1920s · Silent screams
Shadows on a painted wall
Horror cinema was born crooked. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Robert Wiene built a town of slanted rooftops and painted light, and let a somnambulist named Cesare stalk through it like a bad dream. German Expressionism did not try to look real. It tried to look the way fear feels: tilted, too tall, closing in.
Two years later F. W. Murnau released Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Max Schreck's Count Orlok is not handsome or charming. He is bald, rat-fanged and carries plague with him in coffins full of earth. The most famous image in the film is not even Orlok himself but his shadow sliding up a staircase, a clawed hand stretching toward a door. Audiences who had just lived through the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic understood exactly what that shadow meant.
Watch these with a good restoration and a proper score. Silence does strange things to a modern viewer. You start to listen for sounds that are not there.
1930s · The studio monsters
Universal builds a family of fiends
Sound arrived and so did the monster rally. In 1931 Universal Pictures released Tod Browning's Dracula, with Bela Lugosi's slow Hungarian vowels, and James Whale's Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff under Jack Pierce's flat-headed makeup. Both were enormous hits, and the studio spent the rest of the decade adding to the household: The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and, best of all, Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
Whale's sequel is the one to treasure. It is camp and heartbroken in the same breath, with Elsa Lanchester's hiss and lightning-streaked hair arriving in the final minutes like a thunderclap. The Universal monsters are rarely frightening to a modern teenager, but they are the grammar of everything that followed: the castle, the mob with torches, the creature who is sadder than the people chasing him.
1940s to 1950s · Suggestion
Val Lewton and the art of the unseen
At RKO in the 1940s, producer Val Lewton had tiny budgets and a brilliant idea: if you cannot afford a monster, do not show one. Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur, scares with a hiss in the dark and a woman alone at a night-time swimming pool. Its sudden bus-brake screech gave the industry a name for the jump scare: the "Lewton bus." I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is even dreamier, a voodoo-haunted Jane Eyre set on a Caribbean island.
Across the Atlantic, Hammer Films brought blood and colour to the old monsters with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), pairing Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Those are technicolour, but they belong to the same lineage: gothic stories told with conviction.
1960s · Last light
The haunting and the walking dead
The black-and-white era went out with two masterpieces. Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), adapted from Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House, never shows its ghost. It simply lets a door bulge, a wall breathe and Julie Harris hear something pounding in the corridor. It remains one of the best haunted house films ever made.
Then in 1968 George A. Romero shot Night of the Living Dead near Pittsburgh for roughly the cost of a family car. The dead rise, a handful of strangers board up a farmhouse, and the ending lands like a punch. Its grainy footage looked like news broadcasts from Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, and its legacy is every zombie story you have ever seen.
Start with Nosferatu, then Bride of Frankenstein, Cat People, The Haunting and Night of the Living Dead. Five films, five decades, one long shadow.
Next era: the slashers