Horror in the 1920s

The decade in context

Horror's visual language was invented in the silent era. With no spoken dialogue to lean on, filmmakers used angular sets, stark lighting and exaggerated performances to make fear visible, and German studios led the way.

The decade gave cinema its first lasting vampire and set a pattern still used today: a threat that arrives from outside a community and exposes what that community cannot control.

The decade began in Berlin. On February 26, 1920, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered at the Marmorhaus cinema, and it did something audiences had rarely seen: it set a thriller inside a world that looked deliberately wrong. Directed by Robert Wiene from a script by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, it was produced by Decla-Film and shot entirely on studio sets in Berlin-Weissensee over about a month at the turn of 1919 and 1920. Its reported budget was tiny by later standards. The designers Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig built streets and rooms from sharp angles, leaning walls and painted canvas, and they painted shadows and shafts of light directly onto the sets. The camera did not need to invent atmosphere, because the scenery already carried it.

That approach had a name, expressionism, borrowed from painting and theater, where the goal was to show an inner state instead of an accurate picture of the outside world. In film it meant crooked doorways, exaggerated gestures and lighting with extreme contrast. Historians often connect it to Germany after the First World War, with a shaken economy and a public attracted to stories of authority gone wrong, though that is an interpretation. Critics later coined the word caligarism for films that copied the look. Whatever its causes, the style gave horror something it could not do without: a way of making a frightening feeling visible on screen without a word of spoken dialogue.

The second landmark is Nosferatu. It was made by Prana Film, a small company founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and the occultist artist Albin Grau, who also designed the film's sets, costumes and publicity. Henrik Galeen wrote a screenplay that followed Bram Stoker's Dracula without having acquired the rights. Director F. W. Murnau began shooting in July 1921, and instead of building everything in a studio he went outside, filming in the Baltic port of Wismar and other northern German towns and in northern Slovakia, with interiors done in a Berlin studio. A modest budget meant a single camera, which meant a single original negative. The film premiered in Berlin on March 4, 1922, at a society evening in the Marmorsaal of the Zoological Garden.

What followed nearly erased it. Bram Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker, sued over the unauthorized adaptation, and a court ruled that copies should be destroyed. Prana had gone bankrupt, and its only production was now a legal liability. Some prints survived anyway, and over the following decades the film was reassembled, restored and rediscovered as one of the foundations of the genre. It matters to this library for two reasons. It gave cinema its first lasting vampire, a gaunt, rodent-like figure unlike the elegant aristocrat of later films, and it showed that horror could be built from real locations and shadow as well as painted sets. Max Schreck, then little known, played the Count.

Germany produced more. Paul Wegener's The Golem: How He Came Into the World, co-directed with Carl Boese and released in 1920, gave the screen a gothic retelling of a Jewish legend about a clay figure brought to life. In 1924 Waxworks, directed by Paul Leni, offered an anthology in which a poet imagines tales about three wax figures, played by Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss, with the shortest segment devoted to Jack the Ripper. An Austrian film of the same year, The Hands of Orlac, adapted Maurice Renard's novel about a pianist and a transplanted pair of hands. These were films about doubles, automata and bodies that no longer obey their owners, a set of themes the genre has returned to ever since.

Hollywood paid attention. Germany's studios were famous for their craft, and talent flowed across the Atlantic during the second half of the decade. Murnau made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans in 1927, a film cited as an example of German influence on American cinema, and Leni later directed The Cat and the Canary (1927), a comic haunted-house picture. The techniques they carried, including moving cameras, bold lighting and designed sets, filtered into American filmmaking, where they would later be visible in horror cycles and in film noir. The longer story of that migration is told in the Germany guide.

The most famous American horror performer of the decade was Lon Chaney, an actor known for creating his own makeup. For Universal's The Phantom of the Opera, which premiered at New York's Astor Theatre on September 6, 1925, he designed the Phantom's face himself and the studio kept it secret until the premiere. Rupert Julian is the credited director, though reshoots were ordered afterward and other hands worked on the picture. Universal built a replica of the Paris Opera House on Stage 28, reported as the first soundstage made with steel girders set in concrete, at a cost for the whole film of roughly $632,000. It earned about $2 million on its first run and was reissued with sound in 1929. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1998.

The commercial context mattered. Cinema in the 1920s was a mass medium for the first time, with large theaters, regular programs and a star system, and studios had learned that frightening pictures could draw audiences. Silent films were rarely silent in the theater. Music was played live, from a single pianist or organist in a small house to an orchestra in a large one, and some films, Caligari among them, had a commissioned score. The modern idea that music and sound do much of the work of fear, which is explored in How Horror Films Use Sound to Create Fear, starts here, in the effort to supply by music what the soundtrack could not yet provide.

There was no single set of rules for horror yet. In the United States the studios' self-regulation became formal only with the Production Code adopted in 1930 and enforced strictly from 1934, so 1920s films were made before that system arrived, although local censors and state boards could still demand cuts. The effect is that the decade's films are sometimes more direct about death and cruelty than the Hollywood horror of the 1930s would be. The Code era, with its insistence that crime be punished and that certain subjects be avoided, shaped how the monsters of the next decade were written.

Why does this decade matter to a modern viewer? Because nearly every basic strategy of horror filmmaking was tested in it. Shadow as menace, the outsider who brings disease or doom, the double, the mad scientist, the monster who is also a victim, the story told in a series of linked tales: all are present before 1930. The decade also teaches a useful lesson about reading old films, which is to watch them at their own speed, with attention to composition and gesture instead of waiting for plot twists. Once you adjust, the pictures are often more unsettling than their reputations suggest.

For those who want a path through the period in this library, start with Nosferatu, read the profile of F. W. Murnau, and then open the birth of horror cinema timeline to see where it fits. If you want to compare it with the more psychological approach of the next big shift, jump to the 1960s and read about Psycho. The contrast between a creature from outside society and a danger that lives next door is one of the most useful ways to understand the genre's development. You can also use the Movie Explorer and choose the 1920s to see exactly what the library holds for this decade.

Films from the 1920s