Silent Film – The Revenant Review
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – Midnight Faces (1926)
1926’s Midnight Faces is another entry into the “old dark house” subgenre, and is heavily influenced by The Bat, which had a tremendously successful run on Broadway beginning in 1920 and a film version which came out also in 1926. By comparison, Midnight Faces is a rather cheap imitation. Though the film is classified as a horror-thriller, comedy could easily be added to its descriptors.
The plot involves a young man, played by Francis X. Bushman, Jr., who inherits a mansion from his uncle which is nestled in a dismal Florida swamp. Though the house is supposed to be empty we see an intruder enter, and soon after the servants arrive it becomes apparent that threats are hiding within the dark recesses and behind secret passageways.
The movie has not aged well. The writing is rudimentary and mostly implausible nonsense and is overly reliant on stereotypes and genre tropes. As comic relief the film provides the character of Trohelius Snapp, played by Martin Turner, the loyal manservant to the protagonist. Turner was a talented physical comic who is nonetheless trapped in the racist stereotype of the black buffoon, spooked by every creak and bump and unable to exert self-control over his fear. He is not alone in the paper-thin tropes, as we have a Fu Manchu-looking Asian and a black cape-wearing prowler to add to the warmed-over stew. The director, Bennett Cohen, borrows heavily if not entirely successfully from Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu with its use of disembodied shadows grasping and reaching along walls and fixtures.
In the end, Midnight Faces is sometimes fun, most times flawed, and ultimately forgettable.
Grade: D
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – The Student of Prague (1926)
1926’s The Student of Prague, also known as The Man Who Cheated Life, is a remake of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ 1913 film , which starred Paul Wegener, was directed by Stellen Rye, and which had been inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839). The film is directed by Henrik Galeen, who wrote and co-directed 1915’s The Golem and co-wrote Wegener’s 1920 classic , wrote the screenplay for Nosferatu (1922) and Waxworks (1924), and wrote this screenplay as well. In 1928 he would go on to direct Alraune. In this film Galeen uses some of the tricks learned from Murnau in Nosferatu, such as Scapinelli’s disembodied shadow manipulating physical objects.
The story is of a Prague student named Balduin who signs a contract with the mysterious Scapinelli, promising him anything in Balduin’s room in exchange for 600,000 florins. To Balduin’s horror, Scapinelli chooses the young man’s reflection and commands the doppelganger to ruin the real Balduin’s reputation and good name. The movie follows the same story-line and structure as Stellen Rye’s original movie but with understandably more flair and sophistication as filmmaking had advanced considerably in the intervening years. Steve Haberman writes of Galeen’s style:
“[He] incorporates a Romantic use of natural locations, cinematic subject shots and montage, studio-built landscapes of the mind, chiaroscuro lighting and camera-sensitive acting. Whereas Rye in 1913 staged scenes in a single static shot, like illustrations to a storybook, Galeen marshaled all of the arsenal of cinema to involve the audience emotionally in each moment. The result is one of the most moving and filmically complex works of the German screen.” (Silent Screams: The History of the Silent Film, pg. 78)
This film once again reunites Conrad Veidt, who plays Balduin, and Werner Krauss, who plays Scapinelli, both of whom had appeared in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Waxworks (1924). Seeing Krauss commanding Veidt’s slow-moving double draws direct parallels to their earlier Caligari and somnambulist roles, both in their spirit and in their mannerisms. Veidt, in particular, carries the central role well and, as always, hands in a master-class performance. The sets are designed by Herman Warm, who created the exquisite Expressionist sets for Caligari, and though more realistic are perfectly suited to enhance both the mundane and fantastical elements of the film.
Unfortunately, as of this writing the only copy currently available is a poor VHS transfer from Alpha Video, and The Student of Prague is a film that deserves a good print. It’s a solid movie which effectively uses special effects to bring the haunting story to the screen.
