Scary movies - the early ones.

The Horror Movie - think Poe, Hoffman and Aleister Crowley mixed in with strip cartoon, has pretty well always been a subject of reverence for some. Over many years it was all the transgressive entertainment those who had no access to porn knew about.  There were more than a few never watched anything else. 

Even with its dedicated literature, outlets and producers, complete with devoted followers, surprisingly little was known about its evolution. How many could tell you about Sheldon Lewis? 

You Tube, as might be expected, has come to the rescue with significant, neglected material. A just about watchable copy of Roland West’s 1925 The Monster is there. 

West was an established producer-director in silent Hollywood, an associate of Joseph Schenk and William Cameron Menzies. Now, you are more likely to hear about the scandal that swirled around him and actress Thelma Todd, than his movies, though his horror titles the silent The Bat and 70mm. sound re-make The Bat Whispers still get the occasional showing.    

The Monster - Chaney, Austin, Arthur & James

The Monster is a signpost to the Horror Movie Cycle to come. It places comedy in an Old Dark House years before The Cat & the Canary. It’s an early monster movie Lon Chaney did without Tod Browning, making it easier to separate the contributions the pair made to their work together. 

We’re back in the Twenties American rural town where long lasting comic Johnny Arthur and Hallam Cooley, the two clerks in Watson’s General Store both have their eye on owner Edward McWade’s daughter Gertrude Olmstead. Arthur is mad on becoming a detective and has sent off for his mail order diploma, cuffs and gun. Cooley however has an advantage having used his savings for a dress suit to wear at the McWade’s dance party, where the attraction is a keg of cider.

However on the dark highway, a hooded figure has lured Dr. Herbert Prior into the ditch, with the mirror across the road routine, which is hard to make out in this copy. The abandoned nursing home is nearby. Is help available there? When the Doc. goes missing, city detective William H. Turner shows up and is scornful of Arthur’s interest in crime fighting.

Back out at the nursing home at night,  the hooded man sends the leads cascading down a chute into the subterranean chambers under the Institute. (like Cameron Menzies cutaway decor in The Bat) There they are greeted by Chaney’s Dr. Ziske in a white coat and sunken eyed make up and Walter James, his shirtless assistant Caliban (!) in a turban, along with crazy Knute Erickson who has this nice line in miming rolling an imaginary cigarette. 

Monster - Chaney & Olmstead

The doctor insists they stay the night - cranking down the steel shutters to make his point and he makes off with the revolver Arthur has given Coolley to protect fearful Olmstead. A door leads to an underground chamber sealed by a rock raised by a winch. Olmstead is rescued from the Terribly Strange Bed in the alcove only to have hands emerge from the sofa to drag her down and the clerks find themselves menaced by the doctor’s electric Death Chair, while Arthur’s attempt at escape, walking the telegraph wires, is frustrated by George Austin in the hood. Olmsted is wheeled in unconscious in a gauze cocoon for Chaney to perform his fiendish operation (don’t show this one to the kids) but Arthur proves resourceful and summons help with his detective school Roman Candle in a so so model shot.

With all this ground breaking it’s a pity The Monster isn’t a better movie. Chaney is of course in his element, all but turning to the audience and rubbing his hands while giving fiendish laughter. West’s handling offers a basic technique with the action mainly played in “American Shot” three quarter length figures. There are a couple of bad eye lines but the piece has generally competent direction. Production values get by. This is one of the few circulating Metro silent films not designed by Cedric Gibbons and W.L. Heywood’s decoration is notably less flamboyant than we might expect. Performances are broad but titles by Thomas Ince’s accomplished writer C. Gardner Sullivan get the most out of the mix of hick comedy and Gothic. “Bowman’s disappearance was Danburg’s biggest thrill since the milkman eloped with the bootlegger’s wife.”

This one wasn't the only silent film with a debt to Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tar and Professor Fether.” Maurice Tourneur did a Le système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume / The Lunatics in 1913 and it was a source for German filmmaker Richard Oswald’s two Unheimliche Geschichten films.

Uncanny Tales - Schünzel, Oswald & Veidt.

