A Place of Darkness

The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema

Kendall R. Phillips

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781477315538
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

"An illuminating history... it's clear that the right story can still terrify us; A Place of Darkness is a primer on how the movies learned to do it." — NPR Horror is one of the most enduringly popular genres in cinema. The term "horror film" was coined in 1931 between the premiere of Dracula and the release of Frankenstein, but monsters, ghosts, demons, and supernatural and horrific themes have been popular with American audiences since the emergence of novelty cinematographic attractions in the late 1890s. A Place of Darkness illuminates the prehistory of the horror genre by tracing the way horrific elements and stories were portrayed in films prior to the introduction of the term "horror film." Using a rhetorical approach that examines not only early films but also the promotional materials for them and critical responses to them, Kendall R. Phillips argues that the portrayal of horrific elements was enmeshed in broader social tensions around the emergence of American identity and, in turn, American cinema. He shows how early cinema linked monsters, ghosts, witches, and magicians with Old World superstitions and beliefs, in contrast to an American way of thinking that was pragmatic, reasonable, scientific, and progressive. Throughout the teens and twenties, Phillips finds, supernatural elements were almost always explained away as some hysterical mistake, humorous prank, or nefarious plot. The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, constituted a substantial upheaval in the system of American certainty and opened a space for the reemergence of Old-World gothic within American popular discourse in the form of the horror genre, which has terrified and thrilled fans ever since. "[A] fascinating read." — Sublime Horror

CHAPTER ONE

Superstition and the Shock of Attraction

HORRIFIC ELEMENTS IN EARLY CINEMA

Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colors—the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.

MAXIM GORKY, 1896

VIEWERS FIRST ENCOUNTERING THE PROJECTION of moving images were quick to comment on the uncanny nature of seemingly lifelike bodies and objects moving before them in what Maxim Gorky famously called the “kingdom of shadows.” “It is not life,” Gorky wrote, “but its shadow . . . it is not motion but its soundless spectre.”¹ The French journalist Jean Badreux declared that the Lumière brothers’ invention “will be able to bring those who are no longer in this world back to life before our very eyes. Science has triumphed over death.”² Indeed, much of the early fascination with the projected moving picture was provoked by its capacity to simulate life. The Daily Iowa Capital declared in 1896 that the Cinematographe projector “produced moving objects and the play of the human features with startling faithfulness to life.”³ Keith’s New Theatre in Boston promoted the Lumière Cinematographe as “living pictures” and proclaimed that the attraction “exercises a species of fascination over the patrons of the house altogether unprecedented” with its “absolute faithfulness to life.”⁴ A story recounting the first screening of the Cinematographe in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1897 declared that “the effect is absolutely marvelous. Street-cars, buggies, trucks and people move along city streets as in life.”⁵

The marvel of the simulated living object was, of course, not unprecedented. Still photography had presented seemingly perfect simulations of objects for at least four decades, and while the invention and popularization of photography was largely hailed as a scientific triumph, there was also an unsettling aspect. As Tom Gunning notes, early photography was “experienced as an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identity of objects and people, endlessly reproducing the appearances of objects, creating a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the senses.”⁶ Gunning finds the roots of this unease with the reproduction of images in Freud’s notion of the uncanny and the anxiety created by the confrontation with a copy that, although identical, has its own unique existence. Freud’s original writing on the uncanny was, in part, a response to the earlier work of Ernst Jentsch. Here I want to suggest that the unease related to the visual reproductions of human beings and objects might be productively captured in Jentsch’s earlier sense of the uncanny outlined in his essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906). Whereas Freud attends to the symbolism of the uncanny object as representative of repressed wishes and fears, Jentsch focuses more directly on the relationship between perception and cognition. But, in attending to the earliest films, most of which focused more on the spectacle of appearance than on the symbolism of narration, I find Jentsch’s sense of the uncanny more helpful.

In his essay, Jentsch resists offering a simple definition of the uncanny and instead urges attention to the conditions through which the “affective excitement of the uncanny arises.” Jentsch contends that each individual will have different conditions under which an uncanny sensation will be provoked yet suggests that at its root the experience of the uncanny involves “a lack of orientation” connected to the way a particular object or incident is perceived. This often occurs when an object that should be familiar seems suddenly alien and other; in this way “a lack of orientation is bound up with the impressions of the uncanniness of a thing or incident.”⁷

One of the most common forms of this impression gestures back to the uncanny experience Gunning identified in early photography and also seems evident in the marvel over early moving pictures. Jentsch describes it as a “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.”⁸ Jentsch uses the experience of visiting a wax museum as an example of the “unpleasant impression” through which “it is often especially difficult to distinguish a life-size wax or similar figure from a human person.” For Jentsch, this unpleasant impression is evoked by the unsettling of our perception, which allows our imagination to begin the production of “rampantly proliferating” fantasies whereby “reality becomes mixed up in a more or less conscious way.”⁹