Grade: B-
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – A Page of Madness (1926)
Cinema, as an entertainment medium, is a balance between storytelling and visuals. Some movies strike a harmonious balance while others, particularly genre films, tend to lean towards one aspect or the other, often to the movie’s detriment. Horror movies, in particular, not always but generally rely more upon the images on the screen than upon the strength of the story being told. However, there are some movies where the visuals are so captivating that the story, present though muddled into incoherence, becomes almost unnecessary. A Page of Madness (1926), directed by Japanese filmmaker Teinosuke Kinugasa, is such a film.
It is perhaps a small miracle that we still have it. Most of Japan’s silent films are lost forever. Already accustomed to moving pictures via the tradition of Magic Lantern shows, the country’s foray into cinema began in 1897, and the following year they were making ghost movies. Heavily influenced by traditional theater, cinemas began incorporating benshis who became integral parts of the filmmaking industry. These performers, following a rich tradition of oral storytelling, would narrate the silent films, often accompanied by music, spouting the dialogue of characters, explaining scenes, or sometimes even informing the audience of scenes that were missing. They gave viewers an immersive peek into the filmmaking process. With the rise of talkies, the benshi’s place quickly waned. Yet they alone would not disappear. The early twentieth century was not kind to film – almost no one saw the merit in preserving it, and the nitrate film quickly decayed, particularly in Japan’s humid climate. The earthquake of 1923 sent many more movies into the nether, but perhaps no eater of films was as voracious as the U.S. bombers that rained fire and destruction upon Tokyo in World War II.
Originally released in 1926, the movie was lost until Kinugasa found it in his storehouse in 1971. The movie was unlike anything Japan was producing at the time. Movies in that era were played in one of two types of the theaters: ones that played foreign films and ones that played domestic films, which were generally viewed as inferior. Kinugasa took inspiration from outside Japan, particularly among the French and German Expressionist directors, and A Page was a rare domestic product which played in Japan’s foreign theaters.
It was a collaborative effort of talented writers and artists. Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, wrote the original story, which would be elaborated upon by Kinugasa and others. Kinugasa then worked with a group of avant-garde performers known as the School of New Perceptions (Shinkankaku-ha), who, to save money, often slept on set over the course of the month-long filming. The star of the movie, Masao Inoue, forwent pay in order to support its making.
The print today is missing nearly a third of its original state, and the lack of inter-titles makes the story confusing at times. The famous benshi Musei Tokugawa narrated the film at its premiere, but without this element to guide modern viewers some scenes are confusing, or their place within the timeline uncertain. The viewer is left guessing and trying to piece together images like a puzzle which we know is missing pieces. Nevertheless, a story can be salvaged: A man’s wife is placed into a mental asylum after, we can guess from various images (a crying baby in a drain, etc.), she tried to drown a baby. He takes a job as the asylum’s janitor, not revealing his identity, to stay near her, though it appears she is unable to recognize him through her hallucinations. One day his daughter and son arrive to visit their mother, seemingly surprised to see their father there, and we can gather that the daughter is there to announce to her mother her recent engagement. At some point the man has an argument with his daughter which compels him to hatch an escape for his wife, but things don’t go as planned. It’s unclear if the final third of the movie is a representation of the man’s own sanity slipping, or his realization of the repercussions that his actions may cause, though this viewer takes it to be the latter.
Nevertheless, the story is largely a mystery, but it is also beside the point. It’s the visuals, which continually place the viewer in the skewed perspective of insanity, that make the movie mesmerizing, and the seeming incoherence of the story only serves to emphasize this aspect. A Page of Madness is a combination of influences, most notably the German Expressionist The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) by Robert Weine, which dealt with an asylum and the perceptions of madness, and Abel Gance’s experimental 1915 French film La Folie du Docteur Tube, which used distorting lenses to simulate people being high after inhaling a white powder.
A Page begins like a fever dream, with images of an elegant dancing woman in a club intercut with a rainstorm and drums and brass instruments. Gradually the viewer realizes that the music and elegant setting is in the head of a tattered dancing girl in an asylum, played by the captivatingly beautiful Eiko Minami. Though the film is silent, the images and rapid rhythmic editing make the viewer disorientated and think that they too can hear the drums. From there the movie slides back and forth between sobriety and unhinged indulgence, depending on whose eyes the lens is peering through. It’s an experience that, though the viewer is not quite sure what they saw or how to explain it, will linger.
