Silent As the Grave
Over here avoiding cliched plays on words like the plague
Le Manoir du Diable (1896) d: Georges Méliès
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) d: Robert Wiene
Vampyr – der Traum des Allan Gray (1932) d: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Un Chien Andalou (1929) d: Luis Buñuel
Consider Le Manoir du Diable a little amuse-bouche for this collection. It’s only 3 minutes long, and as far as anyone can tell, it is the very first horror movie. It’s not particularly scary – it’s actually a little goofy – but it’s got vampires and the devil, so it counts. This was made way back in 1896 – wild.
The other movie people call the first horror is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the apotheosis of German expressionism. To me, the most impressive thing about it is how genuinely creepy it still is today. That scene where Cesare wakes up? C’mon.
More German expressionism with Vampyr. It’s a little bit of a cheat to include this with silent films; however, it was the director’s first talkie, and it was required to be recorded in 3 languages, so there is very little dialogue and he generously uses silent-film style title cards. A lot of fascinating and disorienting filming effects make it feel like a gauzy nightmare, and the out-of-body coffin scene is really quite eerie.
Un Chien Andalou is the most surreal of these dreamlike films, would you expect anything less from Salvador Dali? It doesn’t have a plot per se, it’s really a nonlinear series of disturbing vignettes. Among other things, it’s notorious for a certain eye-scream that I genuinely can’t believe made it into a film from the 20s.
(I focused on the lesser-known stuff here, but it almost goes without saying – Nosferatu is a goddamn masterpiece absolutely worth your time if you haven’t seen it.)