Chapter Two

Waxworks

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

—SIEGFRIED SASSOON,

“On Passing the New Menin Gate” (1928)

Marching Corpses

Death offers the only way out of the clutches of history. But what happens if the corpse returns? What if bodies behave in ways that violate physical laws? What if they come to avenge themselves on the living?

French director Abel Gance began filming the silent movie J’accuse (I Accuse) even before the armistice of 1918. In the late summer of the war’s final year, after the slaughter of the German spring offensives, Gance gathered two thousand French soldiers on leave to shoot the penultimate scene. Most of these infantrymen had recently manned the fortifications near Verdun, where, for nine months in 1916, French and German forces fought continuously over the four-hundred-year-old fortress city with little effect other than almost 800,000 casualties. Close to 1 million soldiers died for this salient on the western front during the course of the Great War.¹

A 1938 remake of the film opened with stock footage from the French War Department intercut into images of a small group of soldiers that includes the protagonist, poet Jean Diaz, crawling through the rubble as shells rain down on them. A dove floats in a putrid pool of water, and when the camera pulls back, we see that a shell has struck a large stone crucifix. Christ’s corpse now hangs upside down as the soldiers move past, one of them seeking to save the dead dove to eat later. Although the action and the tinting of the film suggest daytime, shadows crush the world under heavy darkness. Trees reach toward an empty sky like gnarled hands. In scenes that are supposed to take place out in the open, we feel we are in a collapsed trench dugout.

Gance had ventured to make the first and most explicit effort to connect the story of war to the emergence of horror. His intention becomes clear at the film’s end when the dead rise and shamble toward a French village inhabited by civilians who in the filmmaker’s imagination had been unaware of the sacrifices their men had made at the front. The soldiers come out of the ground to accuse the villagers and return to their graves only when the terrified villagers accept the accusation, or at least understand what the men of France have suffered. Like many films that dealt with war in this era, the violence prosecuted against noncombatants remained unexamined, unseen, or, in the case of J’accuse, a source of terrible irony.

The soldiers who acted out their own tragedy in Gance’s epic, many of them fresh enough from the carnage that they could display their bandaged wounds, did not know they would become part of the most memorable scene of the first horror film of the postwar world. Neither they nor their director knew that the vast majority of these walk-on actors would return to the front to die in the final three months of the war.

J’accuse, in both its iterations, represented something of a confused mixture of the thematic elements from Great War horror and romance. Melodrama plays out against the backdrop of combat when the character of François Laurin eagerly enlists in 1914 but worries, with good reason, that his wife, Edith, will not remain faithful in his absence. She is, in fact, already having a love affair with the young poet Jean. Before he joins the French army, François sends Edith away to live under the watchful eyes of his parents. This fateful decision leads to her capture by the enemy, with the clear suggestion that the German soldiers rape her. The violence Edith suffers reflected the reality of the war for millions of noncombatants and so, paradoxically, appears in a film that accuses civilians of not understanding the soldiers’ plight. Battered and abused, Edith returns to her village with a daughter born from the assault.

The misogynistic elements of the film not only include the perennial obsession over feminine betrayal but also draw on specific worries about control over women’s sexuality during the war years. An entire genre developed around the fear that women on the homefront would not remain faithful. Paul Leni, soon to become one of the great horror filmmakers, directed the 1921 German silent film Hintertreppe (Backstairs), which featured a veteran, believed dead, returning home and killing the man his fiancée has fallen in love with, mutilating him with an ax. When the young woman discovers what has happened, she commits suicide.²

In Drums in the Night (1922), German playwright Bertolt Brecht tells a similar tale with a very different conclusion, one much influenced by Brecht’s emerging Marxism. The play features a lover traumatized by the war and by the discovery of his beloved’s homefront engagement to a wealthy war profiteer, with little distinction made between the horrors of each experience. The wronged veteran makes what’s presented to theatergoers as the saintly decision to forgive his affianced even though it’s questionable whether she needs his forgiveness, given that he’s been missing for four years and her family pressed her into the engagement. The two are reunited but only amid the blood and flames of the Spartacist uprising, Germany’s failed 1919 socialist revolution.

J’accuse perhaps helped create this particular kind of homefront drama, though anxieties already felt by men during the war provided a major impetus. Gance’s film tries to salve men’s worries in a peculiar way. In the first act of the 1919 version, we see the development of what’s known in popular American flicks today as a “bromance” between François and Jean after both men serve together in the trenches. Jean tells his friend they are fighting a kind of “duel,” but it’s with fate and not with each other. François demands to know whether Jean loves his wife. He receives Jean’s heartfelt confession by replying that he hopes his own death will allow Jean and Edith to find happiness. Bizarrely, the moment when the two men confess their mutual love for Edith may represent the most romantic moment in the film. The scene reads as if they are revealing their love for each other, and subsequent events reveal that this is more or less what they are doing.

The bond between the two men prepares the way for the tragedy, and the supernatural element, of J’accuse. A German shell mortally wounds François. Jean returns to his village, insane with grief, and alternately reads from and tears up his poetry while calling forth the dead of all nations. Some critics have written that Gance portrays Jean’s trauma in a kind of hallucinatory vision, and this can be seen in the 1919 version. The 1938 film, however, suggests a terrifying suspension of the laws of nature. The corpses of French and German soldiers rise from their graves and begin to march home.

Gance’s assistant director in the original version of the film, the poet Blaise Cendrars, appeared as one of the mutilated living dead. Cendrars, who had been part of the opening wave of modernist poetry before the war, fought on the Somme from late 1914 to February 1915. During the fighting at Champagne in the fall of 1914, he had been badly wounded and lost his right arm. In one of his most famous poems, “The War in the Luxembourg” (1916), he writes of young children in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens digging trenches in their sandboxes and asking for the latest newspaper instead of the fantastic stories of Jules Verne. In J’accuse he helped bring together the fantastic and the horrific in a way few had ever done before.

The corpses that come from the ground are in various states of decay. Images of the army of the dead are intercut with scenes of mass panic as people flee. Viewers today, particularly of the 1938 version, might be startled by how much these scenes resemble the apocalyptic situation of the contemporary zombie film that, at the beginning, almost always shows us a montage of mass panic, images that signal society’s breakdown. Gance gives us just such an image of a society in free fall during 1919.

Gance did not really know what to do with the dramatic idea of a zombie army coming forth to the horror of the living. He showed the gored veterans rising and marching and then returning to their graves. Nevertheless, we learn much from J’accuse about the meaning of the Great War and its influence on horror. It represents the first moment that a director considered the possibility that the return of the dead could become an act of social criticism.

The theme of the living dead as a plague that forces human survivors to reimagine their world has become central to the contemporary zombie genre, so much so that social satire seems notable in its absence. This trope has become a staple of modern horror cinema, with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the rest of his oeuvre often being copied. Most films that have attempted to deal with zombies in serious fashion (I obviously do not speak of the 2008 Zombie Strippers and the other efforts to cash in on America’s most popular early-twenty-first-century monster) developed an essentially formulaic set of rules for dealing with the zombie apocalypse.

This paradigm for survival, in post-9/11 America, has resulted in an ideologically confusing set of zombie fantasies. The template for dealing with the undead became such a deeply ingrained part of modern American horror culture that Max Brooks’s parody manual, The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), became a bestseller. Brooks followed up with World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), which models itself on both Studs Terkel’s “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (1984) and a variety of post–Vietnam War memoirs.

The success of Brooks’s work seems to echo the original effort by Gance to connect the suddenly living dead to the realities of war. Romero’s film appeared just months after the 1968 Tet offensive—a major campaign of the Vietnam War—and featured a cemetery covered with commemorative flags in the year that American troop totals in Vietnam reached their highest levels and causalities mounted.

The popularity of Brooks’s zombie fictions burgeoned after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In an odd twist, Brooks became a frequent and popular speaker at conferences of military leaders. According to journalist Spencer Ackerman, Brooks became “a cult hero” in the American military. Ackerman added, “I’ve found his books on practically every forward operating base I’ve been on in Iraq and Afghanistan.”³

Gance’s shot of soldiers clawing their way out of their own graves remains a grainy negative image lurking behind many films of the post-9/11 era. Romero’s 2005 Land of the Dead, his finest work since Day of the Dead, offered audiences a great film and a thinly veiled allegory of both the growing divide of class inequality in America and the George W. Bush administration at war. In Romero’s film, human survivors have come under the limited protection of the walls built around luxury condominiums called Fiddler’s Green. However, only a tiny number of the living, all wealthy and white, are allowed to live in the high-rise, which includes a mall, restaurants, and various entertainments that make the apocalypse seem far away. The rest are relegated to a kind of “slum city,” where most, though not all, are black or Latino.

Romero himself said that Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, served as a model for his chief villain, Kaufman (played by Dennis Hopper). Indeed, Kaufman wages war against the zombies outside the walls not because they threaten Fiddler’s Green, but because he needs a distraction while providing the wealthy on whom his power depends various consumer goods collected by the raiding parties made up of desperate tent-city dwellers. Blowback comes in the form of a zombie proletarian army that marches on Fiddler’s Green. The zombies have learned, under the guidance of a self-aware zombie revolutionary leader, to use weapons and work together.⁴

No such critique of the prevailing economic order appears in J’accuse, although many on the left during the Great War and later took note of the vast profits reaped by the owners of heavy industry in Europe and America. Gance was slightly influenced by French socialism at a time when socialist movements in Europe appeared to be nearing a moment they could challenge the capitalist order. The war decisively changed the socialists’ stance, with much of the leadership of the left joining the nationalist fervor that accompanied the beginning of the war. Gance’s limited interest in such matters blunted his interest in the revolutionary possibilities of his corpses on the march.

Romero’s films, in contrast, are examples of how later efforts to resurrect a zombie army onscreen contained a more forceful social critique. But J’accuse became the first tentative march of the mutilated demanding justice. Famed horror director Joe Dante appears to have been directly influenced by Gance’s film in his 2005 feature Homecoming (made for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series). In Dante’s harrowing tale, a Republican president leads the nation in an unnamed but divisive war in the Middle East. During the election, one of his speechwriters tells a grieving mother, “Believe me, if I had one wish, I would wish for your son to come back because I know that he would tell us how important this struggle is.” The president (with a personality equal parts Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) begins using this line as part of his boilerplate campaign speech.

The president gets his wish in the fashion of “The Monkey’s Paw.” The war dead rise and march to vote “for anyone who ends this war,” as one of their grave-choked voices explains. The undead soldiers do not want human flesh or the thanks of a grateful nation. They simply want a useless war to end.