Gaining a certain status from making 1919's Anders als die Andern, the first film to show homosexuality, Richard Oswald was never a master craftsman or a subtle artist but he was a major player in the German film Industry from the beginning of WW1 till he fled the Nazis and he got to work with the country’s best acting talent. Many of his performers would outlast the 3rd Reich or shift to Hollywood. Oswald's son Gerd Oswald would go on to make indifferent Hollywood features and some exceptional TV there - Robert Culp in the Outer Limits : Demon with a Glass Hand. 

In Oswald senior's 1919 Unheimliche Geschichten, called Uncanny Tales in English, customers leave the antiquarian bookshop at dusk and the owner hugs his volumes. However comes midnight in the deserted shop, the three paintings on the wall come to life – Conrad Veidt as Death, Reinhold Schünzel as the Devil and the then notorious Anita Berber as a Harlot.  They open five macabre stories in which we see the trio play out triangle plots.

The first episode "The Apparition" has traveler Veidt rescue Berber from her abusive ex-husband Schünzel, who dogs their steps checking into a hotel. When Veidt returns, he finds Berber’s room wrecked and the staff all deny she ever existed - OK montage dissolving between their faces - one of the few pieces of effective editing in the film, though  they manage well matched cuts and dissolves closer. The piece is mainly played by the cast opened out to camera in front of flat studio decors. It is only when he stops the top hat undertaker following a horse-drawn hearse that Veidt learns Berber died of a plague attack that the hotel wishes to conceal.

This is credited to “Die Erscheinung" a 1912 story by Anselma Heine but is a version of the often filmed Paris Exhibition story, seen as Veit Harlan’s Christina Soderbaum version Covered Tracks/ Verwehte Spuren, Terence Fisher’s So Long at the Fair from Anthony Horne’s 1947 novel and Joseph Newman’s 1953 Dangerous Crossing from a John Dickinson Carr radio play.

Second up is "The Hand" by Robert Liebmann (later to co-write Congress Dances) where Veidt and Schünzel throw dice for dancer Berber, who they both desire. Loser Schünzel kills his rival, but the specter of Veidt’s ghostly hand turns into a Beast with Five Fingers and haunts the murderer.

Eerie Tales: The Hand - Schünzel & Berber.

The third episode uses  Poe’s "The Black Cat", having drunken Schünzel kill wife Berber clinging to her cat. Admirer Veidt becomes suspicious and brings the silk hat cops. The dastard’s crime is revealed by the mewing of the animal he had walled up with the body (which we don’t see) in his cellar - very “Tell Tale Heart.” The shot of Berber, carried head downwards with her hair streaming, strikingly anticipates many monster movie compositions to come. 

Next, adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club” has detective Schünzel penetrate a secret society who execute losers in their card game, the ones who draw the Pique As/ Ace of Spades. Again we don’t see the playing cards though the dominating wall clock catches attention. Oswald himself is credited with the last story “The Spectre”, played in powdered wigs, where chatelaine Veidt allows his wife Berber to dally with braggart nobleman Schünzel, after he is found injured in the grounds (which we also never see). The intruder is psyched out by the fittings moving without explanation. 

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Eerie Tales: Berben, Schünzel & Bernhard Goetzke

 

In the book shop, the three apparitions have studied these stories with derision and, at day break, they retreat back into their frames only to terrify the bookseller when he find his paintings have come to life.

For 1919, this is accomplished, with the leads giving animated and carefully differentiated performances and got up in distinctive costumes. Oswald, who also has bit parts, does get traction of out of close-ups where we see passions blaze in a young but assured Veidt’s eyes. The infamous Berber does one of her Dances of Vice (fully clothed but managing the splits) and is not outclassed, though her bad teeth are a distraction. 

The copy doesn’t do their work justice (on You Tube one with English captions is best) but we can see that cameraman Karl Hoffmann and forgotten designer Julius Hahlo are already on top of their game. Oswald and Schünzel both would go on to direct indifferent musicals and emigrate to Hollywood.

Veidt - in The Last Performance.

 

 

 

 For Oswald, his 1932 second go round at Unheimliche Geschichten starred Paul Wegener, a genuine founder figure of the Horror Cinema, clocking up one student of Prague, three Golems, Rex Ingram's The Magician and this one. Released as The Living Dead, it may well be Oswald's best movie, though his loss of status as a leading film maker was accelerated by his unsteady control of  sound technique. Here journalist hero Harald Paulsen (also in Alrune with Paul Wegner and again together in Der fall Molander) is implausibly unconcerned by the devilment around him in some shots and he's able to hear a distant scream from his car off on the road. There's a disturbingly obvious jump in the music and the hissing track fades with the picture. The studio built exteriors are notably small scale. 

