American Nightmare: The History of Horror and Power
The emergence of the horror genre is the result of a long tradition of gothic entertainment converging with the mysterious emerging technology that was moving pictures. At the onset of modernity, The United States of America was undergoing a major cultural shift; urbanization and technological advancements fostered innovations in communication, and it is under these circumstances that cinema was born. Horror-themed literature, imagery, and theater influenced the translation of gothic entertainment to the screen, and eventually the emergence of the horror genre. It is important to note that the genre is a frequent vessel for social commentary; the ideals of American industry are often patriarchal, religious, racist, and capitalistic and while modern horror films attempt to dethrone these ideas, it must be noted that these are ideas that influence how the industry and the horror film genre itself have developed.
Before filmmaking was an accessible means of expression, horror-themed entertainment was still remarkably popular in American culture. As American literature, art, and theater emerged as independent from their British origins, they favored shocking entertainment and theatrical thrills. American Gothic literature in particular deviated from British traditions in the late 1700s and early 1800s; while British gothic literature focuses more on narrative, its American counterpart used death and the unexplainable for “cheap thrills,” as far as some critics were concerned.
With horror entertainment on its initial rise, stories focused on supernatural forces received scrutiny for evading a concrete narrative and other essentials. However, the success of authors like Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne solidified the viability of the genre. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde laid the groundwork for modern psychological horror and villain character study. One of the most iconic works of this era is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818. Its understanding of horror is similar to a modern approach, with terror stemming from human truths. Additionally, science, technology, and visual tricks were becoming popular iterations of spectacle entertainment; early indications of mad scientist horror tropes are seen in the novel and its adaptations. In this way, “Frankenstein changes the Gothic formula by replacing the supernatural with science. There are no ghosts, bleeding statues, floating torsos, apparitions, or devils. Religious terrors are replaced with an entirely material one: the monster. The monster is flesh and blood, he was made by a man (not God), and he speaks and thinks and feels . . . just like us” (Baumann 68). Frankenstein assured America that horror entertainment had depth and merit past its superficial scare.
Although Frankenstein’s monster is a supernatural being, his existence is explained by a man’s meddling with science. This explanation or unmasking of supernatural forces became a trend in early horror. Stories of murder and debauchery were more familiar and acceptable to the public; hangings, police reports, and other representations of death had been sensationalized in the media and inspired a demand for fiction crime stories.
In America, killing is inescapable. The genocide of Indigenous people is baked into the country’s origins, casting a sinister shadow on its development. Murder has always been a part of American culture and, “as Karen Halttunen has shown in her landmark study Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Imagination (1998), the subject of murder in popular fiction and nonfiction literature grew dramatically after the 1820s, the result of many causes, including an escalation in literacy rates” (Rhodes, 26). Horror-themed entertainment was finding its place in the early media landscape, although most supernatural forces were explained away to preserve the traditional happy ending.
Often, publications of horrific stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, were accompanied by engravings or illustrations. Gothic themes and imagery have been present in visual culture for centuries, but these paintings were not accessible to the general public. Once graphic illustrations were published alongside short stories or in the National Police Gazette, people became more interested in visual representations of horror. War was a source of fascination, but “it was not until the 1880s that the half-tone process allowed newspapers and magazines to reproduce photographs. As a result, during the nineteenth century, more Americans likely saw images of the Spanish-American War of 1898 than they did of the U.S. Civil War” (Rhodes 77). Increased access to this shocking media only drove the American desire to produce and experience horror entertainment. This would manifest in spirit photography and a form of theater called phantasmagoria.
Horror theater has a rich history and is one of the most direct links to the emergence of the horror genre in American cinema. Gothic literature and its themes are found in early English theater, namely in Shakespearean tragedies. As American theater found its unique voice, the traditions of gothic plays were carried over. However, “these plays… relied less on narrative suspense than on the spectacle of horror” in comparison to British plays (Rhodes 40). New methods for representing the supernatural onstage were lucrative and reached a peak with the creation of Pepper’s Ghost. Created by an English professor named John Pepper in 1862, the illusion used a pane of glass, a hidden performer, and a spotlight to project a ghostly figure onto the stage. The optical trick was quickly adopted by theaters globally. Audiences marveled at the effect and a surge of ghost-themed performances followed, mere frames for the use of Pepper’s illusion. Otherwise, the capability of theater to bring the supernatural to life was quite limited. The desire for macabre spectacles resulted in magic shows, electricity and science demonstrations, and spiritualism performances.