Abel Gance’s rising undead army—an extraordinary idea in 1919—conveys a message that contains more ambiguity than the often on-the-nose zombie allegories made during the early twentieth century’s “war on terror.” In fact, it’s possible to view J’accuse, particularly the 1919 version, as a parable about how the people of France did not support the war enough, as the walking-dead veterans simply return to their graves after they are satisfied that their sacrifice has been properly honored. The film’s theme of marital infidelity, that inescapable trope in the cinema of the Great War, became a symbol for the larger question of whether the nation had been faithful to the cause of its soldiers. The dead came back to make sure they had.

At the same time, the film’s willingness to confront the viewer with the war dead remained open to other interpretations in exhausted Europe. By 1938, Gance’s message had become, whether he admitted it or not, a clear warning. The director told an interviewer that he had no interest in politics, but he added, “I am against war because war is futile. Ten or twenty years afterward, one reflects that millions have died and all for nothing.”⁵

J’accuse barely found an audience in the United States. Viewers, and at first even American distributors, seemed convinced that the film carried a clear pacifist message. Pioneering director D. W. Griffith took a liking to the film and ensured that it received distribution through United Artists. Its bleak message found little reception in a nation eager to put the war behind it. The American public had no desire to think of a living corpse, and certainly not an army of angry corpses, or the questions such a fever dream posed.

Are You Caligari or Cesare?

The murderous folly of the Great War had chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.

Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.

Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland.

The book he produced in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, has had an enormous influence on film criticism. Perhaps more important, it’s had a deep influence on the way the average person thinks about movies, even if they’ve never heard of the admittedly obscure source of their ideas. Of course, the book’s pugilistic title made it clear that scholars and audiences alike could not view film as simple entertainment. Movies carried political import, not simply reflecting the times but also embodying the horror of the times. Overall, the book denigrates film, and filmgoers, in such a way that it lends credence to the ideas that entertainment means industry rather than art and that all film represents an escape from reality. A critic influenced by such views today might say, for example, that the offbeat comedy Mall Cop (2005) is not much different from François Truffaut’s drama The 400 Blows (1959), while the complex television crime drama The Wire and the tacky reality show Celebrity Apprentice exist in a continuum of mindless satisfaction. It’s a dour view of popular culture that many fans paradoxically hold when they demand that films “leave out the politics” or say that they “just want a good show.”

Like a movie fan who might be a little suspicious of “reading too much” into film, Kracauer spoke of films as a commodity, primarily a means to make money. The movies, he believed, are just entertainment and so they are simply mirror images of the culture that produced them, flexible and flaccid in the messages they convey. He did not think that this made them, as his friend Walter Benjamin believed, possible instruments of revolutionary change. Instead, as artifacts of mass culture, they put dissent to sleep, enervated their audiences, and legitimized the existing order. Had he lived in our era, he would have seen in the phrase “Netflix and chill” the bottomless swamp of this cultural morass.

Films that appeared in Germany between 1918 and 1933 had, Kracauer insisted, “deep psychological dispositions” that led the German people to “surrender to the Nazis.” He seeks to account for Hitler’s success in terms beyond politics, economic collapse, and the general structural weaknesses of the Weimar regime. No, something more terrible had been lurking in the shadows, a set of motifs finding expression in the dream life of film, or really the nightmare life of film. Antonio Gramsci had been right: in the ruins of the Old World, “morbid symptoms” had appeared. The people of the Great War’s aftermath found themselves in the time of monsters, and the monsters filled their screens. This had desensitized them to the real monsters that emerged among them.⁶

Kracauer began his survey with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), frequently if incorrectly called the first horror film. It’s still a good place for Kracauer, and us, to begin since it staged many of the themes that would obsess the genre in the early years. The human body as an empty husk, a figure who combines the mad scientist and the magician, and even the city as a nightmarish wasteland all appear in the film. Caligari garnered more than its share of critical attention in Germany and abroad. In some intellectual circles, the French term Caligarisme came to stand in for the sense of loss, doubt, and existential desperation of the postwar generation.

The larger public responded to Caligari only in a limited degree. The movie’s confusing advertising campaign may have been partially to blame. The slogan used on posters—“You must become Caligari!”—repurposed a line from the film, but no one knew what this could mean. The film did not carry the same shock value as the later Nosferatu, and word seems to have gotten around that the ending had been a bit of a letdown. Director Robert Wiene’s decision to conclude the film as he did offers something of a tale within itself.

The film version of Caligari opens with a framing story absent from the original script. We see the character of Francis sitting on a bench in what seems to be a hospital. An old man sitting beside him, perhaps another patient, has been babbling about “the terrible fate of all life.” Jane, the film’s female lead, walks by as in a trance. “What she and I have experienced is yet more remarkable than the story you have told me,” Francis says to the old man. Francis’s response comes across as a rather confusing non sequitur that might have tipped off a vigilant cinemagoer that something was a bit off. The old man has been talking about the nature of life, not telling Francis a story.

Following this prologue, we see a wizened Dr. Caligari attempting to receive a permit for his hypnotist act in an imaginary German town called Holstenwall. The town official refuses and ends up the first murder victim in a film soon filled with corpses.

But even before the killings begin, the set itself erupts into a violent, surrealist nightmare. Buildings hang at impossible angles, and rooms tilt in dizzying fashion. In this dreary dreamscape two young students, Alan and Francis, become the focus of the narrative. They attend the town fair, where it becomes clear that both are in love with Jane. Joined by her, they visit the tent of Dr. Caligari. A peculiar kind of séance takes place in which Caligari takes questions from the audience and poses them to the allegedly sleeping Cesare; he’s waxen in heavy pancake makeup, lost in a shadowy haze between devilish puppet and living corpse. In this state, Cesare supposedly brings messages from the land of the dead at Caligari’s command. Alan asks when he will die, and Cesare replies, “Before dawn.” Police later find the young student stabbed to death, just as the town official had been.

Francis becomes convinced that Caligari ordered the zombie-like Cesare to kill for him. While he searches for proof, Jane becomes the next target of Caligari’s murderous homunculus. Although Cesare pulls a knife to slay her, he instead kidnaps her and, in one of the most famous sequences in the film, leads Francis and Jane’s father on a chase through the night terror of the set.

The police join Francis in investigating Caligari, who escapes into an insane asylum. Wiene chooses to close the cinematic version with the device of having Francis revealed as a patient in the very asylum where he believes he has tracked Caligari. Dr. Caligari is, in fact, the lead physician and director of the asylum, where Francis lives out his delusions, and we learn that the film we have just watched has simply been a trip through Francis’s madness.

The screenwriters, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, had a very different vision of Caligari, one that would have made its subtext clearer to audiences, perhaps too obvious in the eyes of the director. The original story had been born one night before 1914 and, during the war, had ripened into a terrifying vision meant to condemn the willingness of the masses, not to “become Caligari,” as the confusing advertising poster said, but to become Cesare. The zombie-like Cesare, and the people of Germany, had been somnambulists under the control of their own Caligaris in epaulets during the previous decade.

On that strange night, Janowitz, a Czech poet living in Hamburg before the beginning of the war, had seen an interesting young woman and followed her to a Hamburg town fair in 1913. Losing her among the festive multicolored tents that spread across the Reeperbahn, still today the center of nightlife and entertainment in the city, Janowitz heard what sounded to his probably inebriated ears like ephemeral, ghostly laughter in the trees. But from the bushes emerged the shadow of a man, suddenly looming up in the darkness and just as quickly fading back into it. In the eyes of the poetic Janowitz, the darkness seemed to reabsorb the phantom. He returned home, never having seen his love interest.

The next morning, the local news reported that someone murdered a young woman named Gertrude at the town fair the previous night. The press described what had happened to her as “a horrible sex crime.” Although he had no foundation outside his own imagination, Janowitz became obsessed with the idea that the beautiful young woman he had hoped to meet had been the victim. His fixation on this notion became so intense that he attended the funeral, where, again with little real evidence, he believed he saw the shadow from the foliage. His nightmares told him this had been the shape that murdered Gertrude.⁷

Janowitz’s murderous shadow in the night later became Cesare, but only after four years of war. Janowitz served as an infantry officer for most of the conflict and emerged a confirmed pacifist. The war then helped him mold his peculiar experience from 1913 into a tale of horror.

Carl Mayer, who shared Janowitz’s antiwar sentiment, collaborated on the project. Mayer himself had worked to convince an army psychiatrist that he was unfit to fight. His brother, however, had died in the infantry. Around the time he began his collaboration with Janowitz, Mayer had fallen in love with the actor Gilda Langer, herself mourning the loss of a fiancé on the western front.

The framing story Wiene added to the film dissolved the tale into a dream and robbed it of its piercing metaphorical power. In the original script, Caligari and the director of the local asylum are indeed the same person, but Caligari actually has been committing crimes through the agency of Cesare, a corpse brought back from the netherworld by its master. When Francis confronts Caligari with these facts, his mask of sanity slips away and the film concludes with the doctor a patient in his own asylum.

Janowitz and Mayer had, Kracauer claimed, sought to communicate their vision of German society’s obsession with authoritarianism with the film, the two confirmed pacifists revealing in Caligari’s control over Cesare the willingness of the German people to follow their leaders, as if hypnotized, into the maelstrom of war. They had been sleepwalkers who went about their deadly business unconscious of the consequences. Authoritarian leaders turned citizens, marching in lockstep, into somnolent killers.⁸

The film critic Kracauer believed that the beginnings of the German film industry had chewed up the screenwriters’ original vision and turned Caligari into a product that reaffirmed the audience’s desire to accept and never question authority. The fearful possibilities of loss of control, the image of the lumbering Cesare moving murderously through the night on Dr. Caligari’s errands, did chill the first viewers of the film. But, Kracauer insisted, the ending reaffirmed the need of the masses for the control of strong leadership. Social authorities might sometimes appear like villains, but in reality the masses are much more likely to suffer a fever dream, a delusion of overweening power, than to truly confront a mad Caligari who could bend them to his will.

In fact, although the writers did not get what they wanted in the film, the message they hoped to send may have been simpler—a message about their own obsession with the idea of the corpse and das grosse Sterben.

The film sets, already bizarre, would have been even more surreal if Janowitz and Mayer had had their way. They had hoped to hire Czech engraver, artist, and author Alfred Kubin to design their wasteland and their living corpses. Kubin’s work matched well the aesthetic that the authors hoped to achieve, given his fascination with mechanical puppets and his ability to reimagine the narrow, dreamlike streets of Prague as a fantastical landscape. Kubin had written a strange, semiautobiographical fantasy novel, The Other Side (1909), of which Lotte Eisner writes:

He describes his wandering through the dark streets [of Prague], possessed by an obscure force which led him to imagine weird houses and landscapes, terrifying or grotesque situations. When he entered a little tea-shop, everything seemed bizarre. The waitresses were like wax dolls moved by some strange mechanism.⁹

Kubin’s obsessions with landscapes of horror and waxen death dolls suited the era’s terror of the corpse and the battlefield, as well as the tendency of both realities to transform waking life into a dream.

