1910.  One hundred years ago yesterday, the Edison Kinetograph Company released the first-known adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1817 novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.  Shot over the course of three days in January of that year, FRANKENSTEIN is a somewhat stagebound 12 minute retelling of the story with some special effects that surely looked impressive a century ago… and still do, to my old school eyes.  Charles Ogle isn’t my idea of the ideal Frankenstein monster but I owe him a debt of thanks anyway for kick starting what would turn out to be a full century of shock and awe.  To read more about the centenary of this milestone, I turn you over to Frankensteinia: The Frankenstein Blog.

1920. A decade later and horror was becoming the stock-in-trade of Weimar Germany.  Though there was the occasional spooker produced over here (John Barrymore starred as both DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE in 1919), Germany would let loose a slew of monsters upon the Earth, including (but not limited to) DER GOLEM, WIE ER IN DIE WELT  KAM (THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD, 1920), NOSFERATU, EINE SYMPHONIE DES GRAUENS (NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF TERRORS, 1922), the spooky simulacra of DAS WACHSFIGURENKABINETT (WAXWORKS, 1924) and, leading the pack, Cesare the (killer) Somnambulist of DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, 1920).  Fritz Lang almost directed this German Expressionist classic but the job fell to Robert Wiene instead.  Nevertheless, the film remains a remarkable cinematic accomplishment and a rare horror film that is remembered and revered almost exclusively on its own visual merits, apart from the cult of personality of anyone who helped realize it.  In his 1993 study of the horror genre, The Monster Show, film historian David J. Skal writes: “It is difficult to overstate the kind of revelation CALIGARI represented to much of its audience, which felt it was witnessing an evolutionary leap in the cinema, one comparable to the coming of sound, or, decades later, to the overwhelming experience of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), a film that similarly reconfigured the possibilities of cinematic space and form for the general public.”  Released in Germany in February 1920 and in America two years later, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI prompted quite a bit of controversy in the States that had, surprisingly, little to do with its subject matter and more to do with its provenance.  In the immediate aftermath of World War I,  “America First” isolationists resented the import of a German-made film; expatriate poet Ezra Pound was a detractor, Carl Sandburg a fan.  The American Legion protested and eggs were thrown at the screen at an exhibition of the film in Los Angeles in May 1922.  That November, however, CALIGARI was back… and in some ways, we never really got him out of our blood.

1930.  At the change-over of the 1920s to the 1930s, of silent films to “talkies,” the horror genre had yet to be named.  Monster movies were rare and more common were mysteries with horrific overtones.  Roland West‘s THE BAT WHISPERS (1930) was a sound remake of his earlier THE BAT (1926), a film adaptation of the hit stage play by Avery Hopwood and Mary Roberts Rinehart.  (The original inspired Bob Kane to create the comic book superhero Batman.)  A technical virtuoso of energetic camerawork, THE BAT WHISPERS amounts to little more than a lot of running around an old dark house, up and down the stairs, in and out of sliding panels.  It’s fun in a corny sort of way but look how it pales beside what had come out of France and Germany through the previous decade.  A year later, with the release and subsequent success of Universal’s DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN (both 1931), horror became a going concern, a market, an angle, a passion, an obsession.  During the Great Depression, films that lifted movie audiences out of the grind of the mundane and the press of desperation very often pitted the living against the undead, good against evil, pure against corrupt.  Mid-decade, the cycle seemed to be flagging until a package deal reissue of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN got exhibitors crowing “Horror is paying off again!”  Throughout the decade, America glutted itself on horrors to the point that, by 1940, there seemed nowhere left for the genre to go.

1940.  It’s fitting, in a circular sort of way, that 1940 should be typified for the sake of argument by THE GHOST BREAKERS.  A vehicle for Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, the film was a sequel to Elliot Nugent’s THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1939).  As had THE BAT, this Paramount production was based on a Broadway hit, which had been adapted previously for the big screen by German expatriate Paul Leni in Hollywood 1927, by George Melford and Enrique Tovar Ávalos as  LA VOLUNTAD DEL MUERTO (“The Dead Man’s Will”) in Mexico in 1930 and by THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925) director Rupert Julian (with a purported assist from playwright John Willard) as THE CAT CREEPS, also in 1930.  THE CAT AND THE CANARY would again be remade in 1978 but let’s get back to THE GHOST BREAKERS.  After a solid decade of spookery, filmmakers were turning a satirical eye toward horror movies (which, it should be noted, often included comic relief).  THE GHOST BREAKERS doesn’t, as had THE CAT AND THE CANARY, explain away all of its frights and manages to have it both ways, being genuinely funny (during a thunder storm, Hope cracks “Basil Rathbone must be having a party”) and genuinely creepy.  KING KONG‘s (1933) Noble Johnson turns up as a gen-u-ine zombie, the art direction of Hans Dreier (SUNSET BLVD.) and Robert Usher (THIS GUN FOR HIRE) is as lushly beautiful as it is eerily evocative and Charles Lang’s cinematography is top notch (director George Marshall would reuse whole passages of THE GHOST BREAKERS in his 1953 remake SCARED STIFF); Lang went on to shoot the superior Hollywood ghost stories THE UNINVITED (1944) and THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR (1947), as well as a number of films for Billy Wilder, and another Broadway crossover, WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967).

