGE OF

Cinematic Horror

1896-1934: QUANTA OF FEAR

DAVID ANNWN JONES

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

© David Annwn Jones, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-335-8

eISBN 978-1-78683-337-2

The right of David Annwn Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Scene from White Zombie (1932). © With permission of Andrew Lifford-Stills Collection.

For Kevin Brownlow, in admiration; for Lesley and

for the younger generation: Rebecca, Andrew, Calum,

 Jenny, Alasdair, Miranda, Miles, Finlay and Erin.

May all your best chills be thrills.

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1.  Satanic Seizure and the Crimson Smoke of Fear

Georges Méliès’s Le 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 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

Filmography

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

IWOULD LIKE to express my sincere thanks to Sarah Lewis of University of Wales Press for her kind assistance and patience in the preparation of this book. The timely advice, friendly offices and hard work of Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, the series editor, in helping me at an extremely busy time for himself, also proved invaluable. As ever and, as in the case of all my projects, the support and commitment of Dr Lesley Newland, my wife, has enabled the completion of this work.

List of Illustrations

1  A detective (Reinhold Schünzel), who has infiltrated a ‘Suicide club’, suffers hallucinations of its president (Conrad Veidt) in Richard Oswald’s Unheimliche Geschichten / Tales of the Uncanny (1919).

2  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).

3  The victorious detective (Reinhold Schünzel) finally traps the president of the ‘Suicide club’ (Conrad Veidt) by using the villain’s own devices in Richard Oswald’s Unheimliche Geschichten / Uncanny Tales (1919).

4  Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt) sees his name written on an hourglass which displays the sands of his life running out in Paul Leni’s Wachsfigurenkabinett / Waxworks (1924).

5  Max (Max Linder) finally succumbs to terror in the Château de Bombarnac in Abel Gance’s Au Secours! / Help! (1924).

6  The devil (Benjamin Christensen) appears to Father Henrik (Johannes Andersen) in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922).

7  The protagonist (Castleton Knight) imagines that he is being buried alive and wakes inside his coffin in Castleton Knight’s Prelude to Rachmaninoff in C Sharp Minor (1927).

8  David Gray (Nicolas de Gunzburg) looks down on his own corpse in Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932).

9  The infernal game is revealed at the heart of Satan’s (DeWitt Jennings’s) mansion in Benjamin Christensen’s Seven Footprints to Satan (1929).

10  Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer) watches helplessly as Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi) instructs Madeline Short (Madge Bellamy) to kill her husband, Neil Parker (John Harron) in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932).

11  The mysterious robed stalker shot by the police is finally revealed to be Nana Goya (Esperanza del Real) in Ramón Peón’s La Llorona / The Wailing Woman (1933).

Introduction

IWOULD LIKE to propose an innovative model for considering the evolution of the earliest horror films (1896–1934), a paradigm which takes account of these films’ hybrid status simultaneously as parodies, fantasies, trick routines and melodramas, but which enables exploration primarily of their complex scenarios and motifs which inspire different types of fear and dread. In terms of recent critical discussions of this type of movie, this is an innovative approach to the cinema of this period, arguing for the recognition of a burgeoning production of films of fear and horror before several prominent theorists admit the establishment of a horror movie genre. It is a study which explores the innovative power of film from Georges Méliès’s Manoir du Diable (1896) to Edgar G. Ulmer’s reflexive The Black Cat (1934). Focusing on twenty-one key works and referencing many other relevant movies of the period, this book involves an inclusive approach revealing an awareness of the heterogeneity of horror production, the discussion spanning the period of the first films, the expansion from single-reelers to longer, continuous productions and the advent of talkies.