In 1920, Weimar Germany looked back on its brief flirtation with revolution one year earlier. Though few in the middle class voiced the sentiment openly, many felt some gratitude for the brutal tactics of the right-wing Freikorps. Perhaps the nation had not become a social democracy and indeed barely held on to the democratic reforms it had managed since 1918. But at least the Germans had kept the Bolsheviks from the door and the authorities ruled with a firm hand. Had they become Caligari? In fact, they had become Cesare.

Kracauer had been certain that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari predicted both the rise of the authoritarian personality and how the forces of fascism would seize hold of this pathology for its own ends. Just as the continent had become a sleepwalking murderer in 1914, it continued to act as a death doll in a world of fantasy and nightmare, answering the call of the authoritative voice. The people of Germany, he thought, had been willing to see themselves and others locked away in a madman’s cabinet or in an asylum as madmen themselves. All for their own safety.

From his vantage point, Kracauer had more than enough reason to voice suspicion about German film. His tendency to see authoritarianism everywhere, while understandable, doesn’t account for the Caligari screenwriters’ own obsessions, centered more on the murderous automaton Cesare than on the question of authoritarianism. Death itself and the reanimated corpse are at the center of their vision of the film and the version seen by audiences. Neither man could leave behind the Great War. Rather than predicting Nazism, they told the story of the great death.

The Dark Carnival

Kracauer had surprisingly little to say about the popular Nosferatu despite his thoughtful discussion of director F. W. Murnau’s work as a whole. He did write that Murnau had “the unique facility of obliterating the boundaries of the real and the unreal,” a comment that resonates with the film’s relationship to the Great War in which, many soldiers claimed, reality and fantasy blended under the constant strain of shelling and the debilitating anxiety of the trenches. However, for Kracauer, the dread shadow of Count Orlok hovers over the period after 1919 in a different, almost mystical way. He refers to the 1920s as a time when “the German soul” found itself “tossed about in gloomy space like the phantom ship in Nosferatu.”¹⁰

Kracauer’s political orientation may explain his lack of interest in writing about the first vampire film. By 1930, he had read much of the work of Karl Marx. This led him that year to write a frighteningly prescient book, The Salaried Masses, in which he claimed that Germany’s new white-collar workers would prove especially susceptible to Nazism. History, unfortunately, bears out his thesis. Lower-middle-class white-collar workers joined in an unlikely alliance with the wealthiest industrialists to become the backbone of Germany’s Nazi Party.

Much of the German left saw Nosferatu as precisely the kind of entertainment that desensitized the people to political concerns. Socialist critics of the film complained vociferously about moviegoers taking Nosferatu seriously, even as they couldn’t themselves avoid discussing it at length. The leftist Leipziger Volkszeitung (Leipzig People’s Newspaper), for example, insisted that the film distracted the working class by enshrouding them in a “supernatural fog.” In fact, the paper saw it as part of a larger effort by the ruling class to keep the people “sufficiently stupid for capitalist interests.”¹¹

Marxist worries about the popularity of such films may appear overwrought today. We’d do well to remember that these critics wrote in revolutionary times, when hundreds of millions of people had been either utterly terrified or passionately inspired by the 1917 people’s revolution in Russia that, ever so briefly, looked like it might spread across all of Europe after the climactic end of the Great War. In the early 1920s, a turn from revolutionary fervor to fantasy in German entertainment seemed to them to mark the final collapse of their hopes, particularly after the bloody failure of the Communist uprisings that followed the war.

Moreover, the Marxist criticism did not simply focus on a single popular film that had seized the public imagination. The workers, the Leipziger Volkszeitung claimed, faced what amounted to “a supernatural epidemic” in the world of entertainment. The paper argued that the new taste for horror represented a new kind of capitalist propaganda and that the proletariat would do well to stay at home rather than give their money to the film industry “and the phantom Nosferatu can well let himself be devoured by their own rats.”

Notably, even those who castigated the film for its allegedly lurid and escapist nature could not help but see it as intimately tied to the bloodletting the world had recently inflicted on itself. Marxist critics admitted that “this dangerous nonsense about spiritualism and the occult” had been eagerly consumed by “millions of disturbed souls” victimized by the war and its consequences.

Kracauer and his fellow leftists would feel right at home among today’s film critics. The horror genre continues to receive criticism as an adolescent pastime, nihilistic in its premises with limited expectations of its own audience. Even in the golden age of Universal Studios monster movies, critical reviews of horror films tended to use the opportunity to dismiss them with a bit of snark. The Hollywood Reporter in November 1931 couldn’t help but praise the direction of James Whale in Frankenstein. The reviewer also couldn’t bring himself to write with unadulterated praise of a “spook” film. He opined that Universal Studios had either “the greatest shocker of all time—or a dud.”¹²

More recently, Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong, in their book The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? (1999), described horror, along with action films, as one of the perennial “escapist genres.” Carol Clover—who wrote an entire book asking second-wave feminism to think in more complicated fashion about slasher films (Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1992)—agreed with famed film critic Robin Wood that horror films are inherently disreputable.

The allegedly escapist and formulaic quality of horror continues to attract fans in droves—and still elicits attention and exegesis from intellectuals. Hundreds of think pieces on the zombie phenomenon alone are currently in existence. All essentially ask what it means that zombies have become a national obsession over the last several decades and particularly since 9/11.

Nosferatu rose suddenly from his crypt in the years after the Great War to the same kind of questioning and criticism. Why do people care about these horrible things? Why do they need them? Even the harshest critics of what Murnau and Grau had wrought felt compelled to talk about the new craze for the supernatural in relation to the Great War, at that time the most catastrophic event in terms of the loss and degradation of human life that anyone could begin to imagine.

Perhaps rather than Kracauer’s claim that it offered an escape from history, the horror film allowed (and still allows) audiences to talk about trauma in an oblique way? The power of horror that allowed for the expression of the darkest of shell-shocked impulses certainly proved irresistible for the talents of the avant-garde after 1918. The painter turned director Paul Leni produced a horror fantasy film entitled Waxworks in 1924, a prologue to the nightmares he soon helped bring into the world. His vision began in Weimar Germany but ended up, and ended too soon, in Los Angeles.

Leni’s Waxworks continued the themes of Caligari by reintroducing the terror of the reanimated corpse, the husk brought to life to live out a terrible past in the present. He produced the film in the aftermath of the Nazi Party’s failed Beer Hall Putsch. In fact, the film screened in Germany while Hitler, imprisoned for only nine months for his part in the attempted overthrow of the Weimar government, feverishly mapped out the sadistic fantasies he planned to unleash on the world in what became Mein Kampf. The dreamy atmosphere of Waxworks echoed both the morbid half-light of 1914–1918 and seemed to forecast the things that had slithered into history with the rise of fascism.

Henrik Galeen, screenwriter for both Paul Wegener’s first (and now lost) golem film in 1914 and Nosferatu, also wrote the screenplay for Waxworks. The film opens in a carnival, a space for frivolous amusement that had increasingly begun to take on dark undertones. During much of the nineteenth century, the traveling circus placed “freaks” on display in the sideshow, a series of tents that ran along the side of the big top, which housed the three-ring circus. At one time, such entertainments had a certain degree of middle-class respectability conferred by the reputation and popularity of nineteenth-century American showman P. T. Barnum. Barnum saw his work as educational and even scientific. He had, for example, included temperance lectures as part of the program at the famous Barnum’s American Museum, at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in New York City, giving his entertainments the strongest of bourgeois credentials.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the traveling carnival had begun to fall into disrepute. Medical authorities began to question the representation of human oddities as entertainment. This criticism emerged less from physicians’ humanitarian impulses than from the professionalization of their own discipline. A new generation of doctors saw human abnormalities as part of their own bailiwick rather than a source of entertainment.

Increasingly, the respectable classes viewed the sideshow as a working-­class entertainment run by dangerous, socially marginal carnival workers (carnies). Films such as Caligari sealed the deal, preparing the way for the fully embodied “dark carnival” of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), the threat-laden atmosphere of the traveling show in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), and Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Today, and it’s difficult to explain without this background, many people still find the sound of carnival music eerie and suggestive of something dreadful.

Leni’s carnival is, like Robert Wiene’s in Caligari, a nightmare dimension in which a young poet in this age of disillusioned poets takes a job from a showman. The poet will work in service of the dark carnival, writing narratives for each of the empty-eyed figures in the showman’s wax museum. In the cavernous tent the waxworks begin to move and act out the dreamlike tales of horror the poet imagines. These dark imaginings revolve around tyrants inflicting torture, and in the final sequence the writer imagines himself and his love interest, the showman’s daughter, chased by a waxen but suddenly living Jack the Ripper. The line between the poet’s imagination and what’s really happening onscreen remains fuzzy, as does the boundary between a shell-shocked generation’s experience of watching the film and their history.

Kracauer viewed Waxworks as yet more evidence of the German tendency toward authoritarianism. He found in the film “the collective German soul” that had long been “wavering between tyranny and chaos.” Citing a number of other examples of tyrannical personalities portrayed on film in the era, he saw the cinematic obsession with these figures as part of the fascist sensibility that placed Mussolini in power in Italy and created similar powerful political movements in much of Europe, most prominently, of course, in the rise of National Socialism in Germany.¹³

Doubtless these films did express European anxieties about an entire nation’s willingness to follow political and military leaders into the maelstrom of war. Certainly veterans had reason to question why they had, again and again, gone over the top of the trenches into the blasted lunar landscape of no-man’s-land at the sound of a whistle, losing arms, legs, and blood while leaving the corpses of their comrades behind.

But Kracauer presses this interpretation of early horror, and of German film in general, too far. There’s not enough evidence, for example, that the world understood that their somnambulist obedience had helped produce the outrages of the Great War. The true terror for this generation remained the terror of the dead, most specifically the terror of lifeless corpses hanging cruciform in barbed wire, lying shattered across hundreds of fields of fire, or filling the rat-infested trenches and floating, bloated and purpling, while the rain fell in torrents. Implicit in films like Caligari and Waxworks, and explicit in J’accuse and Nosferatu, the loss of the dead combined with the inability to properly and fully mourn and forget them, lurked in the shadows on the screen.

We can see this sensibility in Leni’s choice of uncanny terrors. The waxwork had a long history by the 1920s in the genealogy of death, religion, science, and what we today call body horror. The marionette and the shadow play are images of terror with ancient roots in human religious beliefs. Creating an image of a thing living or dead has, from the earliest ages of human religious consciousness, endowed that image with the properties of the sacred. At the same time, the uncanny power of such images has led to warnings in Judaism, Protestant Christianity, and Islam about the dangers of “graven images,” the worry over idolatry.