Grade: A-
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – Maciste in Hell (1925)
The Hercules-like character of Maciste, one of cinema’s oldest recurring characters, first hit Italian screens in the 1914’s Cabiria, with Bartolomeo Pagano playing the central role. Throughout the silent era (27 films starring Pagano before 1927), and again in the 1960s, the physically and morally strong hero was placed in fantastical situations, usually involving evil rulers and black magic, and the macho Maciste needing to rescue a beautiful damsel. It’s all very much the stuff of boys’ pulp fantasies.
On rare occasions Maciste would venture into the horror realm, sometimes literally. In 1925’s Maciste in Hell, the hero (once again played by Pagano) is kidnapped by a demon and sent to the underworld where he must use his bulk to battle his way out. The movie borrows heavily from the images of 1911’s L’Inferno, a feature-length adaptation of Dante’s work in which the author is shown through the levels of Hell via a series of imaginative special effects (coincidentally, it was the first feature length Italian movie and the first feature length film shown in its entirety, in one screening, in the United States). Maciste in Hell borrows that film’s volcanic landscape, the tortured souls chained and tormented by demons, and even the giant Satan snacking on souls like they were milk duds. We even have a giant help the hero get to another level.
Yet whereas L’Inferno was a serious film, Maciste is an adventurer’s romp where the bruiser smashes his adversaries and smiles at the metal-bikini clad she-devils. Truly, the special effects are both terrific and creative, such as when Maciste punches off a demon’s head, which then lands on a trident and is healed, thrown back to the standing body, and reattached to allow the demon to keep fighting. Other special effects are just as impressive and add to the sense of fun, and any young boy can’t help but smile as Maciste uses his brute force to push a crowd of demons over a precipice.
Where Maciste doesn’t excel is in the story itself, which is understandably simple and geared towards younger viewers, where the line between good and bad is clearly drawn. When the demons take human form they become the mustache-twirling villains in black capes and black top hats that early silent comedies employed as their antagonists, famously tying people to railroad tracks or saw tables. While many people today associate these Snidely Whiplash-like characters with silent cinema, few understand that these archetypes were seen at the time as products of clichéd Victorian melodramas and were used purely to comic effect, and the same is true in Maciste, where they come off more as pranksters trying to get people to blaspheme than truly potent menaces. Children watching the movie could feel confident in resisting them as well as Maciste himself.
Maciste no doubt influenced and was influenced by pulp fiction, and probably had a hand in creating comic book heroes in the following decade. Likewise, we would begin seeing many of the same tropes in blockbuster cinema of the late 1970s and 1980s, from Princess Leia’s slave attire to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ultra-macho shows of strength, such as in Commando (1985). Likewise, the idea of an otherworldly being playing with their severed head would arise in a movie like Labyrinth (1986).
Maciste in Hell is another example of silent cinema pushing creative boundaries even as it retreads earlier works. With the advent of “talkies” and therefore bulky sound equipment, it became more difficult for filmmakers to create the spectacle of chaos that silent films could muster, where the sounds on stage or at a location didn’t matter. It would be a few more generations before movie technology and directors’ visions could once again catch up to the standards of fantasy set by movies like this.
Grade: B
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest (1925)
Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest (1925), also known simply as Wolf Blood, is saddled with some modern misconceptions. Firstly, it is often erroneously described as the first werewolf film, but that honor belongs to the now lost The Werewolf from 1913, considered by some to also be the first true Universal monster, though the much later The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1925) would have far greater impact in establishing that studio’s series. The Werewolf involved a Navajo witch who transformed into a wolf to kill white settlers, and then returned a century later to kill again. (Some are even more in error in calling 1935’s Werewolf of London the first werewolf film, but it was merely the first mainstream Hollywood one.) Nevertheless, Wolf Blood can properly be considered the earliest surviving werewolf movie.
