When do we first start to see horror films in America? What are these early films like?
In American silent cinema, there were often scary stories and terrifying characters, usually played by Lon Chaney, the famous “man of a thousand faces.” But they were always human beings, and if something seemed to be ghostly or supernatural, it had to be explained away as a criminal enterprise.
That wasn’t the case in Europe, where the early cinema embraced the outright fantastic from the very beginning — the trick films of Georges Méliès, for instance. And then there were the German expressionist classics like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Nosferatu” — which were not escapist entertainment, but rather self-conscious art films intended to embody metaphors about the Great War. In “Caligari,” you have this malignant authoritarian figure sending forth his sleepwalker to kill and be killed, just as untold numbers of soldiers had been in the Great War. And in the original promotion for “Nosferatu,” there was this idea that the vampire represented the cosmic vampire of war itself, which had drained the blood out of Europe.
The European and the American traditions came together at the beginning of the talkie era, when Universal Pictures produced “Dracula,” which was the very first time that Hollywood had taken a chance on an outright supernatural premise. Dracula was not a criminal; he was a 500 year old demon from hell. The film was a freak success. It came out in 1931, the worst year of the Great Depression, and literally saved Universal from bankruptcy, as did “Frankenstein,” which they brought out very quickly after they realized what a success they had on their hands with “Dracula.” So even though “Dracula” is not a polished or artistically innovative film — in fact, it really creaks — it’s still one of the most influential films Hollywood ever released because it opened up the dormant possibilities of the fantastic and the supernatural.
Vampires, zombies, ghosts — these monsters never go away, but interest in them seems to ebb and flow. Is there a connection between a monster’s popularity and the cultural moment at hand?
Yes. The 1930s, the Depression era, was a time when all of the promises of the Roaring Twenties and the faith in progress and science, and all these things that were going to make our lives better just crashed and burned. And I don’t think it’s a mistake that we saw the rise of the mad scientist, the expert, the egghead, the people who were supposed to fix things for us, but instead had a malign influence. The image of the Frankenstein monster is a proletariat image — asphalt spreader boots and work clothes; he’s like a mute symbol of the whole working class that’s been abandoned by the people who were supposed to take care of him.