Our sense of horror film productions of the first forty years has expanded exponentially over the last two decades, and we have long needed a more inclusive account of the complex, wide-ranging field of early horror film production. In response to this need, my discussion explores horror films as constituents of an expanding ‘field’ of production and reveals the ways in which any notion of a limited cycle of 1930s Hollywood films establishing the horror genre per se has proved reductive and misleading. The inclusive approach which I adopt encourages comparisons of films such as Castleton Knight’s small-scale film: Prelude, D. W. Griffith’s chilling creation: The Sealed Room (1909) and Ramón Peón’s La Llorona / The Wailing Woman (1933), which have never been studied seriously in the context of horror cinema before. My discussion also stretches its bounds beyond the Anglo-American studios, discussing, in its seven chapters, the work of directors from France, Spain, England, Moravia (the present Czech Republic), Germany, Italy, Denmark, Mexico and the USA. Segundo de Chomón’s work is celebrated alongside that of Georges Méliès, and Alice Guy Blaché’s unique contributions to horror considered with that of Nino Oxilia.

As Carlos Clarens indicated relatively early in the study of horror cinema, the application of genre headings and criteria to films is often counterproductive:

Film is an immensely rich, free-flowing, and disorganized medium. Our period is one of classification […] we apply to movies the strict rules and superficial restrictions of genre headings, when horror […] films at their best obey no rules and transcend the limitations we impose on them. Let me be the first to realize that such a staggering number of movies can wreak havoc on any serious attempt at theorizing. (Clarens, 1967: xv)

Whilst I agree with Clarens’s points regarding the ‘free-flowing’ nature of film and the need to avoid ‘strict rules’ in this regard, as the book in hand suggests, I do not share his sense of the notional insufficiency of cinema theory in this regard. Yet the only way one can hope to describe and evaluate such films meaningfully is by using critical approaches which are sensitive to their range and variety.

As Stacey Abbott writes, since the widespread influence of Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault’s ‘cinema of attractions’, it has been ‘common practice to describe early cinema as split between two types of filmmaking – realist and fantasy’ as well as other discrete categories (Abbott, 2007: 48). Yet, as she continues, this division makes no sense if one remembers how even so-called realist films were regarded in their day as thoroughly haunted and uncanny works (p. 49). This is a point I discuss at some length with regard to Georges Méliès’s oeuvre in Gothic Machine (Jones, 2011: 148–52).

Over two decades, Gunning and Charles Musser have conducted a public debate regarding methods by which the ‘cinema of attractions’ paradigm can be made to reflect the true complexity of early films. Musser has written that ‘attractions and narrative’ (as defined as separate genres by Gunning) ‘frequently coexisted’ in films and that he (Musser) views them ‘not only as intertwined’ but that he finds himself ‘fascinated by the ways in which cinematic form often enhanced as well as generated narrative (rather than interrupted it) even in this early period’ (Musser, 2006: 159). Musser’s argument is plainly accurate if one considers, for example, Alfred Clark’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) which, as well as being an early exercise in cinematic shock effects (attraction), comprises a simple narrative structure composed of preparation, crisis and aftermath, and one which satisfies Gaudreault’s criteria for minimum narrative sequence in containing ‘a minimum of two transformations’; the film shows an initial situation altered to bring forth a new situation (Gaudreault, 2009: 24). Even Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable (1896), the action of which is often regarded as a series of trucs or tricks, employs simplified narrative elements from J. M. Loaisel-Tréogate’s prose melodrama Le Château du Diable (1802), including the incursion into the haunted house and encounters with witches and different sets of demonic presences.

The Féeries, those fantastical theatrical extravaganzas on which Méliès drew so heavily in his early years as film-maker, even with all their magical transformations, tricks and colourful spectacles, followed the plots of Charles Perrault’s and Madame d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales. As Elizabeth Ezra has written, Méliès was able to ‘tell stories within a single scene’, and she goes on to use structural models to analyse the narrative complexity in the French director’s films (2000: 33–4). Magic lantern shows, employed alongside Méliès’s early film projections, were also an important influence for cinema, including, as they did, both trick and slip-slides as well as series of numbered slides which followed a narrative often recited by the lanternist. Films made in the first five years of the twentieth century such as Walter R. Booth’s The Magic Sword (1901), Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow’s Alice in Wonderland (1903), Percy Stow’s The Mistletoe Bough (1904) and Alice Guy Blaché’s French La Esméralda (1905) betray no less interest in narrative. Musser advocates, he writes, a ‘more dialectical and open approach to these dynamics’, and yet then goes on to counterpose to Gunning’s schema ‘a multifaceted system of representation and spectatorship’ which, once more relies upon generic categorisation for its organisation, including: ‘1) a cinema of contemplation; 2) a cinema of discernment in which spectators engage in intellectually active processes of comparison and judgment’ (Musser, 2006: 159).