Secondly, Wolf Blood is today advertised as a horror film, but really it’s a drama-romance with some werewolf elements coming into play in the second half. It tells of the manager of a logging camp named Dick Bannister who falls in love with his pretty young boss. After a fight with a business rival he requires a blood transfusion, and the only blood available is that of a she-wolf. Worries about the effects soon spring forth and he fears that the blood is changing his brain, edging him ever further toward homicide and madness.
Lycanthropy comes fairly late in the film, more than half-way through. There is no transformation scene. Instead, we see Bannister running through the forest in a fit of madness alongside ghostly wolves. Before the release of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, American films generally shied away from inserting the sincerely supernatural into their narratives, unlike their German and Scandinavian counterparts. American plots had a tendency to explain away the seemingly supernatural with human agency, misunderstanding, or mental breakdown, and the trend is no different here.
The director and star, George Chesebro, was a regular fixture in B-movie Westerns, often playing a villain. Likewise, his co-stars were also well-known to contemporary Western fans, and the influence of that genre can be felt throughout. Also present are numerous jokes about Prohibition and jazz, as well as a pinch of racism, placing this film firmly within the time in which it was created.
The forest vistas, with the stately pine trees, are beautiful to behold, but the rest of the movie is very dimly lit and at times difficult to discern. The story is simple and the curious ideas about blood transfusion innocently quaint, but there isn’t much to invest the viewer’s attention. I couldn’t find contemporary reviews, but I imagine this was seen as pretty middling-fare even in the 1920s.
Wolf Blood, while not being a bad film, does not have a great deal to offer the modern audience except for its novelty as the longest surviving runt in a very particular pack.
Grade: D
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – Häxan (1922)
Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen received rave reviews for his 1916 film Blind Justice when it toured in America. While showing the film to prisoners at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, one convict knifed another, deeply disturbing Christensen. When discussing the incident with famed prison reformer Thomas Mott Osborne during his brief but influential tenure as the warden, he was told that even the most career criminals possessed an emotional humanity that could be reached through the right methods. From this meeting, “Christensen began to think about how a belief in absolute evil caused mankind to dehumanize and persecute those with mental illness, deformity, and in poverty” (Steve Haberman, Silent Screams: The History of the Silent Horror Film, pg. 84).
In 1919, in a Berlin bookshop, Benjamin Christensen found a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, the fifteenth-century treatise on witch persecution, and spent the next two years studying the history of witchcraft, determined to make an entirely new kind of film that would serve to explore the subject. The causal link between the historical Inquisition and inmate treatment in the modern world, being ignorance and inhumanity, was a pronounced and natural one. Häxan (1922), also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, is certainly one of the most unconventional films of the silent era, and for a viewer today the experience will be a unique one. Really a horror-docudrama about witchcraft, the film is at turns academic, horrifying, hilarious, and ultimately sobering.
Christensen takes a rationalist’s approach to witchcraft. He first approached scholars to help him with his film, but the low culture stigma of cinema and the unsavory subject matter meant their refusal. Left to his own devices, the first part of the film is Christensen’s own semi-scholarly lecture complete with artwork, moving diagrams, and a kickass mechanical model of hell. He explains the views of the pre-scientific world and how they shaped people’s absurd ideas about witches. He states, “The belief in evil spirits, sorcery and witchcraft is the result of naïve notions about the mystery of the universe.” Based only upon this dry but nevertheless interesting opening, one might be forgiven for thinking this film will be dull, and they would be entirely, tragically wrong. While he does this presentation, he shows titillating and scandalous images from woodcuts and paintings, promising to show them to us with actors in due time. Christensen is a true showman who is building anticipation in his audience.
The second part is where the dramatic reenactments begin, and this is when the film gets trippy. Here Christensen shows us what medieval people believed was happening, not what truly was. The production quality is superb and is certainly some of the finest to be seen in the silent era. The attention to detail in the costumes, sets, lighting, and especially make-up is extraordinary, especially when Christensen himself enters the scene as the horny horned trickster Satan, with mottled skin and a darting tongue. Heavy with sexual overtones and libidinal metaphors – demons vigorously churn butter in obvious imitation of masturbation – the film features discreet but nevertheless tantalizing nudity and Christensen’s images continually fly in the face of accepted decency. As Steve Haberman writes, “the overall impression is of sex stripped of beauty and romance and made monstrously vile” (pg. 86). Häxan was the most expensive Swedish film up to that point and the effort shows. The quality of the make-up effects and props are not just surprising because of the era, but because they’re superior to most of what would come after for the next few generations. Additionally, there is even included an impressive stop-motion animation of a small demon tearing through a door.