Spiritualism was kickstarted in America largely by the Fox sisters, Leah, Margaret, and Kate, in 1849. In what was later revealed to be a hoax, the sisters claimed a connection with the afterlife and worked as mediums, spreading the concept of their abilities as Spiritualism. The sisters also facilitated seances and performed their skills for a paying audience. A cultural fascination with their practices resulted in others claiming spiritual connections, most of which were dispelled as hoaxes, exposed as magic tricks, or even taken to court for their deception. The following is a line from David Walker’s The Humbug in American Religion: Ritual Theories of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism: “All of spiritualism's legal trials may be understood as occasions to redraw the same theoretical and practical lines among religious freedom, magical deception, and critical investigation that were drawn and blurred in séances” (Walker 45). The relationship between those three elements is both strengthened and complicated by their position in American culture. In the period leading up to the birth of the horror film, religion was being tested by magical connection with the spirit world; the country was then tasked with the critical analysis of the similarities and differences between each set of beliefs.
An apparition of this cultural debate is seen in the practice of spirit photography. Using a phenomenon similar to that of Pepper’s Ghost, photographers would create phantom figures in long-exposure images and identify them as the dead relative of the subject. These spirit photographers capitalized on the losses sustained during the Civil War; in this case, the paranormal was comforting. Here, the entanglement of frightening, otherworldly imagery and religion is seen once again. The spirit photograph found success because of this wide appeal; “the dearly departed family member functions as the symbolic representative of sociocultural and religious tradition and authority” while the phenomenon of the image itself provides a fascinating shock (Kaplan 26). The techniques developed for spirit photography were the basis for the motion picture illusions that would entrance audiences with the same fascination with the supernatural.
Another permutation of Pepper’s Ghost and one of the most immersive horror experiences of the 19th century is phantasmagoria. This variation of theater was perfected in Paris, 1799, by Etienne Gaspard Robertson. He used a modified magic lantern to fill a dark room with projected images of ghosts, skeletons, witches, and more; he also employed actors and experimented with shadow. American recreations of this practice were more focused on projections but found commercial success all the same. Like early cinema projections, Phantasmagoria shows would tour the country delighting audiences and indication the success that early film would find. During the era described by Tom Gunning as the Cinema of Attractions, visually exciting trick films “clearly paralleled the Phantasmagoria… Many of these films included transformations, superimpositions, and rear projections, not to mention frequent appearances of ghosts, skeletons, and the like” (Barber 85). These traits were unessential to narrative films, but they lived on as American gothic culture fueled early horror cinema.
As moving mixtures developed, they were often likened to spectral experiences in their essence. Additionally, the filmmaking tricks and techniques being discovered allowed the illusion of the supernatural to become more real than ever. Because of these circumstances, “the horror-themed film proved ideally suited to early cinema… changing with the larger evolutions underway in the same era. Here were moving pictures informed by literature, theatre, and visual culture, but also moving pictures that relied upon a type of magic that only cinematic special effects could create. The ghost resided not in the machine, but only in the illusory images it projected” (Rhodes 96). America’s fascination with this new technology gave horror an purpose: to be a route ideal for visual experimentation and the continuation of the Cinema of Attractions.
Upon the emergence of cinema, the depiction of ghosts was an immediate subject of interest as camera tricks could produce phantasmic effects. Spiritualism was also examined, with many films comedically revealing hoaxes, and “it is hardly surprising that this latter-day and performance-based religion— one that not only influenced literature, but also had a major impact in the theatre—would become the subject of numerous early films” (Rhodes 176). Still, the supernatural was being unmasked at the conclusion of the story; characters often dressed as sheet-ghosts, sparking fear within the narrative but laughter in the audience. The dramatic irony of knowing a ghost is not real gives the audience a sense of separation from having to question the limits of the reality they actually reside in.