1950.  What a difference another decade makes.  Post-ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1946), the Hollywood horror movie was effectively dead in the water.  As if in a moment of shameful clarity, Universal passed off one of its own productions, THE BRUTE MAN (1946), starring “Monster Without Makeup” Rondo Hatton, to the Poverty Row outfit PRC. In 1950, neither of the Kings of Hollywood, Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff, had a movie released and it was a dry season as well for Lon Chaney, Jr., Basil Rathbone, John Carradine.    The sea change in genre filmmaking was about to do an about-face from boogeymen to the fallout of science gone wrong but before the earth was invaded by Martians, big bugs, pod people, or assorted things from other worlds, the last gasp of Gothic horror came from an unlikely source.  Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD. (1950) is never categorized as a fright film and yet, wall-to-wall, it packs in more disturbing imagery than a great many conventional spookshows.  It’s got a haunted house (albeit ghost-less), a resident vamp (if not a vampire), a weird servant (if not a hunchback), a dead monkey and an undead narrator.  Look at William Holden above and tell me he isn’t a kissin’ cousin to The Cemetery Zombie from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), who walks (or, rather, shuffles) the way Joe Gillis floats.  It was critic Richard Corliss who, in 1975, drew a parallel between Joe Gillis and Jonathan Harker, the ill-starred protagonist of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and between Norma Desmond and the Undying Count.  Both pine for the Old Times, both seduce/bewitch/repulse/enslave their respective houseguests a la the spider and the fly in a waking nightmare that writer Jonathan Rigby categorized as “the grisly spectacle of Hollywood cannibalizing itself.”

1960.  Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO is 50 years old, can you believe it?  It’s a bitter pill for me to swallow, as I was born a year later, and already I don’t like where this train of thought is headed.  But all vanity aside, PSYCHO changed the game, horror-wise, in America.  Sure, Gothic horrors would continue to be made – Roger Corman did big business in Edgar Allan Poe through the decade, but this flinty little low budget shocker represents the fork in the road.  For all the ghoulies and ghosties that went bump in the night through the next few decades, there seemed to be three or four more schizos, psychos and slashers.  Murderous motelier Norman Bates was based on real life cannibal serial killer Ed Gein, whose unpalatable exploits would also inspire THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, DERANGED and, in these all too literal times, ED GEIN and ED GEIN: THE BUTCHER OF PLAINFIELD.  If the rather unprepossessing Norman Bates hadn’t been dreamed up by novelist Robert Bloch, scenarist Joseph DeStefano, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins, would we now have such killers-next-door as Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees or Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector?

1970.  Vampires were in by 1970, thanks in part to the efforts of Great Britain’s Hammer Studios (whose string of Dracula films ran from 1958 to 1974, accompanied by the odd non-Dracula offshoot/lesbian vampire caper) and a daytime soap opera called DARK SHADOWS, which went from Off-Gothic in its last two seasons to fangs-out monsterrific.  The series went big screen with HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS and the year also saw the premiere of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS from Hammer, EL CONDE DRACULA (COUNT DRACULA) from Jesus Franco in Spain, LA VAMPIRE NUE (THE NUDE VAMPIRE) from France and both GEBISSEN WIRD NUR NACHTS (US: THE VAMPIRE HAPPENING) and JONATHAN – VAMPIRE STERBEN NICHT from Germany.  Hammer’s in-house Dracula Christopher Lee turned up two vampiric cameos that year, spoofing his own image in THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN with Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers and ONE MORE TIME, alongside frequent costar Peter Cushing.  And yet the one to beat, at least to me, remains COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE.  Conceived by a gaggle of out-of-work Los Angeles actors as a soft core porno movie, the project was turned out as a straight-ahead chiller at the behest of star Robert Quarry.  His scenes cut out of Hitchcock’s SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1942), Quarry continued as a bit player for years – HOUSE OF BAMBOO (1955), A KISS BEFORE DYING (1956), CRIME OF PASSION (1957), AGENT FOR H.A.R.M. (1966) – before this breakthrough role came his way in his mid-40s.  Though COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE spawned only one sequel, the film was a huge success (relative to cost) and its influence could be felt through the decade.  Although Yorga himself is witty, urbane and haughtily aloof, his undead minions are the dirty, snaggle-toothed creatures of folklore and nightmares.  We need more of those, less of the sparkly kind.