Yet Musser, though still involved in the debate with Gunning had, by the time he wrote these words in 2006, begun to realise that an organisational and rhetorical paradigm based on cinematic generic categories, is essentially flawed. As he writes:

There is always a fundamental problem with associating or equating a period (however brief) with a particular kind of cinema. To label the cinema before 1907, 1903, 1901, or 1897 as ‘cinema of attractions’ is to marginalise other features, which were at least as important (for instance, the role of the exhibitor as a crucial creative force before 1901 or 1903). (Musser, 2006: 160)

One can understand the desire to establish and record the exact contexts for the presentation of early films following on from Gunning’s early work influenced by Hans Jauss’s reception theory though, from a New Historicist perspective, such attempts are ultimately futile. Additionally, as Musser hints above, the subsequent marginalisation or exclusion of other cinematic features which such an approach causes is, of course, counterproductive. Such failings obviously invite a new critical paradigm. Of twenty-two films which I have selected for discussion, several have been subject to this process of labelling which Musser mentions, and so have not been studied in the context of horror cinema before.

The Problems of Genre

Genre criticism of films originally developed in the early 1970s in reaction to auteur analysis of American movies, where the work of mainstream directors was valorised as high art. In Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich’s ‘Introduction: generic canons’, Jancovich points out that the work of Stephen Neale and James Naremore repudiates the notion that ‘there is something called the horror film that exists as a stable or a consistent body of work’ (Geraghty and Jancovich, 2008: 2–3). Faced by these concerns about the stability and sufficiency of ‘the horror film’ attribution per se, Christine Gledhill has written that genre ‘is particularly useful now for its potential to fill a gap left by the grand theory, which once promised to grasp film as part of a totalising ‘social formation’ or ‘historical conjecture’ (2003: 221). Because the term ‘a cycle of horror’ pictures was used by Colonel Joy working for Will H. Hays after the release of Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and some critics have characterised earlier films which inspire fear as ‘Gothic’, ‘mystery’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘fantasy’ works, we might expect that films featuring horror strategies and effects prominently are thin on the ground before 1930 (Kinnard, 1995: 1). In fact the opposite is true: there is no doubt that fear, terror (feelings of ‘anticipatory dread’) and horror (‘revulsion experienced following a frightening stimulus’) are dramatically present in a wide array of early films and, crucially, that these elements had started to lead to productions recognisably structured as horror films after the First World War (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1978: 393 and 567).

Roy Kinnard’s suggestion in Horror in Silent Films (1995) that ‘The horror film as a genre was officially born in the early sound era, on November 16, 1931’ has, then, proved a useful boundary marker for critics convinced of the need to foreground a monolithic stable notion of genre in terms of horror film (even if one might also note the obvious irony manifest in efforts to characterise horror films, which often work to destabilise parameters of reality and realities, as a stable genre) (Kinnard, 1995: 1). Kinnard continues: ‘On that date, Universal Pictures released their now-classic production of Frankenstein […] such an unqualified hit that it literally created a new type of movie – the horror film – and was the first picture to be referred to as such’ (p. 1). It is an opinion shared by Peter Hutchings in his discussion in The Horror Film (2004). Alison Peirse partly agrees and writes that, though there were individual eerie and horror films, before 1931 there was no such thing as a cycle or genre of these productions (2013: 5–9). Murray Leeder defines horror film’s genrification more carefully as a process which occurred from 1895 to 1938, discussing how earlier films of fear possessed the same core elements (2018: 7–9).