The next part of the film is concerned with the realities of historical witch-hunts and how the infectious nature of accusations was inescapable and how they ruined countless lives. While Christensen employed horror imagery earlier, here he presents us with the true source of horror: ignorance and irrationality. Under the Inquisition the Church becomes a hell on Earth, complete with rotten-toothed, sadistic clergy and all the tortures the human mind can conjure. We see men of science accused of devilry and innocent women suffering for the lust they drive in men. Satan and witches are not horrifying, but the irrational mind frame which creates them is, and therefore “Christensen relates the Church to both ignorance and sadism, giving the impression that religion at its core is inseparable from evil” (Haberman, pg. 88). He mirrors the earlier scenes of demons with those of the clergy, visually driving home the view that they were essentially cut from the same blood-soaked ecclesiastical cloth. The sexual repression of the priests is displaced into deviance and perversion, and women – whose countenances so tempted them – are the objects of their unnatural release.
Finally, the film ends with an examination of modern medicine and offers some scientific explanations for the myths surrounding witches. Attention is especially paid to hysteria (in part what we would today call “conversion disorder”), which was seen as an exclusively female disorder from the nineteenth century until around the time this film was released, when Sigmund’s Freud’s theories were in vogue. Here Christensen is not only offering rational alternatives, but also criticizing the contemporary treatment of women and the less fortunate. He asks of his audience, “We no longer burn our old and poor. But do they not often suffer bitterly? And the little woman, whom we call hysterical, alone and unhappy, isn’t she still a riddle for us? Nowadays we detain the unhappy in a mental institution or – if she is wealthy – in a modern clinic.” He suggests that we haven’t moved as far as we think from the mindset that caused the witch-hunts and need some further self-examination to move forward, especially for the sake of women and those less fortunate who are still the victims of authority and misunderstanding. As Haberman notes, a theme of male apprehension regarding female independence crops up many times throughout the film, and each time it is a male authority figure, often through violent means, who suppresses:
“The final impression of Haxan is that women throughout history have been subjected to the control of men, sometimes mercifully, more often cruelly. Females are tempted and degraded by Satan, unfairly judged and punished by the Church, and diagnosed and shut away in clinics by modern doctors. The implication is that men fear the opposite sex and seek to control them. The final image in the film is a silhouette of the charred bodies of several accused witches bound to stakes after being burned alive: the ultimate method of male restraint and domination” (pg. 91).
The performances are strong throughout the film, with special attention to be paid to Maren Pedersen, whose elderly Maria the Weaver is tortured by the Inquisition as the camera keeps upon her lined face, allowing our imaginations to fill in the rest of what’s happening to her. She was not a professional actress but a woman Christensen found who was selling flowers on the street. According to the director, Pederson told him that the Devil was real and that she saw him sitting by her bed at night. She is truly pitiable and her visage on film is striking, both when she’s hungrily slobbering on stew and when tears are running down her cheeks. These close-up shots of faces in agony, in particular, riled many censors and caused the film to be banned or recut in many countries.
Yet while there are aspects of horror and serious social commentary, Christensen still employs his own morbid sense of humor to liven the film. Many scenes are playful and tongue-in-cheek, especially when dealing with medieval beliefs, such as the witches lining up to kiss Satan’s ass. The scenes are lively and nightmarish and could easily be put to a modern heavy metal soundtrack. And where else can you see Satan pop out and gleefully club a nun on the head? The transitions are almost dreamlike, leaving the viewer to question whether they are witnessing hallucinations or reality. Nevertheless, when dealing with historical or contemporary reality Christensen stays his hand and presents it matter-of-factly so as to not diminish its effect. All the while he maintains a reassuring, almost conversational tone with the viewer, reminding them that despite the seeming chaos on screen, there is method to all the madness.