These strictures point toward the terror you feel when an image’s empty eyes look back at you or when they seem to do so but cannot. In most monotheistic traditions, nervousness over the making of idols masks the deeper terrors of the empty image, the possibility that it can become inhabited by the horror of the world, demonic shadows filling a space meant for the divine. Perhaps even worse, human beings have feared that they contain a nullity, that behind their own eyes waits an utter nothingness. The idol, the image, the puppet, the automaton, and the homunculus might suddenly become the simulacrum of the corpse.

By the beginning of the Great War, emerging Western secularism, coming in fits and starts since the eighteenth century and always accompanied by feverish fundamentalist reassertions of belief, had taken the terror of the empty image into the realm of entertainment. In The Secret Life of Puppets (2001), Victoria Nelson describes this process perfectly when she notes how the Egyptian mummy of late antiquity transformed in twentieth-century horror films “from a divine body within an organized religious belief system to an organic demon.” Nelson adds that what we are seeing in this process amounts to a full retreat from the concept of the human soul in the Western imagination.¹⁴

Creating the false body in wax has a history longer than film. Waxworks as a form stretches back before its appearance in traveling fairs and film. The fashioning of the wax image always had its grotesque side, with the Catholic Church’s use of often unintentionally terrifying wax saints holding the alleged relics and remembrances of their own martyrdom: teeth, bones, even hearts. The making of images to work sympathetic magic, hexing people or freeing them from just such a curse, had a long history in the folk traditions of Europe. The making of so-called poppets in England existed long before the notion of the voodoo doll and may have contributed to it when Euro­peans came in contact with the Africans they enslaved in Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean. Whatever the origin, the magical practice shows a relationship in the human mind between the doll and the dead.

One did not have to believe in magic to make such a connection. Medical students throughout Europe had, for several centuries, used finely crafted wax figures for anatomical study. Modeled frequently as young and female, often designed so that on the outside they seemed like exquisitely beautiful women caught sleeping, the figures sometimes contained as many as seven anatomically correct layers that students could fold back to reveal the mysteries of the body. These began to appear in the Renaissance, but the eighteenth century became the golden age of what some called “anatomical Venuses” but that medical students more commonly called “slashed beauties” or “dissected Graces.” The attention given to the modeling of perfectly formed breasts and hips, as well as delicate lips, eyes, and hair, make it impossible to ignore sexual fetishism as an element in their creation.¹⁵

A public passion for the wax figure continued to grow in the eighteenth century. Swiss physician Philippe Curtius, whose medical training prepared him for the modeling and sculpting of anatomically accurate figures, became the first entrepreneur of such shows in France. Although he began his exhibition at a fairground, his wax displays proved popular enough with all classes to allow him to open his tony Salon de Cire, which included his Caverne des Grande Voleurs, where he made use of fake blood to portray his scenes of crime and murder.

The depth of meaning that accrued to the figure in wax can be seen in the degree to which politics affected, and almost destroyed, Curtius’s career. His assistant, Marie Grosholtz (1761–1850), better known by her married name and entertainment moniker, Madame Tussaud, modeled the severed heads of the guillotine’s victims during the so-called Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution. In Curtius’s waxworks, models of the decapitated heads of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette shared the same display space with executed revolutionaries such as Robespierre and Marat.

Although the portrayal of beheaded political figures at first provoked surprisingly little partisan controversy, Curtius’s wax figure of the Marquis de Lafayette almost lost him his business and his life. Lafayette had briefly been seen as a heroic figure in France until he led counterrevolutionary forces in 1792 and then fled to Austria. Public outcry led Curtius to offer a public apology to the National Convention for continuing to display his wax Lafayette and, in an act that showed the degree to which waxworks had come to incarnate the figures they represented, Curtius saved his own skin by publicly guillotining the waxen traitor outside the Salon.¹⁶

Madame Tussaud took over Curtius’s operation after his death. The experiment in entertainment became an international phenomenon after the French Revolution. Tussaud moved her waxworks to England in 1802 and over the next half century transformed it into perhaps London’s most popular entertainment, with many imitators in Victorian England and the United States. The British royal family in wax remained a perennial favorite, but so did the portrayal of crime, assassination, and torture. Customers passed through a candlelit labyrinth featuring blood-drenched crime scenes and the acts of tyrants, poisoners, and murderers as they left the attraction. Punch magazine first used the nomenclature Chamber of Horrors in 1846 for what Tussaud called The Adjourning Room.¹⁷

Although Tussaud herself died in 1850, the waxworks remained a popular attraction at the beginning of the Great War. In fact, during the first flames of war fever, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum featured special displays of all the dynastic figures involved in the conflagration. Kaiser Wilhelm’s wax image suffered so much abuse from angry crowds that it had to be removed, although it, too, would rejoin the other monarchs later in the war. War maps, shell fragments, and other relics of war joined the display. The museum’s proprietors seemed to realize early that the war would provoke a taste for the macabre, a counterintuitive desire to remember the conflict, even by the returning veterans and soldiers on leave, who often thronged the attraction from 1914 to 1918.

France had its own Chamber of Horrors, which grew in popularity in the aftermath of the nation’s tremendous losses in the Great War. The French public mourned without end, becoming especially expressive at mass burial sites such as Douaumont, a fortification at Verdun turned into an ossuary that contains the bits and pieces of perhaps 100,000 unidentifiable German and French corpses. The French also flocked to the Théâtre du Grand Guignol, which had opened in Paris in 1897 and presented criminal scenes, images of mental illness, and the macabre supernatural. Since the theater was located in a former convent, cherubic angels still peeked out of the shadows at the grotesqueries onstage.¹⁸

The earliest of what would become known as special effects played an essential role in the Grand Guignol, including staged monstrosities, gallons of fake blood, and highly believable bodily mutilations. The shadow play took a step beyond Tussaud’s. Instead of waxworks, live actors became dead bodies, showing the audience that even if corpses had no souls, they had plenty of blood and entrails.

The Great War actually increased the French public’s fascination with such gory spectacle. In fact, audiences demanded that the Grand Guignol make a more explicit connection with the war. The popularity of J’accuse alone suggests that they had some desire to contend with the death puppet, the eidolon of the Reaper.

Camille Choisy, who owned the Grand Guignol at the end of the war, proved happy to oblige this taste for horror. Even as France suffered millions of casualties, Choisy incorporated fake poison gas attacks and startling explosive charges that mimicked the shelling of the trenches. The use of surgical instruments, influenced by the horror stories of combat triage at the front, became instruments of torture and death in Choisy’s productions. The popularity of the theater and its ghastly fare endured in France into the 1920s—an adaptation of Caligari played there in 1925.¹⁹

Tussaud’s, meanwhile, began to lose its appeal in the early 1920s. Waxworks in general declined in popularity, as did the sideshow and the circus. Historians of popular entertainment have tended to see the rise of film as the undoing of these other entertainment forms. Although it’s impossible to deny the influence of the new art form, it’s also true that in the case of the waxworks, the scale of death in the Great War fully awakened the primordial terror of the corpse. Both the dead body and the waxwork made it difficult to imagine the possibility of an eternal soul.

Waxworks, and the unsettling questions they raised, seemed to incorporate all the eerie elements of the war’s transformation of the human body into an icon of death and mutilation. They are inanimate bodies, shells with no ghost, blank except for the nightmares that the audience imposes on them. The waxworks guide audiences into the darkest of uncanny valleys, the dead eyes of the figures mirroring nothing. They are puppets that call our personhood into question in exactly the same way the corpse calls into question what we have convinced ourselves of concerning the possibilities of the afterlife.

German horror films dealt with this concept again and again with Caligari’s Cesare being only the most well-known corpse-puppet, standing in for the mounds of the lifeless created by shell and Maxim gun. But the horror of this idea, a horror that destroyed optimistic hopes for a human soul animating the fleshy pulp of the body, became the defining feature of postwar horror films. We see it in Nosferatu’s ability to empty both Ellen and Knock, and Hutter himself, of their allegedly natural desires and fill their empty husks with desire for him. Indeed, the vampire glides through the world nearly incorporeal, fading to ethereal nothingness in the sunlight, as would be expected of one that comes from the land of phantoms. Ellen, in contrast, stays behind as a lifeless puppet, a figure of terror as well as grief.

Mummies and Dolls

We find the terror of the corpse in some unlikely places during and after the Great War. Ernst Lubitsch, born in Berlin in 1892, fled in the 1930s to America, where he made comedies such as Ninotchka (1939), starring Greta Garbo and famously advertised as the film in which “Garbo laughs!” In 1940, a year after his infant daughters somehow survived the sinking of the SS Athenia by a Nazi U-boat as they made their way to America, Lubitsch made the classic comedy The Shop around the Corner with Jimmy Stewart (remade in 1998 as the crowd-pleasing, maudlin You’ve Got Mail). Lubitsch made the world laugh in the midst of war and exile.

But even he did not escape the wartime obsession with the dead. Long before his exile in America, Lubitsch directed The Eyes of the Mummy in October 1918, when the death toll of the spring offensives was becoming known on the home front and the German army teetered on the edge of collapse. At the same time, civilian deaths in Germany mounted from the worldwide influenza epidemic and the British blockade.

Lubitsch chose a strange tale to tell in the midst of chaos. He mixed orientalism, exacerbated perhaps by the awareness of the fighting on the Ottoman front, with a story of violent passion, supernatural curses, and death. Like other German movies in that era, it reflected the growing interest in mesmerism, featuring an Egyptian woman named Ma who attempts unsuccessfully to escape the hypnotic power of Radu, a vicious and mystically powerful archetype of the “exotic” East. Ma also embodied the European’s sensualized notions of the colonial world. The character was played by Pola Negri, an excellent Polish actress heavily sexualized in the silent era.

British archaeologist Howard Carter’s account of the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 helped spark a widespread interest in mummies, his 1924 lecture tour of the United States creating what has been called Egyptomania. This would eventually result in Boris Karloff’s classic turn as The Mummy in 1932. However, German archaeologists had been robbing graves in Egypt since the 1880s. Most famously, the representatives of a historical museum in Berlin essentially cheated Egyptian authorities out of the famous bust of Nefertiti on the eve of the Great War in 1913. Thus, a cultural fascination with the “oriental” world (a term that appears again and again in Eyes of the Mummy in describing Egyptian customs) already had a long pedigree.

The film holds together surprisingly well today, despite being available only in badly degraded prints with contemporary music that seeks to sound like the lost orchestral setting used by Lubitsch. Negri’s character, Ma, peeps through an ancient aperture in the tomb of an Egyptian monarch, her gothic double named, confusingly but appropriately, Queen Ma. Negri, as the “eyes of the mummy,” represents not only orientalist fantasy but also the primordial death doll. The audience, from Ma’s first scene, must have watched the film with near certainty that she would die. When Ma marries a German painter, Radu’s jealous rage causes him to so viciously sling a blade into a portrait of her, yet another Gothic double, that the act feels like a murder.

