After it was all over, everyone tried to forget World War I. No one wanted to remember that the greatest minds of their generation had designed a war that ultimately slaughtered over 16 million people. They had died choking to death on mustard gas, being burned alive by flamethrowers, being crushed beneath tank treads, being stabbed by bayonets, being clubbed by rifle butts: On average, some 456 people murdered per hour, every hour, for four unrelenting years.
On its heels came the Russian Revolution. That added as many as 10 million deaths (many of them civilian) to the body count. At about the same time, a global flu pandemic wiped out up to 50 million more people in only two years. All in, between 1914 and 1923, at least 6 percent of the global population died of disease, starved to death, were killed on battlefields, or were slaughtered in their homes by foreign soldiers.
No wonder the biggest trend of 1924 was flagpole sitting.
And then—dance mania defined the Roaring ’20s. Jazz ruled the airwaves and flappers ruled fashion. Hollywood paid lip service to the war with earnest films like The Big Parade (1925) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), but it was Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton who earned box-office bank. Audiences flocked to see pirate movies, jazz musicals, and religious epics. America had narrowly escaped a dark decade, but the good times were here again.
Not so fast, said Horror. Because something new was bubbling up from underground.
It assumed its first form thanks to a German soldier named Albin Grau, who had served in the Serbian campaign of WWI, a yearlong invasion in which so many German soldiers were slaughtered that reinforcements arrived at a rate of 200,000 a month. After the war ended, Grau returned to Germany and met up with F.W. Murnau, an aspiring director who had survived the Battle of Verdun, which had seen 305,000 soldiers slaughtered.
The two veterans decided to violate copyright and make the film Nosferatu (1922), a bootleg adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which had been a modest hit when it came out but not a blockbuster. Stoker’s widow, Florence, was horrified; she engaged in a long lawsuit that saw every print of the movie, save one, destroyed. But the experience lit a fire under her. She subsequently sold the rights to her husband’s novel to Universal Pictures, despite the head of the studio, Carl Laemmle Sr., declaring: “I don’t believe in horror pictures. It’s morbid.” And: “People don’t want that sort of thing.”