1980.  The original FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) takes a lot of critical flak for spawning a generation of brain dead slasher pics – originals, sequels and knock-offs – that diverted the genre from the psychological/metaphysical/spiritual complexities of films like CAT PEOPLE (1942), PSYCHO (1960), THE INNOCENTS (1961), THE HAUNTING (1964), ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and THE EXORCIST (1973) to lesser concerns of body counts and creative kills.  Sure, this cursed summer camp classic upped the attrition ante of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) and HALLOWEEN (1978) but there’s more to it than that.  The film hit me at just the right age, as I was transitioning from high school to college, and I enjoyed the urban legend tone of the film, which brought to mind such great tall tales as “The Hook.”  Bill Murray had retold that proverbial campfire tale for comic effect in the Canadian comedy MEATBALLS (1979); two years before that, the true life events that likely inspired “The Hook” were given their own film treatment in Charles B. Pierce’s THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN (1977).  Interestingly, the look of the flour sack-faced “Phantom Killer” of that film wound up informing an early incarnation of the unstoppable Jason Voorhees in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART. 2 (1981), by which point the F13 train began to go off the rails, focusing more on the exploitation factor of the deaths than the lingering atmosphere of dread and mystery that the first film had in spades.

1990.  The decade between 1980 and 1990 is, to my way of thinking, largely a wasteland of sequels.  Sure, there were good and even classic movies during this time but I’d be hard pressed to find a fright film from 1990 that I’d watch again.  An exception to that rule is John McNaughton’s HENRY, PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER.  The film was made years earlier and played the festival circuit from 1986 until 1990, at which time it received a limited release in January.  I saw it at The Angelika in New York, at a matinee, and I remember how I staggered out of that midday showing with about half a dozen other guys giving serious consideration to jumping in front of an Uptown 6 train.  It’s hard to believe only a year later THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) would make serial killing and face eating sexy; HENRY doesn’t play that game, the bait and switch of etching an ostensible fiend and then stacking the deck so that audiences can’t help but admire him.  Watching Hannibal Lector, you wonder “Who’s he gonna kill next?”  With Henry, you grow cold and feel sick at heart every time he talks to someone new, fearing the worst because you know the worst is much more likely than anything like the best.

2000.  AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000) isn’t really illustrative of horror in the first decade of the New Millennium, which was ruled (or seemed to be) by imports of Asian horror films (RINGU, from 1996), their American remakes (THE RING, THE GRUDGE, DARK WATER) and, later, zombie movies patterned after the success of 28 DAYS LATER (2002), SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004) and LAND OF THE DEAD (2005).  The genre’s most recent milestones had premiered the year before, with THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and THE SIXTH SENSE.  The latter film, the breakout hit for M. Night Shyamalan, had pulled a wooly old trick from the fearmaker’s toolkit, one used previously in JACOB’S LADDER (1990), SIESTA (1988), CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962), in “The Hitch-Hiker” (1959) episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE’s first season, in the 1951 Tales from the Crypt story “Reflection of Death” (filmed as a vignette for the 1972 TALES FROM THE CRYPT feature) and, of course, in Ambrose Bierce’s classic Civil War era short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”  While all of these tales crusted their misdirection around the unavoidable truth that the protagonist is actually dead (a reversal of SUNSET BLVD.’s narrative tack, which leads with this information), AMERICAN PSYCHO (based on the controversial 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis) encourages the viewer to doubt everything the indefatigably murderous Patrick Bateman says and does.  David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997) bears mentioning in this context, as it anticipates an essential ambiguity of personality that would recur throughout the decade in such films as FIGHT CLUB (1999), Lynch’s own MULHOLLAND DR.,  SESSION 9 (2001) and THE MACHINIST (2004) from Brad Anderson, Alexander Aja’s HAUTE TENSION (HIGH TENSION, 2003), Marc Evans’ TRAUMA (2004) and Christopher Smith’s TRIANGLE (2009), to name but a few titles that particularize a decade obsessed with chasing its own tail.

2010.  After all that heady horror, it felt kind of good to kick off a new decade with an old name: THE WOLF MAN (2010).  Scripted by Andrew Kevin Walker (of SE7EN and SLEEPY HOLLOW fame) and David Self (who wrote the - gag – 1999 remake of THE HAUNTING), directed by Joe Johnson and starring Benicio del Toro (with Geraldine Chaplin as Maleva the Gypsy Woman – how perfect is that?), this effects-ridden rethink came and went but it was nice seeing its billboards all over town for a few weeks and hearing my not-yet 3 year-old son call out from his carseat “Daddy, look… the Wolfman!”  The failure of THE WOLFMAN doesn’t augur big things for the classic monsters in this second decade of the New Millennium but if 100 years of horror has taught me anything it’s that anything is possible.