Chris Fujiwara, in an essay written for The Criterion Collection, bestows high praise on Christensen’s artistry:
“Under any title and with any modifications, Häxan endures because of Christensen’s tremendous skill with lighting, staging, and varying of shot scale. The word “painterly” comes to mind in watching Christensen’s ingeniously constructed shots, but it is inadequate to evoke the fascination the film exerts through its patterns of movement and its narrative disjunctions. Christensen is at once painter, historian, social critic, and a highly self-conscious filmmaker. His world comes alive as few attempts to recreate the past on film have.”
Many silent films, even in horror, can have a sense of innocence to them. But there is no innocence here. Christensen offers an intelligent yet entertaining adult fantasy filled with adult humor, yet it is all coupled with important contemplations and explanations. In every scene can be felt the deliberate touch of an eccentric, macabre genius. The film was well-received in Denmark and Sweden but was banned in countries like the United States for what was considered graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion. In France, Catholic organizations mobilized against the film because of its negative depictions of the Church.
While largely a critical success, the film’s experimental nature meant limited distribution and audience attendance, making the film a financial failure and putting a pause on Christensen’s career for two years. He had originally intended Häxan to be the first installment of a trilogy, with the other movies being The Saint and The Spirits, which would have further explored themes of suspicion towards Christian institutions and an objective approach to spiritual matters. For The Saint Christensen had planned to explore religious hysteria, and for The Spirits he wanted to assemble the world’s foremost mediums and hold a séance, hoping to capture an actual spiritual manifestation on film. Though a few scenes were shot for The Saint, neither film was finished.
In the late 1960s the film received new life from British exploitation filmmaker Anthony Balch who shortened the film and added a jazz soundtrack as well as a narrative by “beat” writer William S. Burroughs. The film became a unique “midnight movie” rediscovered by a generation who appreciated its dark humor and deliberate touches of insanity. It’s time today’s horror fans rediscovered it as well.
Christensen’s 1916 Blind Justice is my favorite pre- Caligari horror/thriller, and Häxan is unquestionably floating, like a witch rubbed with flying ointment, somewhere at the top of my list of favorite silent horror films, and manages to even bespell the eras beyond.
Grade: A+
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – Warning Shadows (1923)
Warning Shadows (1923), known in German as Schatten – Eine nächtliche Halluzination (“Shadows – a Nocturnal Hallucination”), is a work which uses the characteristics of the German Expressionist movement as an interesting, and seemingly inevitable, tool for storytelling. Directed by American-born but German-raised Arthur Robison, the tale is about a flirtatious wife who adores the fawning attention she receives from four foppish dinner guests while her husband’s jealousy steadily brews. Into this mix an uninvited guest arrives, a disheveled and likely mad shadow-player who borrows the diners’ shadows to use with a kind of magic, revealing the tragic consequences that will come if they continue as they have been – a literal ‘foreshadow’. The shadow-player is performed by Alexander Granach, who played the memorable Renfield-type character in Nosferatu (1922) the year before, and again presents the screen with an eccentric, memorable performance.
That there are no inter-titles makes the narrative difficult to follow at times, and the film is experimental in many ways and uses Expressionistic elements in its approach. The costumes and hairstyles are exaggerated in the stylistic manner of the times and shadows are employed throughout the film as a way to expose a truth which light, ironically, hides. The shadows are used cleverly and add to the dream-like quality of the film.
However, there are times when the film seems to get too artistic for its own good, at the cost of storytelling. The narrative tends to ramble and the generalized acting can be a distraction, especially after eighty minutes of continually watching the husband’s anguished jealousy play painfully on his face. The sets, too, are surprisingly unremarkable.
Warning Shadows is a film which attempts something novel and unique. Silent films are themselves a play of light and shadows, and here the art form appears to appropriately comment upon itself. Unfortunately, the final product has not aged as well as some of its contemporaries.
