Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

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x Steffen Hantke film often pinpoint the cinema of this period as an inventory of tropes and styles from which horror films have been drawing in all their national and thematic variations. This is the heritage of German cinema from the silent film era—films associated with the glory days of the Ufa and the Decla, with the stylistic influence of Expressionism, and with a thematic preoccupation with the darker aspects of the human psyche, best captured by Lotte Eisner’s almost programmatic title The Haunted Screen. Equally programmatic is the title of S. S. Prawer’s study of horror cinema, from which this book borrows its own title: Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror. 3 Horror film, Prawer suggests, emerged and consolidated itself as a genre in the wake of a single film, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with the stylistic and thematic agenda it established. Prawer’s analysis is too sophisticated to allow such radical reductionism, and so the title of his book, I believe, must be taken metonymically, referring to the seminal importance of the type of film Caligari represents—German filmmaking between the two World Wars. Looking back over the genealogy of horror film, we might recognize Caligari as the visual and thematic blueprint for every claustrophobic nightmare of dehumanization, just as Murnau’s Nosferatu appears as one, if not the, seminal vampire film, The Student of Prague as the cinematic key-text about the Doppelgänger motif, Lang’s M as the first serial killer film, and Lang’s first two Dr. Mabuse films as foundational texts in the cinema of individual and collective paranoia. Other critics, concurring with the basic conceit in Prawer’s study, confirm the idea that German cinema during the Weimar years was, in fact, fertile grounds for the horror film. Summarizing the state of current research on the topic, Peter Hutchings makes the connection between horror film and the German films of the period explicit: “most accounts of horror history published in the past thirty years refer to the German productions The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922) as horror films” (3). To these two seminal films Hutchings also adds The Student of Prague (1913) and The Golem (1913), asserting that, taken together, these films “might well anticipate and be an influence upon later horror production” (9). David Skal, in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, picks up this theme of influence in his own discussion of cinematic history. Discussing German films of the Weimar years in the context of such modernist movements as Surrealism and phenomena like the French Grand Guignol, Skal ends the chapter entitled “‘You Will Become Caligari’: Monsters, Mountebanks and Modernism” with this tongue-in-cheek evocation of the influence German expressionist films were to have, especially on the American horror film: Whether Americans liked it or not, an enormous westward expansion of horrors was taking shape, a manifest destiny of the macabre. The dark beings that had used the European avant-garde to find a modern expression would soon begin crossing the Atlantic, in film canisters instead of coffins, waiting to be animated in darkened rooms through the application of artificial light. […] Shaken out of their ancient crypts and castles by the mod-
Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film xi ern concussions of war, they began seeking a new resting place, slouching inexorably toward Hollywood to be born anew. (Skal 60–1) Similarly, Mark Jancovich considers German expressionist filmmaking as a “key moment in the development of the horror film” (3). It occurred in the wake of a brief pre-history of the genre during the silent era, and, in turn, preceded “the Hollywood productions of the 1930s,” among which the Universal horror films are the most notable examples (3). 4 Though the Universal horror films were, according to Jancovich, more indebted in their choice of material and tone to the literary Gothic, they nonetheless “drew on some of the techniques of German expressionism” (3), demonstrating how deeply German filmmakers had written themselves into the further development of the genre. Style figures prominently in Jancovich’s argument; he considers the “list of classics associated with the movement [of German expressionism] [as] particularly impressive” because of their “anti-realist aesthetic” (3), which was to become a hallmark of horror films thereafter (one might think of such wildly divergent examples as Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter and Brian Yuzna’s Society). Lesser critics, even if they have little of substance to add to the discussion of early German horror films, operate squarely within the chronology outlined by Hutchings and Jancovich, a chronology deeply invested in the formation of a canon for the genre of horror film. Attempting to describe, as its subtitle announces, the “Evolution of the American Horror Film,” Joseph Maddrey’s Nightmares in Red, White and Blue (2004) pays unquestioning homage to the canonical films of Weimar cinema. In fact, the chapter entitled (yet again) “You Must Become Caligari: German Expressionism and the Origins of Film Gothic” (7–10) opens Maddrey’s historical survey, suggesting that American horror film—or perhaps even all horror film—starts with German expressionist cinema. Though Maddrey does little more than provide brief plot summaries of Wegener’s The Student of Prague and The Golem, Wiene’s Caligari, and Murnau’s Nosferatu, it is the inclusion of these films in the book and their placement at such a crucial historical juncture that demonstrate how compelling the official historical narrative is. Taken together, these sources make a strong case for the critical consensus among historians of horror film that German cinema before the Third Reich helped to bring about horror as a cinematic genre; that German filmmakers contributed works that were to become central to the canon of the genre, establishing a look, a style, and a mood for the horror film, as much as an inventory of themes and tropes, that were to persist during the further development of the genre throughout the rest of the 20th century and beyond. What we are dealing with here is a well-documented and well-theorized aspect of cinematic history. Less well-documented and far less thoroughly theorized is the second element in the historical narrative of German horror film—the rupture that occurred during the Third Reich and the war years. Critical discourse has hardly addressed this historical turning-point at all. The absence of horror films from
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Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

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