Outside of the budding horror genre, films in the early 1900s favored verisimilitude and excused the use of reality-blurring visual effects through dream sequences. Horror-themed films were not advertised as such; they were billed as mystery or crime films and characterized as “weird.” Additionally, the industry push for happy endings continued to suggest that a supernatural villain should always be unmasked and explained. It was only with the growing attention to mise-en scene that the horror genre began to establish itself and develop a cinematic language of its own.
One of the most recognizable characteristics of horror films are the characters themselves. Depictions of the devil, ghosts, and witches can be found in all visual and storytelling cultures, but the unique history of these figures in America combined with the timing of cinema’s emergence make for familiar archetypes.
Imagery of Satan in early film was established in part by American Mutoscope & Biograph’s Frederick Armitage. In his films The Prince of Darkness and A Terrible Night, the devil appears wearing “horns, a goatee, and black attire with a black cape. As a result, this particular devil seems to be the first horror-themed character to appear in more than one American film, a type of repetition on which the later horror movie genre would depend” (Rhodes 129). This image of the devil takes clear influence from adaptations of Dante Alighieri's Inferno and the tale of Faust, but has a comedic twist. Many terrifying characters, namely skeletons and Satan, often appeared on film in a comedic light, causing mayhem in the world of the living. There is a place for comedy within horror and vice versa, but undermining Satan on-screen invites questions about religion and what people want to see; Christianity, its power, and the destruction wrought in its name is necessary context for anything considered American, so it is difficult not to question the line between what is acceptable entertainment and what is near-blasphemous. The image of a powerful devil inciting fear is a difficult one to accept. However, forces of evil acting through human vessels proved to win American attention.
Undoubtedly, the Salem Witch Trials had a massive impact on the American consciousness leading into the 18th century; it is difficult to accept that the church’s belief in the devil’s ability to act through a “witch” resulted in the deaths of innocent women. Conversely, some were simply fascinated with witchcraft. The journalism surrounding the trials and executions was wide-spread and “as Owen Davies has remarked, ‘Witches were integral to the cultural fabric of America.’ To an extent, the same can be said of early cinema in the United States, during which time all manner of witchcraft appeared on the screen” (Rhodes 158). Necessitated by the country’s fascination with witchcraft and the events in Salem, as well as the popularity of trick films and magic demonstrations, witches became another feature of the horror genre. In comparison to the common depiction of Satan, witches are more often a threat and punished for their actions; this disparity highlights the patriarchal and religious values that have influenced horror. When it is difficult to accept a supernatural force, or “other,” narratives have been constructed to feed systems of oppression already in place.
Another manifestation of oppression in early film history is the representation of Black people, or lack thereof. In early horror films, racist filmmakers used the idea of Blackness as monstrous or “other” to fuel scenarios of terror. Most often, these early films featured white actors in blackface, adding to the inexcusable misrepresentation and stereotyping that mars proper representation and raises questions about education surrounding these hurtful works. In films such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the Black characters are villainized and treated with the opposition that a horror archetype might be. In her book Horror Noire : Blacks in American Horror Films From the 1890s to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman compares the death of Gus in Birth of a Nation to the hunting and killing of Frankenstein. She makes the astute observation that “for the Monster, Gus, and Lynch, their transformation into the monstrous comes when each are fully absent from their masters. But only the Monster learns important lessons and becomes a new “man” because of it” (Coleman 27). Films like Birth of a Nation were made to spark fear through their dehumanizing portrayal of Black people. Today, the reality of the filmmaker’s intention is the horror itself.
In reflection on horror film history, modern filmmakers have completely redefined the genre for the better; diverse casts and creative teams head thoughtful films that critique cultural horrors through jump-scare metaphors. These innovative works build upon early horror-themed cinema in the same way that the genre was built on the fundamentals of gothic literature, art, and theatre. The human fascination with the unexplainable is timeless; religion and the draw of the supernatural both stem from this truth. With horror filmmaking as an outlet, we can continue to express and record these unexplainable frustrations and cultural burdens. More exploration and experimentation is the path towards reckoning with the source of the fears, or the source of those ghostly footsteps on the stairs…
