Early Horror Movies

Silent film offered the early pioneers a wonderful medium in which to examine terror. Early horror films are surreal, dark pieces, owing their visual appearance to the expressionist painters and their narrative style to the stories played out by the Grand Guignol Theatre Company. Darkness and shadows, such important features of modern horror, were impossible to show on the film stock available at the time, so the sequences, for example in Nosferatu, where we see a vampire leaping amongst gravestones in what appears to be broad daylight, seem doubly surreal to us now. Nonetheless, these early entries to the genre established many of the codes and conventions still identifiable today.

Unfortunately, many of these early attempts at horror have been lost to us. Read a timeline outlining the main landmarks here.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919)

Often cited as the'granddaddy of all horror films', this is an eerie exploration of the mind of a madman. All the codes and conventions of the horror film as we know it are are apparent, even in this early example. "The Cabinet..." is stylish, imaginative, and, with its expressionist angles, never less than disturbing. A 1996 reissue, complete with art deco titles, makes perfect sense of a film that has had a profound influence on subsequent horror.

Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu is the very first vampire movie, baldly plagiarising the Dracula story to present Count Orlok, the grotesquely made-up 'Max Schreck', curling his long fingernails round the limbs of a series of hapless victims. Described as the vampire movie that actually believes in vampires, Nosferatu gives us a far more frightening bloodsucker than any of its successors; Shreck is simply inhuman.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is a fascinating reworking of the Nosferatu legend; a compelling, if fanciful reconstruction of the film's creation. Starring Willem Dafoe & John Malkovich.