The Birth of Horror Cinema: A Short Timeline

Trick films and the first frights, 1896 to 1909

Horror did not wait for the movies to grow up. In the first years of film, short trick pictures borrowed the devils, ghosts and skeletons of stage magic and fairground ghost shows, and the person who did the most with them was Georges Méliès, a Paris magician who turned his theater into a film studio. His Le Manoir du diable, known in English as The Haunted Castle or The House of the Devil, is dated December 24, 1896, though film historians note it may have been released in late 1896 or early 1897. It runs about three minutes. In it the Devil conjures a woman, a skeleton that becomes a bat, ghostly figures and a group of old women, and a knight drives him off with a crucifix.

Some writers call it the first horror film, and because a man turns into a bat in the opening, some even call it the first vampire film. Both claims depend on how strictly the genre is defined. Méliès meant to amuse and astonish, not to frighten, and the film is best seen as a comic fantasy that happens to use the furniture of horror. Méliès also shot a remake in 1897, Le Château hanté, and the two are often confused. The 1896 film was long considered lost until a copy turned up in the New Zealand Film Archive, a find that was confirmed in the late 1980s.

What matters is what the film shows about the medium. Cinema could make a body vanish, change shape or float, and audiences had seen nothing like it. Those effects, achieved by stopping the camera and swapping objects, gave filmmakers a cheap way to show the impossible. For the next decade, supernatural trick films, devil films and skeleton films were a regular part of the early program, and they set up the idea that the screen was a good place for things that could not exist.

Edison's Frankenstein, 1910

The first screen version of Mary Shelley's novel was a short made by Edison Studios and released on March 18, 1910. J. Searle Dawley directed and wrote it, Charles Stanton Ogle played the creature, and Augustus Phillips played the scientist. It fits on a single reel of 975 feet, which is roughly 16 minutes at silent speeds. The creation scene was among its best effects: the filmmakers burned a dummy and ran the film backwards, so that the monster appeared to form out of smoke and flame.

The film is a loose adaptation. The scientist is not named, and the monster disappears after seeing its own reflection, instead of killing members of the family as it does in the book. Edison's trade periodical called it a liberal adaptation, and the studio said it wanted to emphasize the mystic and psychological aspects of the story while leaving out anything repulsive. That is an early example of a pattern that would shape American horror for decades, in which the studio promised to be tasteful while selling the thrill.

For decades the film was believed to be lost. Its description and stills survived in an April 1910 Edison catalog, and a print surfaced in the 1970s through a Wisconsin collector, Alois Dettlaff, who had bought it in the early 1950s. The Library of Congress acquired his collection in 2014, and a full restoration was announced in 2018.

Expressionism: Caligari, Nosferatu and the look of dread

After the First World War, German studios found that distorted images could say what realism could not. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered at the Marmorhaus in Berlin on February 26, 1920. Robert Wiene directed from a script by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, two writers shaped by their wartime distrust of authority. Designers Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig built a world of slanted houses, crooked streets and painted shadows, all filmed in a studio. Werner Krauss played the sinister doctor, and Conrad Veidt the sleepwalker Cesare. Both used stylized, expressionist performances to match the sets.

The film's frame story, which sets the main action inside a narrator's account, was added without the writers' agreement. Janowitz opposed it, and the critic Siegfried Kracauer later argued it turned a revolutionary film into a conformist one. Even so, the look of Caligari changed what filmmakers thought a thriller could look like. Critics still argue about whether to call it the first horror film, a claim Roger Ebert made but framed as arguable, but nobody disputes its influence on horror and, later, on film noir.

Two years later came Nosferatu, which premiered in the Marmorsaal of the Berlin Zoological Garden on March 4, 1922, with a general release at the Primus-Palast on March 15. F. W. Murnau directed for Prana Film, a company founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau that made no other film. Grau, an occultist who also designed the sets and costumes, helped shape the look of Count Orlok, played by Max Schreck. Hans Erdmann wrote the score for the Berlin premiere, though most of it is now lost.

Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The name Orlok replaced Dracula, but Stoker's widow Florence sued, and a court ordered all copies destroyed. Several prints survived, and the film went on to become one of the most influential in the genre. Its vampire, a figure of dread rather than glamour, is a large part of why a silent German film still shapes how people imagine the undead.

Hollywood's silent faces: Chaney, Hunchback and Phantom

American studios did not need a European export to get interested. Universal made The Hunchback of Notre Dame, released September 2, 1923, and The Phantom of the Opera, which premiered at the Astor Theatre in New York on September 6, 1925. Both starred Lon Chaney, an actor who designed and applied his own makeup. For the Phantom he used a skullcap, glued-on ears, cheek padding and wires beneath the nose, and the studio kept the result secret until the premiere.