Lubitsch continued to worry the idea of the death doll, even when working in a genre other than horror. His 1919 comedic fantasy film, The Doll, keeps the darkness at bay, but only just barely, with a few laugh-out-loud moments. The film tells the story of a young German named Lancelot whose nervous disposition and sexual repression keep him from living up to his legend­ary namesake or indeed from agreeing to marry. We see Lancelot’s terror of sex rather clearly in a scene that features him running from forty possible female suitors who have taken part in a Weimar-era The Bachelor–style contest arranged by his father.

When Lancelot seems to find an answer to his problem, the film begins to take on the surrealist quality of the era’s horror culture. A group of monks (anxious to get part of his fortune) point Lancelot to a dollmaker, who builds lifelike female automata. Lancelot has the idea to substitute one of these dolls, built “primarily for bachelors” the film cagily tells us, for a human wife. Hijinks ensue, and Lubitsch takes the edge off the whole affair by playing up the romantic and farcical possibilities. (The “doll,” whom Lancelot weds, is actually the dollmaker’s real-life daughter.)

The Doll, however, cannot entirely escape its roots in the morbid imagination of the German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, one of whose short stories provided the basis of the tale. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816) had its character fall in love with an automaton and presumably have sex with it while disdaining his thoroughly human betrothed. The story had obsessed Freud and became part of the basis of his idea of the uncanny since it posed the question of what exactly constituted the difference between the mechanism of an automaton and the mechanism of flesh, blood, and organs. Lubitsch’s Doll may have scored some laughs, but it had an uneasy relationship to an era that saw the human body pour out its entrails like so many scraps of clockwork.

Some of the comedy of The Doll works by what in central Europe, particularly in Czech culture, goes by the name of smutný vtip, roughly translated as “the sad joke.” The dollmaker’s apprentice, who looks ten years old, repeatedly attempts suicide by drinking paint and leaping out of windows. This plot point would not be a knee-slapper in the best of times but was certainly not one at a moment when Great War veterans committed suicide at an alarming rate. The automata themselves lead us into skin-crawling territory, particularly given the film’s suggestion that they are created primarily to provide sex. Lubitsch, the comedy director, created a work that did not stray far from Hoffmann’s shadowy imagination and indeed looks ahead to the uncanny, empty-eyed bodies that existed on the razor’s edge of the living and the dead.

Germany’s haunted screen surely deserves all the attention it can get in a study of why horror emerged after 1918. But the phenomenon also grew outside of Germany. Italian horror cinema, whose golden age most fans would rightly place in the 1960s and ’70s with the works of Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci, also shows a fascination with the corpse and the questions it poses for the living. But this began in the years after the Great War and not with the blood, sex, and gore of Italy’s infamous giallo (yellow) films. (The term referred to cheap paperbacks with yellow covers that dealt with psychological horror, mystery, and lots of bloody murders.)

Prior to the war, Italy had been part of a defensive alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but it sat out the conflict until 1915, when it joined in the fighting along with the Allies. Although their country sided with the victors of the Great War, many Italians across the political spectrum declared the effort a vittoria mutilata (mutilated victory). The country had lost 600,000 dead and suffered a major military defeat at the Battle of Caporetto. The desire to escape the horror and humiliation of war paradoxically resulted in an effort to proclaim the glory of warfare in many quarters. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, part of the futurist movement in Italy and a coauthor of The Manifesto of Futurism (1909), wrote that his movement sought to “glorify war,” which could cleanse Italy of its “gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquaries.” The vision of the steel and fire of modern war as a purifying force combined with a fear of a Communist revolution along the lines of what had occurred in Russia and almost occurred in Germany. Doom came to Italy as a result.²⁰

Italian director Eugenio Testa’s Il mostro di Frankenstein (The Monster of Frankenstein) appeared in 1920, perhaps the only film in the long history of films associated with Mary Shelley’s novel to properly distinguish the creature (the Monster) from the creator (Dr. Victor Frankenstein). Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the picture. No prints seem to have survived, and there are only two still shots available. All we know for certain is that it dealt with the terror of the corpse: the reassembled death puppet built of a pile of bodies.

Mussolini’s National Fascist Party came to power in 1922, two years after this lost version of the Frankenstein story was produced. The regime made the country unfriendly to horror cinema, in part because the Fascists understood that such films confirmed the primal fear of death. Light soap operas, comedies, and war films that focused on the bravery of Italian soldiers remained welcome, winning awards such as the Mussolini Cup at the Venice Film Festival, founded in 1932. Death in battle could be celebrated; the meaning of death and certainly the brave soldier transformed into a corpse had to be excluded.

But the corpse kept walking.

Shadow Kingdom

The Russian Marxist novelist Maxim Gorky, on seeing his first film in 1895, famously described himself as having entered “the kingdom of shadows.” Many of the most important creative minds behind the postwar film compared their work to the raising of ghostly specters, with Murnau calling film “the shadow of life.” Numerous artists and writers did the same. They seemed compelled by the idea of ghostly shadow in which the dead could live on. But the kingdom of shadows forced upon its subjects the possibility of the vengeful dead, the hungry dead, or, perhaps most terrifying of all, the empty dead, the corpse, the dead as void.²¹

A new idea by the producer of Nosferatu offered a powerful example of the terror of human beings as empty puppets rather than ensouled beings destined for eternal life. Albin Grau had the germ of the notion that became the 1922 Arthur Robison silent film Warning Shadows: A Nocturnal Hallucination. The techniques and themes Robison used reveal the era’s need to explore the twilight between the real world and the nightmare, the no-man’s-land of the traumatized mind, mesmerized by the violence of history.

One of the first truly psychological horror films (one finds it hard not to imagine what a Hitchcock remake might have been like), Warning Shadows brought together the terror of the body as puppet with the male anxieties over the faithfulness of the war bride that seemed to appear everywhere in European fictions of the era. The film’s unnamed characters, who move in hallucinatory sequences as if in a trance, appear as little more than marionettes.

The film imagines a coquettish wife of the German upper classes who, outrageously, invites her suitors to a dinner party. The guests include one simply referred to as “the Lover,” suggesting that he may have succeeded already in his intentions. Her jealous husband, known simply as “the Count,” sits by furiously while his wife flirts with her paramours. Robison intimates that the whole narrative will explode in violence.

Magical realism invades the tale with the appearance of a juggler and hypnotist who, preternaturally sensing what is about to occur, puts the entire party into a deep trance. They enter the world of dreams, indeed the world of nightmare trauma, where their shadows, puppet-like eidolons of their true selves, act out all their passions. The shadow world emerges as both the playground and the battlefield of the Freudian id. All of the characters’ desires, from lust to revenge, rage freely. The Count, playing his rivals against one another until they stab his unfaithful wife to death in a fit of jealousy, climaxes the nightmare. Realizing what they have been led to do, the suitors defenestrate the Count, brutally murdering him.

The film so successfully muddies the line between hallucination and reality that we forget that we’ve been party to an infernal puppet show. The hypnotist awakens the six characters, and us, from the group therapy session of marionettes, part séance, part Freudian psychoanalysis, and all shadowplay. The dream world has shown the participants the outcome of their actions. The wife’s admirers leave in shame, and she consents to play the loving, faithful spouse. In heavy but well-wrought symbolism, the film ends with all shadows disappearing; the natural light used by cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner in this scene suggests both new beginnings and the end of the nightmare of passion and violence.

Wagner had also filmed the famous shadows in Nosferatu and seems to have been responsible for the idea of the vampire extruding his power and bringing death by enveloping his victims in his monstrous silhouette. Wagner had wide experience with photography by the time he entered the German film industry, working for a time on newsreel composition in New York. He had gained experience in photographing violence and death during his reporting on the Mexican Revolution in 1913. He enlisted in the German army at the beginning of the war but suffered a terrible wound; he survived to work first with Ernst Lubitsch (prior to Eyes of the Mummy) and then F. W. Murnau.

Wagner’s interest in the shadowy worlds of trauma and nightmare emerged from his brief but chilling experience with an elite German Hussars cavalry unit. The German army featured 110 cavalry units at the beginning of the war, mostly used for scouting and screening the disposition of troops. Some German and Austrian horse soldiers saw slightly more direct action on the eastern front against Russian Cossack troops. Similar units in the British army made a brief return when the German front broke and collapsed into retreat in late 1918.

Wagner had been discharged by 1915 when he wrote an oddly uninformative account of his wartime service for Leslie’s Illustrated entitled “Ten Weeks in the German Army.” Wagner’s description of his tour of duty simply describes rather than romanticizes the cavalry, perhaps the one European military unit that sustained its reputation for gallantry past the early months of conflict. (Even the romance of the cavalry did not last; the final major use of mounted troops on the western front came perhaps with the Battle of Verdun, during which, on one day in March 1916 alone, seven thousand horses died from shelling.) During his long career, Wagner spoke little about his service, or his injuries, after this single short article. His reflections on the violence of war appeared wholly onscreen.²²

The shadow of war had enveloped the world. Its influence appears even in the work of a Danish director who had little direct connection to the Great War, although the culture of horror it produced affected him profoundly and brought death to the screen in a storm surge of dark energy. Made in 1932, a decade after Nosferatu, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film Vampyr extended the terrifying concept of vampirism into the realm of dream. It evokes Murnau and Grau’s “land of phantoms” even more successfully than they themselves had done in 1922. Dreyer’s images overwhelm his narrative, and the film, an opera of death, offers a truly bizarre mixture of jump scares, occult lore, morbidity, and even an implicit eroticism that, anecdotally, still has an inexplicable effect on viewers today.²³

Dreyer maintained a lifelong fascination with what suffering did to the human being and the message the corpse delivered to the living. In the minds of many cinephiles, Joan of Arc (1928) remains his masterpiece, but its close examination of the psychology of martyrdom often proved too much for contemporary viewers and certainly for today’s audiences. Vampyr, in contrast, continues to work in its subtly disturbing fashion across the decades.