Grade: C
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – Waxworks (1924)
The German film Waxworks (1924) is commonly classified as a fantasy-horror, though more accurately it is an anthology film with horror elements coming into play only in the latter half. Written by Henrik Galeen, the structure clearly takes inspiration from 1919’s Eerie Tales , even having two of the actors playing multiple roles, and from Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921). The framing story involves a wax exhibition at a fair that hires a young writer to create fantastic stories about their figures, which include Huran al Raschid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper.
The sets of each tale are of course stylistic in the German Romantic sense, such as was seen in 1920’s The Golem: How He Came into the World . Their interesting construction is largely due to director Paul Leni’s early struggles as an avant garde artist and as a working set designer. In 1924 he explained his approach to the German film magazine Kinematograph:
“If the designer merely imitated photography to construct sets, the film would remain faceless and impersonal. There has to be the possibility of bringing out an object’s essential attributes so as to give the image style and color…
This is particularly necessary for films set wholly in a world of unreality. For my film Waxworks I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no idea of reality. My fairground is sketched in with an utter renunciation of detail. All it seeks to engender is an indescribable fluidity of light, moving shapes, shadows, lines and curves. It is not extreme reality that the camera perceives, but the reality of inner events, which is more profound, effective and moving than what we see through everyday eyes, and I equally believe that the cinema can produce this truth, heightened effectively.
I may perhaps cite the example of Caligari and The Golem, in which Hans Poelzig created a town’s image. I cannot stress too strongly how important it is for a designer to shun the world seen every day and to attain its true sinews…
It will be seen that a designer must not construct ‘fine’ sets. He must penetrate the surface of things and reach their heart. He must create mood (Stimmung) even though he has to safeguard his independence with regard to the object seen merely through everyday eyes. It is this which makes him an artist. Otherwise I can see no reason why he should not be replaced by an adroit apprentice carpenter.”
In addition to memorable sets, the film contains some notable actors of German horror cinema. The first tale stars Emil Jannings, looking far more rotund than he did in Eyes of the Mummy Ma (1918) six years earlier, playing the 8th century Caliph. The story is light and the ending is actually quite entertaining and funny, with Jannings playing the role with a joking glee, and it reportedly inspired Douglas Fairbanks to make Thief of Bagdad (1924) the same year. The humorous nature of the episode is an indication that the terror-film cycle that began with the deadly seriousness of Caligari and continued with Nosferatu was now coming to an end (S.S. Prawer, Cailagri’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror, 42).
Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss, who both played major roles in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), also appear. Veidt plays Ivan the Terrible, being appropriately malicious and menacing, especially as he claps his hands to force a grieving wedding party to dance and to drink while the father of the bride lies dead on the banquet hall’s steps. Steve Haberman aptly describes the effectiveness of Veidt’s performance, recognizing that “the part could have been played as merely a leering sadist, but Veidt constantly emphasizes the almost childlike fear Ivan suffers of those around him, even in his own palace. Though he is the Czar, he seems like a wicked little boy among grown-ups, staring at them with wide, guilty eyes, waiting for one of them to punish him” (Silent Screams: The History of the Silent Horror Film, 62).
Krauss, who had played the titular Caligari, inhabits a fairly small role as Jack the Ripper, who the film combines with the Victorian urban legend of Spring-heeled Jack in a dream sequence reminiscent of the painted sets of Caligari, a manic disorientation created by a maze of double exposures. Through this sequence “Leni created the closest equivalent to a nightmare that the cinema had yet presented” (Haberman 63).
The writer is played by William Dieterle, who would also appear in F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). A fourth segment, based upon Rinaldo Rinaldini, had been written but cut due to budget constraints, and Dieterle would have played that role. In the mid-1930s, as Nazi policy and aggression mounted, Dieterle immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in 1937. He would go on to a long and successful Hollywood career.
The wax exhibit owner’s daughter, and the main love interest of the stories’ various protagonists, is played by Russian-born Olga Belajeff, born in 1900, who had a strong career until the advent of talkies.
Director Paul Leni would accept an invitation in 1927 by Carl Laemmle, a founder of Universal movie studios, to come to America and direct. His debut American film would be the horror-comedy The Cat and the Canary (1927), which would have a profound influence on subsequent haunted house movies released by Universal over the coming decades. In 1928 he again teamed up with Conrad Veidt to direct him in one of his finest performances as the title character in The Man Who Laughs, the film that inspired Bob Kane to create The Joker. Sadly, Leni would die the following year of sepsis.