The Phantom of the Opera had a troubled production. Rupert Julian directed the original shoot but left after a negative preview, and Edward Sedgwick supervised a reshoot, with Lois Weber and Maurice Pivar helping to cut the final version. The budget was reported at about $632,000, and the film earned about $2 million initially. The Masquerade Ball sequence was shot in two-color Technicolor. Early reviews were mixed, but today critics often rank it among the best of the silent era, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 1998.

These films established two ideas that Universal would follow into the sound era. The first was that a monster could be a tragic figure, someone the audience pities even as he terrifies. The second was that a star's face, transformed, could sell tickets.

The Universal cycle, 1931 to 1948

Sound changed everything. Universal's Dracula, directed by Tod Browning with Bela Lugosi as the Count, premiered at the Roxy Theatre in New York on February 12, 1931, and opened across the country two days later. It was made for about $341,000 and earned a profit of roughly $700,000, the largest of the studio's 1931 releases. The film has no original score. Its opening credits use music from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, with excerpts from Wagner and Schubert elsewhere. Universal also shot a Spanish-language version on the same sets at night, with a different cast and director.

Frankenstein followed on November 21, 1931. James Whale directed, Carl Laemmle Jr. produced, and Boris Karloff played the Monster in makeup designed by Jack Pierce. Bela Lugosi had originally been expected for the role but left the project. The film cost about $262,000 and was a hit, though state censor boards in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York cut a scene in which the Monster drowns a little girl, and Kansas also asked for cuts. The scene was later found in a British archive and restored. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 1991.

More monsters came quickly: The Mummy on December 22, 1932, The Invisible Man on November 13, 1933, Bride of Frankenstein on April 22, 1935, and Werewolf of London on May 13, 1935. After Bride came a dry spell. Then successful re-releases of Dracula and Frankenstein renewed the market, and Son of Frankenstein appeared on January 13, 1939. The Wolf Man arrived on December 12, 1941 and became Lon Chaney Jr.'s signature role. In the 1940s the monsters began to meet each other, as in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (March 5, 1943), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (June 15, 1948) turned them into comedy figures. The studio also produced Creature from the Black Lagoon (February 12, 1954), one of the few new monsters of the 1950s.

These films gave horror its public vocabulary: the castle, the mob with torches, the mad scientist, the lab with sparking machines. Their makeup and performances became the standard images of monsters for generations, and the supernatural tradition in the library owes a great deal to their rules.

The Production Code and the soft horror of the 1930s

The Motion Picture Production Code, also called the Hays Code, was drafted in 1929 by Martin Quigley and Father Daniel A. Lord, agreed to by studio heads including Irving Thalberg in February 1930, and adopted by the studios' trade association on March 31, 1930. For several years it was loosely applied, which is why the early Universal films could show a great deal. The real change came on June 13, 1934, when an amendment created the Production Code Administration, and films released on or after July 1, 1934 needed a Seal of Approval.

One small example shows the difference. In Frankenstein, made before the strict enforcement, the scientist is allowed to shout that he knows what it feels like to be God. By the time Bride of Frankenstein was made under full enforcement in 1935, that kind of open blasphemy was forbidden. Universal's own record shows the effect: after Bride of Frankenstein the studio entered what one account calls a dry spell of horror films, and the next wave did not arrive until re-releases proved there was still an audience.

The Code lasted until 1968, when the MPAA ratings system replaced it, taking effect on November 1 of that year. Between those dates it shaped what a film could show, including the horror films discussed below, and filmmakers who wanted to show more waited for it to loosen.

Val Lewton and the horror you cannot see, 1942 to 1946

In 1942, RKO placed producer Val Lewton in charge of a unit that was to make low-budget horror. The rules were tight: a budget under $150,000, a running time under 75 minutes, and a title chosen by studio executives. Lewton, a Russian-born novelist and former publicity man who had emigrated as a child, answered with films that relied on suggestion, shadow and sound. The first, Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur, premiered at the Rialto Theatre in Manhattan on December 5, 1942, and cost about $135,000. It is the story of a young woman who fears she carries an ancient curse.

The film's stalking scenes are the model for decades of suspense. In one, a woman walks alone at night, and a sudden hiss turns out to be the air brakes of a bus. The device became known in the trade as a Lewton bus, and it is often cited as a forerunner of the jump scare. Another stalking scene is set in a swimming pool, shot at the Royal Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tourneur preferred to hint at the panther through shadows rather than show it, and when executives insisted on a visible cat in one scene, he shot it so the image stayed ambiguous. The film was one of RKO's biggest hits of the season, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 1993.

Lewton's other horror films for RKO include I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man, The Body Snatcher (1945) with Boris Karloff, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam. He gave early chances to future directors Robert Wise and Mark Robson, and Karloff later said Lewton had rescued his career. Lewton died in 1951 at the age of 46. His approach, that audiences are scared by what they imagine, is the template for every film that holds back its monster, and it can be traced from Alien to modern psychological horror.