The plot of Vampyr, to the degree that plot matters much in the film, concerns a young man named Allan Gray, who has come to brood incessantly on occult lore, very much in the manner of a Lovecraft protagonist. (Oddly, the character, played by actor Julian West, looks like Lovecraft, but at the time the author remained buried in obscurity, so there’s no chance Dreyer would have known of him.) We are introduced to the tall and wan Gray by an intertitle card that calls him a “dreamer for whom the line between the real and the supernatural became blurred.” His wanderings have taken him to a place never fully identified. It’s been suggested that it’s Transylvania, vampire country since Stoker made it so in 1897. In truth, it’s purposefully a no-place, a phantasmagoria, in line with Stoker’s own decision to place his vampire warlord at home in “the land beyond the forest.” We know only that Gray has found his way, by means not fully explained and for reasons unknown, to a village overlooked by a castle. (Incidentally or not, in addition to The Trial, another of Kafka’s uncompleted works is The Castle, published posthumously in 1926. Dreyer later showed an interest in Kafka’s work, his bleak 1943 film Day of Wrath described by one critic as bringing together the themes of Kafka and American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne by using an early-modern witch trial as a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of Denmark.)²⁴

A series of mysterious events leads him to two young women, Gisèle and Léone, the latter of whom has been bitten by a vampire. Gray allows the village doctor to use him for a blood transfusion meant to save Léone. Exhausted, Gray falls asleep, then wakes to find the doctor, who has become the vampire’s slave, trying to poison Léone. The doctor flees (taking Gisèle with him), and Gray follows them to the castle, where he falls into a dream-state in which he watches himself in his own coffin. He awakes with the knowledge that he must drive a stake into the heart of the vampire.

The shots in which Gray observes himself in his own coffin are among the most memorable in the film. Dreyer had the idea of placing a small windowpane that allowed the camera to show us the waxen face of Gray’s corpse while also giving the audience a shot of the corpse’s view through the pane glass. The coffin bobs on the water, splashed across the pane, as the camera allows us to look through death’s own eyes.

Eventually, Gray destroys the vampire, Léone recovers, and the doctor dies in an unlikely accident when hundreds of pounds of flour fall upon him and suffocate him in a mill. This absurdist moment opens the way for a kind of escape by Gray and Gisèle, who depart the castle in a boat (not unlike the one in which Gray has seen his corpse, his own death doll, floating), cross a river in dense fog, and walk through a mist-filled forest where sunshine starts to come in through the trees. The final shot of the film cuts back to the mill, where the gears grind to a halt.

On the set of Vampyr, Dreyer described the fear he hoped to generate in his film. He wanted us as viewers to experience the feeling that we are sitting in an “ordinary room,” all the lighting as expected and the furniture in place with nothing that seems intended to provoke the uncanny. “Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door,” he said, and “the atmosphere has changed.” The light will pale while the very quotidian qualities that made the room seem almost dull take on a sinister quality.²⁵

The German public apparently wanted the heroic, sacrificial death matched with unending grief that closed Nosferatu rather than the resolution of Warning Shadows or Dreyer’s “corpse behind the door.” Whereas Murnau’s Count Orlok had been popular, box office receipts marked both Vampyr and Warning Shadows as failures. Wagner himself admitted of Warning Shadows that, at the time, only “film aesthetes” had any interest in the film while it “made no impression on the general public.” The trauma of war, as Freud himself had noted, wanted to replay itself over and over again rather than seeking resolution in the light of common day.²⁶

The fact that audiences took little notice of Dreyer’s Vampyr, which only decades later became a recognized classic, had more to do with politics than subject matter, although the subject clearly did not suit much of Europe’s mood at the time of its release. The film had been distributed in Germany in May 1932. In less than a year, Paul von Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag burned under mysterious circumstances, and the head of the Nazi Party seized emergency powers with either the support or the silent acquiescence of the majority of Germans.

German audiences wanted to see themselves in a quite ordinary room, not in Dreyer’s pale chamber with a corpse behind the door. German censors edited the film to inexplicability even before Hitler consolidated power. An unhappy audience in Vienna rioted on its premiere. History would return them to the land of the phantoms, death’s own kingdom of shadows.²⁷

Broken Faces

The United States also rejected the kind of nightmares directors and screenwriters sought to show to Europe. When, for example, Caligari came to the States in 1921, it found some limited success at the box office and earned praise from a number of important critics. Nevertheless, some of the more popularly written reviews described it as “morbid” and attributed this to its “continental” origins without making any direct reference to the reasons continental Europe might have been in a morbid state of mind.²⁸

In addition to unfriendly critics, Caligari also faced a hostile public in at least one American city. In May 1921, about two thousand patriotic people in Los Angeles marched to express their disdain for the German-made Caligari at the old Miller’s Theatre on South Main Street (whose owner also managed the more famous Alhambra). The American Legion organized the protest, which apparently got somewhat out of hand as night fell, leading local police and the naval provost (since some sailors on leave took part) to appear on the scene. Little seems to have happened, however, beyond a few fistfights and some egg throwing.²⁹

The feeling of some American veterans about the rather small number of German films coming to U.S. theaters does not seem to have significantly affected the success of Caligari. Anti-German sentiment did not remain strong in the 1920s; the era’s very public racism and xenophobia turned instead on African Americans, Jews, and the increasing number of Catholic immigrants from Italy and eastern Europe.

Americans enjoyed comedy, romantic drama, and sometimes a mash-up of the two when they went to the theater. Still, the partnership in crime and bodily mutilation horror that developed between American director Tod Browning and actor/special effects maestro Lon Chaney suggests that some Americans, perhaps especially veterans, wanted something more than light fare. It is also likely that hundreds of thousands of civilians with strong family ties to old Europe had more awareness than their fellow citizens did of the human suffering the war had produced in Europe and around much of the rest of the world.

Browning had been born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1880. Fascinated by sideshows and stage magic from his earliest years, he literally ran away to join the circus at age sixteen. He would spend much of the next two decades performing across the Midwest. Browning’s most infamous performance, a supremely eerie prefiguring of Caligari and his own directorial management of Universal’s Dracula, was a bit known as “The Hypnotic Living Corpse.” This act involved not only a Cesare-like engagement with rural audiences but concluded with his living burial in a wooden casket, a full six feet underground, with ventilation tubes occulted from the audience and milk pellets in his pockets to help sustain life.³⁰

Browning’s big chance in the movies came after the outbreak of the Great War when a fellow Kentuckian who’d had some success in two-reel comedies brought Browning in for a small role. His sense of showmanship and what could sometimes be a commanding personality—he had been a carnival barker as well as a working act—put him in the director’s chair by 1915. An automobile accident in the same year, caused by Browning’s excessive drinking, gave him lifelong injuries (their nature and extent remain a matter of speculation).

After a two-year blacklisting, a sort of professional punishment for his alcoholism, Browning returned to directing, now making dark tales that reflected his own life experience while gathering the black shadows of the postwar world. While working on one of the earliest gangster pictures, Outside the Law (1921), Browning met a young Lon Chaney for the first time. David J. Skal has written at length about the significance of this partnership for the roots of American horror, describing how between them they found a chilling formula that united the grotesque subtext of the circus sideshow with Chaney’s makeup skills to “give convincing shape to Browning’s dark vision of physical limitation and disfigurement.”³¹

Browning and Chaney worked together while America’s ’20s roared with bathtub gin parties and while, simultaneously, a much more conservative America ballooned the membership of the Ku Klux Klan and allowed for the draconian antics of the early FBI hunt for sympathizers of the Russian Revolution, with immigrants from eastern Europe and most everyone on the left perceived as probable Bolsheviks or anarchists. Neither the director nor the actor had deeply held political convictions, and neither had much direct connection with the Great War. Yet they created a funhouse hall of mirrors that brought America’s seediest impulses to light and that reimagined the wounds of war for an America convinced it would never again enter a European conflict.

Before his collaboration with Browning, Chaney had begun the portrayal of physical disfigurement in the 1919 film The Miracle Man, a now lost picture that made him a star. Both his growing artistry with makeup and his ability to contort his body in bizarre fashion appear again in the 1920 film The Penalty. Playing the character Blizzard, a double-amputee crime lord who rules the San Francisco underworld, Chaney brought incredible menace to the character.³²

The Penalty also speaks to the times with allusions to the Red Scare and the anti-immigrant fervor of the era. Blizzard uses immigrant gangs in his plans for domination, alluding to the notion that white nationalists remain fond of today, of the alleged criminality of recent immigrants and new Americans. However, Blizzard also comes across as a surprisingly sympathetic villain, a gift that Chaney frequently displayed. This nuances what could have been a simplistic nativist nightmare.

Browning and Chaney joined their macabre talents in a 1925 film for MGM titled The Unholy Three, which featured three criminal circus performers (including a dwarf played by the famous Harry Earles, later to star in Browning’s controversial 1932 Freaks and in The Wizard of Oz as part of the Lollipop Guild). Chaney appeared as a deranged ventriloquist, another version of the séance medium, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist figures that became symbolic of an era of mental confusion and torment.³³

Somewhat surprisingly given the mood of the country, The Unholy Three earned both critical praise and hefty box office receipts. The influence of Caligari, and the whole catalog of postwar horror, appears in the film with the introduction of the carnival and ventriloquism to the narrative. Both alluded to the era’s unspoken anxiety over the unreality of what had happened to the world since 1914. The carnival had begun to evoke a shadowy world of primal violence, while the ventriloquist—throwing his voice in such a way that he seemed to split himself in two—suggested the double and the death doll.

Chaney and Browning repeated this formula again and again in the 1920s with films like West of Zanzibar, The Road to Mandalay, and The Unknown. Chaney’s career included playing the part of a hunchback twice, an amputee twice, and a scarred and disfigured person at least five times.

A few film historians have seen in Chaney’s surprising success a kind of Horatio Alger tale that Americans couldn’t help but find attractive. Chaney’s net worth and studio salary impressed the public, but so did, it’s been claimed, his ability to shape-shift, to become anything he sought to be, just as the “American dream”—a term coined in a rather optimistic American history textbook in 1931—said all real Americans could achieve success if they tried.³⁴

“There is no Lon Chaney,” the reclusive actor once said to the world via his press agent. “I am the character I am creating. That is all.”

Perhaps something of the protean power of capitalism did reside in this appeal. But such an interpretation ignores the grotesque transformations with which Chaney shocked his audiences. After all, he transformed himself into aberrations of the human body and psyche rather than into expectant capitalists. These are stories of American nightmares rather than American dreams.

Lon Chaney’s most famous role—that of the Phantom, Erik, in Universal Pictures’ 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera—best illustrates how he tapped into the world’s terrors in the postwar period. (The studio would release a “talkie” version in 1930, which, however, did not use Chaney’s voice.) Like the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame, the 1925 Phantom removed Chaney from his usual American milieu. It brought him worldwide acclaim to a degree that none of his other roles achieved.

The most well-known moment in the film, when Christine (played by Mary Philbin) rips the mask from the Phantom, makes it easy to see why. The horribly disfigured Erik appears to have no nose (an effect achieved by Chaney using hooks to pull back his nose at an angle that, according to the film’s cinematographer, made him “bleed like hell”) and a mouth smashed in by some traumatic event. His nearly hairless head appears irremediably scarred. Notably, unlike Gaston Leroux’s 1909 novel, or the many other adaptations and reimaginings since, the 1925 film provides no explanation for Erik’s monstrous appearance. In the aftermath of the Great War, the film allowed audiences to imagine why the Phantom’s face had been disassembled and reconstructed wrongly.