Waxworks doesn’t offer anything new to the genre but what it does, it does well. It’s a fine piece of entertainment and a showcase for some of horror’s most influential designers and recognized masters of German Expressionist acting.
Grade: B-
This review is part of the A Play of Light and Shadow: Horror in Silent Cinema  Series
Movie Review – The Hands of Orlac (1924)
After the triumphant contribution to both horror and cinema that was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), director Robert Wiene followed with the poorly received, utterly forgettable Genuine (1920). In 1924, however, he returned to the genre once again with his Caligari star, Conrad Veidt, in the crime-horror The Hands of Orlac. The story is adapted from Maurice Renard’s body-horror novel of the same name, and tells of a pianist, Paul Orlac (Veidt), who loses his hands in a train wreck and has them replaced with transplants from a man recently executed for murder. Orlac begins to feel as though the homicidal impulses are affecting his soul and mind, and soon larger mysteries and even murder are crashing down upon Orlac and his loyal, devoted wife.
It was one of the first movies to deal with the concept of hands having a will of their own. Successful surgical transplants were still several decades into the future, so the story straddles the line into science-fiction. Once again the notion of amputees looms large as still-fresh memories of the Great War inform the fears of the 1920s audience.
Unlike Wiene’s two previous horror entries, the sets in this Austrian production are mostly natural, with only slight Expressionist-inspired exaggerations and motifs. Wiene’s approach, particularly when compared to his Expressionist works, is conservative and reminiscent of American studio films. The worldly twist, inspired by late 18th century English Gothic novels which dispelled the seemingly supernatural with rationalism, reinforces this feeling, and is alone what keeps the movie from reaching the heights of Caligari in its final act.
The lighting is minimal, often employed like spotlights piercing the darkness, exposing the characters, and the sets are mostly bare but perfectly serviceable. The one exception is the realistic train wreckage with the smashed cars piled in the smoke, revealed with the flash of illuminating search lights.
Veidt, as always, is perfectly suited for the role. His portrayal of a man losing control of his body and will is convincing, hypnotic, and at times unexpectedly graceful. In a 1927 interview with Paul Ickes Veidt described his process, and from any other actor it might sound like pretentious boasting, but no one who has seen Veidt perform could doubt his sincerity:
“For days or even weeks before filming I withdraw into myself, contemplate my navel, as it were, concentrating on a kind of infection of the soul. And soon I discover how the character I have to portray grows in me, how I am transformed into it. The intensity of the process almost frightens me. Before long I find, even before the cameras begin to turn, that in my daily life I move, talk, look and behave differently. The inner Conrad Veidt has become the other person whom I have to portray, or rather into whom my self has changed by autosuggestion. This state could best be described as one of being ‘possessed’” (as quoted by Steve Haberman, Silent Screams: The History of the Silent Horror Film, 66).
I sometimes watch silent films on mute because I find the scores distracting, especially when they do not coincide well with the scenes, but Paul Mercer’s 2008 score, which accompanied the copy I watched, fits the film perfectly, accentuating the unsettling mood.
While it is an impressive artistic achievement, Orlac can move sluggishly at times. Nevertheless, Robert Wiene proves that Caligari was not a fluke. The film was well received upon its release, though some censors opposed certain aspects, including law enforcement authorities who worried that scenes in the film taught the public how to outsmart the police. The novel’s author, Maurice Renard, was thoroughly satisfied, and said that, “The cinematographic adaptation of Orlac’s Hands gratifies my wishes. I was never understood so passionately nor interpreted with such power.” Orlac arrived in the U.S. in 1928 minus a reel, which probably accounts for the mixed response it received here, and it was remade as an American film in 1935 as Mad Love by Karl Freund, starring Peter Lorre.
Wiene would not return to horror again, instead making comedies and dramas, but his mark on the genre, first with Caligari and finally with Orlac, is immortal.
Grade: B