We note that neither Colonel Joy nor the Chicago Daily Tribune critic, nor any other contemporary writers, recognise that these statements ‘officially’ give birth to or instate the age of ‘horror’ genre or in fact use the term ‘genre’ in context. Kinnard, Hutchings and Peirse’s citing of ‘genre’ in this regard are then lexical interventions post-1995. There is a certain sense of a critical fanfare or clarion call to Kinnard’s announcement of a generic genesis and, given the critic’s emphasis elsewhere on historicity, we might expect that the word ‘officially’ must refer to the judgement of Hays, Joy or some other contemporary (early 1930s) external validation. However, Kinnard, seemingly unconsciously obviating these opening points of his discussion, goes on in the same context to write of Richard Oswald’s Unheimliche Geschichten / Tales of the Uncanny (1919): ‘Stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson were adapted for this five-part horror omnibus’ (Kinnard, 1995: 107). We might reasonably ask: what is a ‘horror omnibus’ if not a cycle of short horror films, especially notable in this case, because this particular omnibus heavily influenced another cycle of silent horror films: Fritz Lang’s Der Müde Tod / The Weary Death/Destiny (1921) and Paul Leni’s Wachsfigurenkabinett / Waxworks (1924)? In particular, Wachsfigurenkabinett was also part of yet another distinctive cycle of horror films.

Kinnard develops his argument: ‘Before Frankenstein, in the silent era, there are no horror movies as the public thinks of them today, although there were certainly many films containing horrifying scenes and horrific plot elements’ (p. 1). Peirse concurs, writing that ‘before the 1930s, films were not produced or consumed as horror films as we understand the term today, and their classification as such is retrospective’ (p. 6). She quotes Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich’s warning that one ‘needs to be careful not to transfer one’s own understandings of genre terms and their meanings back onto previous periods in which the terms and their meanings might have been very different’ (cited in Peirse, 2013: 6).

One of course understands the reasons for such attention to lexical acuity and historicity, but when Lotte H. Eisner writes, ‘The weird pleasure the Germans take in evoking horror’, and draws our attention to the title of Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens / Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror, describing the ways in which this director built up an atmosphere of ‘horror’ in the film, we can hardly accuse her of forgetting the ways film audiences interpreted these films in the early 1920s (Eisner, 1969: 52 ). After all she was the cinema critic for Film-Kurier and other German newspapers from 1927 onwards. Siegfried Kracauer straightforwardly identifies Wegener’s Caligari with ‘horror’ ‘in the spirit of E. T. A. Hoffmann’; Kracauer worked from 1922 to 1933 as the film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung (Kracauer, 2004: 205). Again, here, we cannot believe that Kracauer retrospectively transferred his own understanding of the filmic ‘horror’ genre (in existence since at least the early films by Karl Hans Strobl and Hanns Ewers), its terms and ‘meanings back onto’ a previous period.

Furthermore, Kinnard’s reference to ‘no horror movies’ ‘as the public thinks of them today’ existing as a genre in the 1920s and Peirse’s citation of ‘horror films as we understand the term today’ (note the shift in these statements from ‘the public’ to ‘we’) instate an unwieldy and misleading sense of modern consensus in academic and public thought about cinema. In terms of these critical projections (‘the public’ and ‘we’), neither notional term (presumably indicating the generality of those who have a fixed or formulaic idea of what a ‘horror film’ designates) applies to Eisner, Kracauer, Béla Balász, Otto Friedrich, Stephen Brockman, Robert Ebert, Carlos Clarens, Siegbert Salomon Prawer, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Robert K. Klepper, Jean and Dale Drum, Tim Parker, Alan Jones, Amanda Denman or Rupert Julian.