Chaney had replicated, as film after film in this era did, the disfigured faces of veterans, exploded by shrapnel and Maxim guns. No one in the Western world could have looked at the visage of Lon Chaney and not thought of what the French called the gueules cassées (broken faces) who hid their injuries with marionette-like facsimiles just as the Phantom did.

Perhaps the American fascination with the film grew out of its seeming violation of the temper of the times. If they had not served in the armed forces, had no family members on the western front, and had not been jailed under the Espionage Act for dissent, Americans suffered few ill effects from the war. But wounded American veterans suffered no less than their European counterparts.

The ruined face of the Phantom brooded over America and Europe, reminding viewers of the horror of the trenches and the dark dreams that followed veterans the rest of their lives. No longer could the gore of battle be unseen. The broken faces appeared everywhere on the streets, and sometimes beside the hearth, in England, Germany, France, and indeed the world over. Collections showing the extremity of wounds, sometimes in wax and sometimes in casts previously used by casualties, became tourist attractions in Berlin, Paris, and London. In nearly ritualistic fashion, according to army surgeon Jacques W. Maliniak, “thousands” used their holidays to see “an authentic reproduction of the suffering and mutilation of the war.”³⁵

Purveyors of culture in the United States worked incessantly to help the public forget this aspect of the war. They covered the American landscape, for example, with statues of soldiers standing or marching bravely. Lon Chaney himself would depart from his usual horror-film formula in 1926 with Tell It to the Marines, a romantic comedy that increased the Marines’ pride in their wartime service. (Marines had allegedly been called “devil dogs” by exhausted German troops at the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918; U.S. newspapers actually used this term, and claimed the Germans did the same, two months before the battle took place.)³⁶

The veterans themselves, however, could not hide from the horror. Nor could they ignore the willingness of the nation to turn them quickly into stone monuments. Over 200,000 had returned home wounded. They became corpses at the feast of the Roaring Twenties while, in the words of historian Peter Kuznick, large corporations and banks had “thrived during the war with munitions makers leading the pack.”³⁷

Lovecraftian Apocalypse

H. P. Lovecraft delighted in his encounter with The Phantom of the Opera, Chaney’s masterpiece, writing to a friend:

What a spectacle it was! . . . Horror lifted its grisly visage . . . Ugh, that face that was revealed when the mask was pulled off . . . & the nameless legion of things that cloudily appeared beside and behind the owner of that face when the mob chased him into the river at last.³⁸

The writer who enjoyed complaining about almost every aspect of modernity enjoyed movies, or at least this particular horror film. He groused that he had not been able to see Caligari, and even when he complained about a production, like James Whale’s Frankenstein, he often gave a backhanded compliment or two. He thrilled to Phantom and the monster Chaney had made at a particularly significant moment in Lovecraft’s career, in which he was beginning to think more and more about the revelatory nature of horror.

Lovecraft’s failure to make it to the front, or even into the Rhode Island Guard, did nothing to dampen his fascination with the Great War. More significantly for the war’s legacy of horror, the abattoir of the trenches contributed to what later cinematic iterations would make into one of the most famous of his tales. While German horror films examined the meaning of death and the very notion of what it meant to be human, and Chaney and Browning focused on body horror, Lovecraft’s fiction after 1919 engaged both topics directly.

In the midst of the conflict, Lovecraft had written in his amateur, self-published journal The Conservative that condemnations of the war came primarily from “the effeminate idealist” who “shrieks at the mutual slaughter of his fellow-man.” Lovecraft, at home in Providence, obviously could have no concept of what that “mutual slaughter” actually looked or felt like. Indeed, his deep and inveterate racism led him to criticize the war only because what he called the “unnatural racial alignments of the various warring powers” signaled danger for “Teutonic stock.” In other words, the British should not be fighting their racial brothers in Germany.³⁹

Lovecraft’s obscene observations about the “mutual slaughter” of the trenches didn’t keep him from turning to the Great War in fiction, at first simply signaling his growing interest after America joined the Allies in April 1917. Later, his fiction focused more on the apocalyptic implications of the war. When his best work began to appear, in the late 1920s, he thought through the same themes of global catastrophe and utter alienation from the romanticism of the nineteenth century that other writers and artists began to obsess over during the conflict itself.

“Dagon,” written in the summer of 1917 but not coming into print until 1923, raises questions about the possibility of a human future. The narrator tells us that when events recorded occurred, “the great war was then at its very beginning.” A German sea raider takes over a cargo ship and takes the crew captive. The narrator escapes only to find himself on an island that turns out not to be an island at all. There he finds a strange monolith and a creature whose amphibian appearance and sloppy, ugly movements defies his abilities to describe.

As in so many of his tales, Lovecraft ends “Dagon” with his narrator losing his sanity. He is haunted by one thought, and it’s not even of the thing on the island itself. Instead, he takes morphine to keep at bay his visions of “the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering,” and he dreams of “a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down . . . the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind.”⁴⁰

Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep” represents another reflection on “war-­exhausted mankind,” as does his story of the fate of a German U-boat in “The Temple.” But nowhere does he get closer to the real horrors of war than some tales he suggested he wrote on something of a lark. “Herbert West—Reanimator” was a serial publication for an amateur magazine called Home Brew that specialized in lowbrow humor. Although Lovecraft’s own literary pretentions made him grumble about this, he complained a bit too enthusiastically. The prospect of actually being paid for his fiction delighted him. He took the opportunity to tell a mad-scientist tale in which his character Herbert West, a student at Lovecraft’s fictional Miskatonic University, develops a serum for raising the dead.

Lovecraft admitted he had written a “gruesome” narrative. The story did, in fact, include much of the biological horror the postwar world obsessed over. In some ways, he joined Abel Gance in producing the first modern zombie tale: West tears bodies out of their own deaths into “the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature.” Kicked out of Miskatonic for his forbidden experiments, West turns his former dean into “a voiceless, sadistic monster” that in one night maims its victims and rips them to shreds.⁴¹

Lovecraft reveals his lingering interest in the Great War by having West take his serum to “the gigantic struggle” before the U.S. enters the war, enlisting in a Canadian regiment in 1915. Here Lovecraft, more than in his ridiculously inhumane essays, displays some limited sense that the world’s real horror took place in the trenches: he has West’s assistant speak of “hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the battlefields of the Great War.” In pulpy style, however, this description takes a backseat to “the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.”

The mad scientist had taken his experiments to the war in search of “freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment,” again showing Lovecraft’s awareness of what the war had become since his prattle in 1915 about the conflict’s true tragedy residing in “unnatural racial alignments.” Still, the pulp formula constrained him again and again in these tales. One minute, there’s a reflection on the war’s “prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh” and the next we are hearing of reanimated limbs and the use of a new formula created from “reptilian cell-matter” to rejuvenate the dead.⁴²

Lovecraft could never quite break through to a full rendition of the war’s horrors. This failure had nothing to do with his lack of direct experience with the combat. Many artists who spent no time in the trenches managed to capture their personal fears and the collective horror. But, unlike Nosferatu, which compels us to see the specter of death shadowing the world without ever mentioning the war, Lovecraft’s use of war as a backdrop diverts our eyes away toward the fantastic horrors of reanimation. “Herbert West—Reanimator” works wondrously as a horror story, and made for a terrific adaptation from Lovecraft fan and filmmaker Stuart Gordon in 1985. But Lovecraft, like many other Americans of his generation, blinked and looked away at those moments in the narrative when the war drew too close.

“Nyarlathotep” and “Dagon” had shown that Lovecraft could use supernatural fiction to entwine global catastrophe with tales of the fantastic. But his output varied widely. When he began publishing in Weird Tales after its founding in 1923, he often used what even his most fervent admirer, S. T. Joshi, has called “a hackneyed” set of formulas that appealed to the magazine’s readership. Worse, his stories could combine his rancid racism with occultism, as in “The Horror at Red Hook,” or tell a simple tale of an evil monster destroyed by a good wizard (specifically a mystically inclined Miskatonic U Professor), as in “The Dunwich Horror.”⁴³

A change came over Lovecraft’s work by the mid-1920s, however, and his supernatural fiction became much more relevant to the larger world, something other than, as Victoria Nelson puts it, “squishy monster stories for boys.”⁴⁴

He raised great Cthulhu, a monster that has haunted the century, a new death’s head spreading wide his black wings of apocalypse, which was clearly recognizable as the Great War and its meaning continued to menace the world.

Ghosts of No-Man’s-Land

Arthur Machen disdained his employment with the London Evening News, thinking of it primarily as hackwork to keep his family afloat financially. The daily grind of the newspaper business kept him in the doldrums, lightened by his mystical interests and devotion to his family. He did, however, receive a jolt of inspiration from the strange mixture of war fever and patriotic fervor that seized so many in the first days of the Great War. Machen penned his short story “The Bowmen” first as a supplement for the September 29, 1914, edition of his employer’s newspaper. Undoubtedly it pleased him to put his interest in the supernatural to some use at his hated day job.

Reading “The Bowmen” today disappoints if you’ve had the chance to submerge yourself in the malign and unforgettable tales of horror that Machen produced in the 1890s. The tale recounts one of the early calamitous battles of the war and adds a British officer who, having once seen a Latin prayer to St. George rendered on the plates “in a queer vegetarian restaurant in London,” utters the invocation during the heat of battle. Suddenly, in a long line, appear “shapes, with a shining about them,” who rain arrows down on the Germans, killing them by the thousands and ending their seemingly unstoppable march on Paris. The story ends with a note that the German general staff, with their “scientific principles” of war, believed the English had used a deadly form of poison gas. But, Machen writes, “the man . . . knew . . . that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.”

“The Bowmen” became, during his lifetime, Machen’s most popular story, in large part because many readers thought it much more than fiction. The particular edition of the Evening News in which it appeared, for reasons that have never become known, published another tale entitled “Our Short Story” while simply printing Machen’s work under its own title. This made it seem like another edition of Machen’s regular column. Perhaps because it was written from a narrator’s perspective, readers seized on it as a first-person account of a strange but true occurrence on the other side of the Channel.

A number of parish priests delighted in the story for its pious and patriotic effect and passed it along to their flocks in sermon and anecdote. In fact, one such clergyman contacted Machen to ask if the author would grant permission for the parish to print it in pamphlet form, complete with the sources he used to write the story. Machen replied that he had no sources to provide since the tale had come completely from his imagination. The enthusiastic priest insisted heatedly that Machen had this wrong, that the story had been absolutely true. In 1915, when the story appeared in a collection titled The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War, Machen wrote with some frustration that he had failed in the writing of a good story but succeeded in fomenting a myth.⁴⁵

Apparently, he had helped create one of the more persistent fairy tales of the war. On August 23, 1914, British troops had experienced their first major battle with German forces. Fighting with tenacity, the British suffered heavy causalities in what later in the war would count as a mere skirmish but at the time represented one of the greatest clashes of arms ever seen on the continent.