As in the 1919 film,  this one cobbles together “The Black Cat” and “The Suicide Club”, here made one continuous narrative. At night, reporter Paulsen is driving his actress lady friend Mary Parker (what happens to her?) to her performance when his radiator boils. The isolated house where he goes for water belongs to Mörder / Paul Wegener whose home is filled with his morbid inventions. He’s working on a miniature electric chair. 

Having heard a woman's scream,  Paulsen summons  Police Inspector Gerhard Bienert (in Lang's M) and his officers to the scene. They are re-assured by Wegener, until they hear the yowl of her cat, which he unknowingly walled up with the body of wife Roma Bahn.

Wegener escapes into John (Noseratu) Gottowt’s next door Mechanical Museum of Horrors, where the attractions include (clumsy) animatronic displays of the Executions of Emperor Maximilian and Marie Antoinette - along with The Captain from Köpenick (!) which Oswald would film twice. Paulsen gets into a fight with Wegener who brings down an exhibit’s guillotine, slashing the journalist’s arm.

Paulsen goes into Paul (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) Henckels' adjacent Unfallstation (spooky neighborhood this) for treatment, not aware when sheet covered Wegener is wheeled past him on a gurney, sent on his way to the Irrenanstalt where they are practicing The System of Dr. Tarr & Prof. Fether. 

Wegener in flight.

There, head doctor Eugen Klöpfer (Grune's Die Straße) assures Paulsen that Gretel Berndt, the blonde girl singing “The Last Rose of Summer” at the key board, is not an inmate but his niece. They pass the cells where the prisoners claim to be the staff - scarey. He invites Paulsen to diner, where suspicions are raised when the diners crowd round and Berndt starts doing her number over again at table, while Klöpfer waves a knife and offers to shave our hero. Flat Cap Porter Carl Heinz Charrell has been making random calls from the switchboard and the bobbies burst in to save Paulsen.

Wegener has escaped again and Paulsen starts investigating an institution at 13 Old James St. which seems to have no entrance. Climbing the fence he finds himself in Wegener’s Suicide Club, where the members are reacting variously to the practice of  sorting through a deck of cards till a member draws the Ace of Spades, calling for his execution. One jokes about having participated for five months, while young Viktor de Kowa (Kaütner's Des Teufels General) is falling apart with the stress.

“Das speil begin” with the diner suited members nervously picking cards from Wegener’s deck to be torn up when they prove not to be the fatal choice. Sure enough Paulsen gets Piq-As and is trapped in his chair by encircling metal bands, which prevent him operating the panel of controls out of reach in the table in front of him. Wegener watches from safety as the giant pendulum clock (Poe mixed with his hobby gadgets) counts down till the room fills with poison gas.

Paulsen makes an unexplained escape and imprisons Wegener in the chair and the cops break in again, with club members and staff being assured that they need not fear the outside world.

Paulsen in pursuit.

Despite its crude technique and illogicalities, this may be Oswald’s best film. In this nocturnal environment, Wegener’s shadow precedes him, studio moonlight throws the outline of the paling fence on the wall and sequences offer replicas of the giant dial of Metropolis, the asylum of Caligari and the tableaux of Waxworks. While the technicians are second rank, it is clear to see the tradition to which they belong.

Extraordinarily atmospheric still today, The Living Dead gives off the the sense of “evil” which the cycle will inject into the films noirs to come. We are long on violence to women again. These films have in extreme the feeling of menace that characterises the "Expressionist" cinema, the thing which Theodore Roszak's novel "Flicker" attributes to a Catholic conspiracy. It survives into Edgar Ulmer's work and it's what I found disturbing about Metropolis when I saw it at the age of thirteen. This is something which makes this body of work memorable whatever other qualities it may lack.

 
Oh - and Sheldon Lewis was a D.W. Griffith actor who notched up the villain parts in Pearl White serials, like The Clutching Hand, and a couple of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hydes.

 Barrie Pattison 2023