For example, Eisner writes that Caligari is ‘Wie ein Alpdrucktraum verdichten sich überall Schrecken, Grauen vor künftigen Geschehnissen’ (‘Like a nightmare dream: dread and horror pertaining to future events closes in everywhere’; Eisner, 29: 1924, author’s translation). Robert Ebert writes that Caligari is arguably ‘the first true horror film’ (2009). Stephen Brockman calls Caligari ‘an early horror film, laying the groundwork for films like F. Murnau’s Nosferatu, as well as subsequent horror movies’ (emphasis added; Brockman, 2010: 59). Alan Jones includes four horror films made before 1927 in his ‘Horror Canon’ in the Rough Guide to Horror (2005). Wikipedia, arguably the widest contemporary database for what ‘the public’ thinks today currently (2017), states: ‘horror films have existed for more than a century’ and, most tellingly in relation to Kinnard and Peirse’s arguments, cites Carlos Clarens in asserting that, regarding the 1910 production of Frankenstein, ‘the macabre nature of the source materials used made the films synonymous with the horror film genre’ (emphasis added; Wikipedia, 2017). Five of the publisher Taschen’s top fifty horror movies are silents made 1920–6. Open Culture’s online educational sites specifically state that Le Manoir du Diable was ‘the first horror film’ (Open Culture, 2017). Formative anthologies such as Clarens’s own Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey (1968) and Ivan Butler’s Horror in the Cinema (1967) include silent horror films as part of the horror film genre. Robert Klepper writes that Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925) ‘has frequently been regarded as one of the greatest American horror films of all time.’ (1999: 322). What price a genre without its greatest exemplar?

Kinnard’s argument becomes even more tenuous as he continues:

Classic movies like Nosferatu (1922), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925) spring to mind, yet these pictures were not made or promoted as ‘horror’ films […] Before (Browning’s) Dracula, horror films tended to veer away from the supernatural and offered ‘logical’ explanations for their fantastic onscreen events. (Kinnard, 1995: 1)

Passing over for a moment that extraordinary assertion (made seemingly unaware of the pitfalls of directorial Intentionalism – see Carl Dreyer’s and Trey Edwards Shults’s words below), that films which were not initially produced as horror films could not in fact be interpreted as such, both of Kinnard’s subsequent statements above are unreliable, as Rodney Livingstone’s translation of Béla Balász’s 1924 appreciation of Nosferatu reveals. Balász writes: ‘There is a film called Nosferatu which rightly called itself a symphony of horror, the titling of which surely indicates a picture made or promoted as a horror film’ (my emphasis; Balász, 2010: 58). Far from this critic contemporary with Murnau’s film believing that it tends to veer away from the supernatural, Balász is at some pains to detail the ways in which supernatural elements dominate and surround the natural elements in this production. He writes: ‘the nature images were overlaid with premonitions of the supernatural’ (pp. 58–9). Though some uncanny elements of the film were possible in nature, they were, Balász notes, ‘surrounded by an icy blast from another world’ (p. 59). He designates that this type of filmic production is specifically suitable in conveying the supernatural: ‘What is certain is that no written or oral literature is able to express the ghostly, the demonic and the supernatural as well as cinema’ (emphases added; p. 59). One need only also consider the supernatural events in Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica (1915), Sjöström’s Phantom Carriage (1920) and the Student of Prague films (1913 and 1926) to see that Nosferatu is not an isolated example in this respect.

The writers, directors and designers of Abel Gance’s The Masque of Horror / Le Masque d’horreur (1912), Joë Hamman’s L’île d’éprouvanté / Island of Terror (1913), an early adaptation of Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau, Richard Oswald’s Nächte des Grauens / Nights of Horror and Wiene’s Furcht / Fear (1917), knew very well that they were creating frightening works and that these films combined in evolving the diverse structures of horror films. As Peter Kobel writes: ‘Horror was the more developed genre during the silent era, perhaps because there were so many literary antecedents ripe for adaptation (Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the first version of which was made as early as 1908 by Selig Polyscope)’ (Kobel, 2007: 70; emphasis added).

At the time of writing his remarks, Colonel Joy, an ex-US army officer and executive secretary of the Red Cross, had been director of the Studio Relations Committee, a deeply conservative body administering censorship in service to the Hays Code, for five years. His questions written to