A story circulated that soldiers had seen an angel riding a white horse and carrying a flaming sword that held back the German foe. The story grew in scale until it became many horses bearing up many shining figures. It’s worth noting that it took several weeks after the battle ended for the legend of these apparitions to begin making the rounds, about the time Machen’s story appeared. As is often true with rumor legends, the story took on a simple, easily retold, form: some soldiers and lots of civilians who had not been present spoke of angels, not of Agincourt bowmen. The “Angel of Mons,” as the divine intervention became known, failed rather spectacularly, as the large German contingent did force the British to give ground. Still, the truth has not outlived its romance, and even to this day the legend often gets sentimental mention in the odd brand of nationalism and nostalgia that clusters around British commemoration of the war.

A German soldier, Walter Bloem, saw no flaming swords from heaven helping out either side in those first weeks of war. He remembered only “dead and wounded, quivering in convulsions, groaning terribly, blood oozing from fresh wounds.” Phantasmagoria haunted most soldiers, not a world where angels chose sides and saved the day.⁴⁶

Jingoism and its legends aside, Machen managed to convey something of the horror of the times in his short story: “The hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.” And while he portrays the British “Tommy” (the term for the common soldier) facing constant shelling with lighthearted bravery, he forces his audience to remember that bursting shells “tore good Englishmen limb from limb” just across the Channel.

Machen never thought the story really worked and became a bit ashamed of it. He wondered aloud how a “nation sunk in materialism of the grossest kind [had] accepted idle rumors and gossip of the supernatural as truth.” Soon Machen found a way to write about the war that went beyond the simplistic nationalism of “The Bowmen.” He would return to his roots in cosmic horror and find in the Great War an iconography of the true terror that makes of our world a haunted wood.⁴⁷

A Dance with Death

Berlin, halt ein! Besinne Dich. Dein Tänzer ist der Tod. (Berlin, stop! Come to your senses. You’re dancing with death.) Thus read graffiti scrawled all over the walls of the city in the early 1920s.

The far left in German politics struggled to regroup in the years after the failure of the Spartacist uprising and the violent repression that followed. It largely succeeded in this, for a time providing a formidable opponent for the increasingly militant right, of which the Nazi Party represented only one element. But in the earliest years the left largely had to make do with various kinds of agitprop, including the graffiti that suggested Berlin’s death mask. “You’re dancing with death!” touched a chord in German society beyond the world of disappointed revolutionaries, however, encapsulating the fears of the war years and the privation, widespread disease, and indeed starvation that followed. The graffiti used a line snatched from a poem by the controversial poet Walter Mehring. The surreal sentiment became so well-known that it appeared on a popular German poster by the mid-1920s. It seemed to describe the interest in the macabre displayed by German artists and film directors, their desire to put numerous iterations of rotting corpses and dead-eyed comrades on canvas and screen.

Fritz Lang, home from the war but most certainly bringing the war home with him, had long been fascinated with the macabre, the nature of evil, and the relationship of both to the social order. His work, like that of Murnau, Gance, and Leni, shows us more than how the Great War inspired a generation to embrace a death obsession. We see how such a fascination, in some sense the beginnings of the horror tradition itself, both critiqued and called into being societies in the thrall of dread.

The Great War ended Lang’s time as an art student. There are differing accounts of his flight from Paris as the global conflagration began, as there are details left in shadow in much of his biography. Whether he returned to Austria-Hungary to join the imperial armies or became one of the Hapsburgs’ many conscripts has little relevance to his bitter experience of combat or how it shaped his art.

Lang’s war did become a particularly brutal one, known to us largely through official records and the medals the Hapsburg army awarded him. He himself spoke very little about his experiences. He received his first citation for bravery during a reconnaissance mission in March 1916, during which he had been sketching out a line of Russian fortifications. In June of the same year, he received two wounds in a matter of days, the second leaving him temporarily blind and causing a permanent eye injury that, he later alleged, required him to wear his infamous monocle, which he replaced with an equally well-known eye patch in his last years. During his ten-month recovery, he wrote some of his first film treatments, many of which signal his interest in horror and crime. He scripted at least one werewolf tale and another about a son who inherits his father’s “criminal genes,” becoming the dead man’s evil double.

Lang returned to war as a lieutenant in the early fall of 1917, this time serving in Romania and then on the Italian front. He received some other injury during the final year of the war (although it’s unclear that it was another wound). The hospitalization record listed a “nervous disorder” as part of his disability; his symptoms and some aspects of his behavior following the war suggest strongly that he suffered “war neurosis.”

Lang found success in the German film industry after the war, with help from producer Erich Pommer, who also worked with Murnau. Lang’s already imperious nature took on a sharp and dangerous edge. His outbursts of anger at his first wife, Lisa Rosenthal, reportedly included the unsettling habit of waving around a Browning service revolver he’d brought home from the trenches. This would lead to notorious speculation after Rosenthal used this weapon to commit suicide in 1920 after catching Lang and his lover, screenwriter Thea von Harbou (who later married Lang), in bed together.⁴⁸

Fritz Lang’s Great War, and what it did to his psyche, helped him produce some of the most memorable monsters of the era. Indeed, a decade later he and actor Peter Lorre created a corrupted evil that rivaled the vampire born from the imagination of Albin Grau and “Mr. Murnau” (as Lang always respectfully called him).

But first, Lang created one of the most famous automata of the 1920s. She would voice to German audiences, and the world, her own version of the warning “You’re dancing with death.”

Burrower in the Wasteland

In August 1917, Franz Kafka began coughing up blood. He had never previously trusted doctors but now found himself forced to do so after they diagnosed him with pulmonary tuberculosis. As the disease racked his lungs he surely thought of his most memorable tragic character, Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. His illness, however, did not keep him from writing his unclassifiable tales that dug deep into Europe’s worm-rotted battlescape.

Kafka’s incomplete story “The Burrow” captured several of the most inhuman aspects of life during the conflict, including the mud and blood of trench warfare itself. It’s a rush of images involving digging, burrowing into the earth for survival, and the attendant dark irony of digging one’s own grave. The story speaks, as does much of Kafka’s other work, of the cruelty that buried the hopes of the twentieth century. The mole-like creature in “The Burrow” has human imagination and a human desire for freedom, light, and even love. But it has alternate and competing motives, a desire to descend into the loneliness of its burrow, to defend it against any who might threaten its security.⁴⁹

Interpreters of the unfinished tale have seen it, as Victoria Nelson writes, as a parable of the divided mind of the artist or a Freudian “burrowing” into the unconscious. She points out that thinking of the story this way makes it too easy to forget that this thing is an animal, in essence a monster that dreams of tearing apart anyone who enters its hidden abyss.⁵⁰

Kafka worked on “The Burrow” in 1923 as death slowly closed in on him. It’s difficult not to see the chaos and monstrosity of the trenches in the role that incessant noise and burrowing into the earth play in the making of the monster. Kafka knew that human beings could become, had become, like this creature, which declares that, if someone threatened it, “I might . . . maul him, tear the flesh from his bones, destroy him, drink his blood, and fling his corpse among the rest of my spoil.” The monster is Grendel and the Maxim gun, the stuff of primal horror myth joined to the history of the early twentieth century.

Kafka showed some interest in the culture of postwar horror, even though the genre had only begun to emerge at the time of his death. Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel, The Golem, the book that had become so intensely popular in central Europe during the war that a soldier’s edition had been released, seems to have impressed Kafka. An account related by Max Brod, the author’s closest friend and later the publisher of his work, tells us that Kafka not only read and appreciated The Golem but also connected it to the changes wrought by war and history, especially in his native Prague.

“The atmosphere of the old Jewish quarter was wonderfully reproduced,” Kafka said of Meyrink’s work. He would have had no way of knowing anything about that atmosphere of course, at least outside of distant family memories, by the time of the novel’s publication. The Kafkas had long moved out of the quarter.⁵¹ Indeed, a large number of Jewish families, perhaps a fourth of the population of Jewish Prague, left the quarter in the 1850s. The vast majority moved to other parts of the city in the next half century. The old ghetto, known as Josefstadt or Josefov after Emperor Joseph II, who desired the reputation as protector of the Jews of the Austrian Empire, had become a decrepit haunt of thieves. Much of it had been demolished and rebuilt by the beginning of the Great War. “In us it still lives,” Kafka said, “the dark corners, the secret alleys, shuttered windows, squalid courtyards, and sinister inns. . . . With our eyes open we walk through a dream; ourselves only a ghost of a vanished age.” This haunting elegy seems born of a nearly occult vision of the old city. It captures much of what makes Kafka, in my reading, a writer of horror—certainly not a genre writer or bound to the formulas that often limited even the best of Lovecraft’s work, but one who nevertheless found in brutality, alienation, supernatural transformation, and torture the terrible truths of his age.

Max Brod’s anecdote, and Kafka’s comment about the ghostly Prague that had disappeared, could have come directly from Meyrink’s novel or the intertitles of Wegener’s 1920 film. Unfortunately, it’s probably untrue or at least only partially true. Brod did not publish his biography of Kafka until 1937. He had luckily escaped Prague after the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia, and memories had likely grown a bit dim in the interim.⁵²

Even if Kafka never said these things, in exactly this way, about The Golem, the anecdote probably has a kernel of truth. He did see in Prague a ruin that represented modernity. His stories often had an essential placelessness about them: the terrible things that occur in them could be happening anywhere. But he knew Prague like a lover, indeed better than he knew any of his actual lovers, and his best tales and novels capture the secrets, the traps, the essential irrationalism of the ancient city.

They also, like so much of the horror film and fiction of the era, seemed to call into question the stability of the human body. The war shattered the nineteenth-century consensus about death. The double became an image of mortality that could be tortured and mangled. The terror would become fully incarnated in Dr. Frankenstein’s stitched-together horror. Chucky the nightmare doll (Child’s Play, 1988) and the creepy Annabelle (Annabelle, 2014 with a 2017 sequel, part of the hugely popular series The Conjuring) have terrified us with the death doll, the waxwork come to life. Extreme horror such as the original French Martyrs (2008) or Dead Girl (2008), unwatchable by a mainstream audience, takes the pop terror of Hollywood’s nightmare dolls to their logical conclusion. Zombies are themselves the ultimate empty corpses, as Abel Gance showed while the Great War still waged, husks waiting to be filled with social commentary but also deeply nihilistic reminders of our mortality.

Kafka’s Prague, long obsessed with golems, puppets, and automata, joined Paris and Berlin as one of the capitals of an aesthetic of horror. Meanwhile, artists joined writers and movie moguls in telling the story of the monsters that came from the trenches. The Great War would give the world a new art of the nightmare.