Hammer and the colors of the 1950s

In Britain, a small company called Hammer Film Productions, run by James Carreras and Anthony Hinds, found a market. Its science-fiction horror The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), adapted from a BBC serial and directed by Val Guest, was unexpectedly popular. Hammer retitled it to exploit the new X certificate, a British category for adult films. In 1957 the company released The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence Fisher, with Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as the Creature.

The film was made for a reported £65,000 and was Hammer's first gothic horror. Hammer shot it in color, which allowed blood to appear on screen as red. It was a major success in Britain, the United States and continental Europe. Dracula followed, with Fisher directing, Lee as the Count and Cushing as Van Helsing. Principal photography began on November 11, 1957, on a budget of £81,412, and the film broke box-office records in Britain, the United States and Canada. The Mummy came in 1959, with filming from February 23 to April 16, and broke those records again.

Hammer worked from a home base at Bray Studios on the Thames, a former mansion that it remodeled into a studio complex and used until 1966. The grounds were central to what is often called the Hammer look. The company's version of the classic monsters, in color and with more graphic blood, shaped what audiences expected from gothic horror into the 1960s.

1960: the year the genre turned

Three films released in 1960 pointed in different directions. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom premiered in London on April 7. Written by Leo Marks, it follows a young man who films the women he kills, and its harsh reviews are widely seen as ending Powell's career as a director in Britain. Martin Scorsese helped bring it back to attention in the 1970s, and critics now see it as a sharp study of the audience's own voyeurism. Mario Bava's Black Sunday, an Italian gothic with Barbara Steele, opened in Italy on August 11, and was banned in Britain for years.

On June 16, Psycho opened at the DeMille and Baronet theaters in New York. Alfred Hitchcock had been refused his usual budget by Paramount, so he financed the picture himself through Shamley Productions, filmed it in black and white with the crew of his television series at Universal, and spent about $807,000. Hitchcock bought the rights to Robert Bloch's 1959 novel for $9,500. He also insisted that latecomers not be admitted, a policy theater owners first doubted and then embraced as lines formed. The film grossed tens of millions of dollars and received four Oscar nominations. Bernard Herrmann's score for strings only became one of the most imitated in film.

Psycho moved horror out of the castle and into a roadside motel, and it made the killer a polite young man. In effect it launched the line of films that would lead to the slasher, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1992. Hitchcock, who reportedly had copies of the novel bought up to protect the surprise, treated the film's secrets as part of the show.

1968: two films, one turning point

Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, produced by William Castle for Paramount, opened on June 12, 1968. Based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel, it follows a young wife in Manhattan who becomes pregnant and suspects her neighbors of sinister intentions. Though set in New York, it was mostly shot in Los Angeles, with the Dakota apartment building used for exteriors. It earned about $33.4 million on a $3.2 million budget. Ruth Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in 2014. It showed that a major studio could make a respectable, even prestigious horror film about the modern world.

A few months later, on October 1, 1968, Night of the Living Dead premiered at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh. George A. Romero and his friends had raised roughly $114,000, and the film was shot near Evans City, Pennsylvania. It had no stars, no studio and a Black lead actor, Duane Jones, in a mostly white cast. It earned an estimated $30 million worldwide and entered the National Film Registry in 1999. Together the two films mark the point where the old gothic monsters gave way to ordinary settings: an apartment, a farmhouse.

That autumn also brought the end of the Code. The MPAA rating system took effect on November 1, 1968, and the Production Code Administration was dissolved by the end of the year. Free of the Seal, horror could now show more, and the decade that followed brought The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween.

Where to go next

To see the roots in action, watch Nosferatu and read about Murnau, then Psycho and Night of the Living Dead. The creatures that began on the Universal lot have their own entries, including the vampire and the zombie. To see how sound transformed the genre, read How Horror Films Use Sound to Create Fear.

Related entries

• Nosferatu
• Psycho
• Night of the Living Dead
• Supernatural Horror
• The Vampire

Sources and further reading

• The House of the Devil (1896 film), Wikipedia
• Frankenstein (1910 film), Wikipedia
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Wikipedia
• Nosferatu, Wikipedia
• The Phantom of the Opera (1925 film), Wikipedia
• Universal Monsters, Wikipedia
• Dracula (1931 English-language film), Wikipedia
• Frankenstein (1931 film), Wikipedia
• Motion Picture Production Code, Wikipedia
• Val Lewton, Wikipedia
• Cat People (1942 film), Wikipedia
• Hammer Film Productions, Wikipedia
• Psycho (1960 film), Wikipedia
• Peeping Tom (1960 film), Wikipedia
• Black Sunday (1960 film), Wikipedia
• Rosemary's Baby (film), Wikipedia
• Night of the Living Dead, Wikipedia