The Supernatural and the Occult

1896 · Georges Méliès

The first trick was a bat becoming the Devil. Substitution splices, skeletons, a cauldron, a crucifix. Méliès meant a comic féerie and the histories call it the first horror film. Take both readings. Three minutes.

1910 · J. Searle Dawley

The creature forms in a vat of smoke: a burning dummy run backward. Edison in sixteen minutes, one print, lost for most of a century. Ogle built the makeup himself. The ending, the creature fading in a mirror, is the film's own theory of what a monster is.

1920 · Robert Wiene

The sets are a mind. Painted shadows, streets that lean, a sleepwalker who tells you the hour of your death. Nothing in the frame is supernatural except the frame. The uncanny here is a set designer's decision, and it never needed a ghost.

1920 · Paul Wegener, Carl Boese

A creature made of clay and a ghetto built to look grown. Poelzig's walls lean and bulge; Wegener stands very still. The word goes in the chest and the tool stops being one. Watch the gate at the end: a child, an apple, and the horror simply set down.

1920 · Carl Theodor Dreyer

Satan as a hired continuity: the same actor tempting four centuries. Dreyer's uncanny is persuasion, not apparition. Watch the Finnish episode, the one closest to its own war, where the Devil is a man in a room explaining a choice.

1921 · Fritz Lang

Death owns a walled garden and keeps a room of candles, each one a life. The wall of candles is the image, and the three stories are the argument. Herlth and Röhrig's architecture does the haunting. Goetzke plays Death as a tired man who would rather not.

1921 · Victor Sjöström

The coach is a double exposure. Jaenzon and Hellman layered exposures until the coachman could walk through a wall and stand behind a chair. The dead are transparent and the drunk is not. Watch the clock hit midnight in the graveyard. The technique is the ghost.

1922 · F. W. Murnau

A contagion, not a seduction. Murnau puts real hills and a real ship around a figure that should not be walking and lets the landscape catch it. The shadow on the stairs belongs to no one you can see. The rats do the rest.

1922 · Benjamin Christensen

A lecture with a Sabbath in it. Christensen reads the Malleus Maleficarum, stages the torture and the flying, and then ends in a clinic to say the witches were patients. He plays the Devil himself. Variety called it unfit. It opened anyway.

1923 · Arthur Robison

Shadows that do not belong to anyone, literally. A traveling shadow-player pulls the guests' shadows off their bodies and stages their evening on the wall. No story titles in the first release. The uncanny as a projector trick, which is to say, as cinema.

1924 · Robert Wiene

The horror is a pair of hands. Wiene keeps the rooms ordinary and puts the Expressionism in Veidt's fingers: a pianist who believes the grafts remember a murderer. Watch him hold them away from his body. Nothing supernatural happens, and that is the point.

1924 · Paul Leni, Leo Birinski

Three wax figures, three registers, and the Ripper episode is the one that matters here: a few minutes of double exposures, a fairground that tilts, a chase with no floor. Leni packed the method and took it to Universal. The next two films are what he did with it.

1925 · Rupert Julian

A ruined face under a mask. Chaney built it from wire and cotton and held still while Christine pulled the mask off. The Bal Masqué is Technicolor: the Red Death on the stairs at a party that cannot tell costume from warning. The unmasking is why the film exists.

1926 · F. W. Murnau

Mephisto as a plague. Jannings spreads his cloak over a town in the opening, a model and a fan and smoke, and the horror is the scale. Then the flight over the model landscape. The bargain is the plot. Gretchen in the snow is the price.

1926 · Henrik Galeen

A reflection sold, and the double walks Prague on its own. Krampf's split-screen lets Veidt fence himself. Galeen wrote Nosferatu and Waxworks and knew the uncanny works best in a familiar face. The mirror is a contract. The student signs.

1926 · Rex Ingram

Maugham's Crowley sketch, played by the Golem. Wegener as Haddo, a hypnotist who needs a virgin's blood, and Ingram shooting France and a tower with Seitz. The laboratory is the last act. The ritual is filmed as if it might work.

1927 · Paul Leni

Leni brings the German hallway to Hollywood and invents the old dark house. A will, heirs in a river mansion, a claw through a wall, curtains that move. The uncanny as architecture. Every haunted-house comedy after it is standing in these corridors.

1928 · Paul Leni

A face carved into a grin, and an actor who has to work through it. Veidt's mouth is wire and greasepaint, and the eyes above it are the performance. Leni plays England as a German set. Hugo's cruelty on a Universal lot, and the eyes doing what the mouth cannot.

1932 · Carl Theodor Dreyer

Sounds wrong on purpose, looks half developed on purpose. Maté shoots through gauze; shadows go where they like; the doctor serves something you never see. The burial from inside the coffin, glass and sky, is the sequence. Not Expressionism. A dream with a Danish director.

1932 · Victor Halperin

The living dead as labor. Lugosi's Legendre runs a sugar mill with corpses, and the horror is the grinding stones, not appetite. Shot fast on sets left from Dracula. The colonial fact is inside the chiller, and the film half knows it.