Interestingly, Jentch acknowledges that the “unpleasant impression” of the uncanny is not entirely without its appeal. Delving into the use of the uncanny for poetic purposes, Jentsch observes that “horror is a thrill that with care and specialist knowledge can be used well to increase emotional effects” and that “one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him.”¹⁰

Jentsch’s sense of the uncanny thrill may help explain the particular “species of fascination” the early “living pictures” held for audiences as they marveled at the “faithfulness to life” of the shadowy simulations projected before them. Audiences were drawn by the thousands to fairgrounds, expositions, and vaudeville halls to witness the uncanny movement of projected images. In 1896 the Daily Iowa Capital had already observed intense popularity: “The vogue of the ‘moving photographs’ became pronounced, and thousands who had hitherto kept away from variety theaters crossed the doors of those places of amusement to behold the newest scientific achievement.”¹¹ Part of the marvel at this achievement was the capacity to project a photograph vividly enough for a large audience to see—a step forward from machines such as Edison’s Kinetoscope—but more profound was the addition of motion to these large projected images. Georges Méliès recalled his initial dismissal of the Lumière projection. Upon seeing the initial frame projected like a still photograph, Méliès said to his neighbor, “They got us all stirred for projections like this?” But, as the still photograph started into motion, Méliès changed his tune, recounting that “before this spectacle we sat with gaping mouths, struck with amazement, astonished beyond all expression.”¹² Méliès’s observation captures the shock many felt at the addition of a lifelike motion to previously still pictures.

Moving images were not the only cause of uncanny fascination among Americans during the nineteenth century. Beginning around 1852, the American public became fascinated with a growing belief that spirits of the dead could be engaged in communication. The birth of the modern spiritualist movement can be traced to Hydesville, New York, where in 1848 the Fox sisters claimed that strange, otherworldly knocking sounds would answer their questions. After the Fox family took the sisters on the road to describe their strange experiences, the public’s appetite was whetted for more demonstrations of the supernatural, and soon thousands of spirit mediums were travelling across the country and setting up shops in various towns and cities to capitalize on the sudden widespread belief in ghosts and spirit communication. This is often ignored or dismissed as an odd moment in American history. But R. Laurence Moore contends that “scarcely another cultural phenomenon affected as many people or stimulated as much interest as did spiritualism in the ten years before the Civil War and, for that matter, through the subsequent decades of the nineteenth century.”¹³

Lynda Nead argues that, far from being merely coincident, the widespread fascination with motion and animation in visual culture and the growth of spiritualism were part of the same cultural moment. Nead utilizes the metaphor of the “haunted gallery” to capture the interplay between the cultural fascination with spirits, séances, and magic and the rapidly transforming field of visual culture during the period. The moving picture was born at this point of confluence between the advances of visual technologies, the aesthetic focus on motion and animation, the cultural currents of the spiritualist movement, and widespread discussions of superstition. As Nead argues, there was a distinctly “uncanny magic” within early moving pictures, and “film was also possessed by cultural demons and phantoms.”¹⁴

In this chapter, I explore the uncanny nature of early moving pictures through the haunted gallery identified by Nead. By attending to the connections between public discussions of spiritualism and superstition and popular forms of visual culture, I hope to examine the conditions under which horrific elements first entered into moving pictures. The uncanny nature of early films has, of course, been observed by others, but here I want to position early cinema within a broader current within American culture—namely, the culture debate concerning the place of superstition and Old World beliefs in America at the turn of the century.

Although the post–Civil War era is often seen as one in which American modernity emerged through growing industrial, scientific, and bureaucratic structures, it was also a period in which these emerging trends clashed with earlier beliefs and attitudes. Faced with the growing pressures of modernity, American culture struggled with the question: What does it mean to be an American? In some ways, this question revolved around integrating previously distinct regional and local customs and practices into a homogenous national culture. In other ways, this was a question of how to address those residents previously disenfranchised from citizenship, including the country’s freed enslaved peoples and the growing number of immigrants.

This core question was dramatically evident during the bloody years of the Civil War as the nation engaged in a struggle over whether America was to be a single nation or a loose confederation of regions. But the end of the war and the question of secession did not finalize the answer of what American culture was to be and how it would look. The numerous dynamic and disparate social movements—from civil rights to women’s rights to labor unions to anarchists—arising during this period evidence the tensions emerging around how the notion of American national identity was to be understood and who would be counted within it.

America also saw dramatic growth in immigration and in the concentration of populations in urban areas. In many major cities, whole neighborhoods were made up largely of people from other countries, newer arrivals with different languages and traditions. At the same time, the rapid expansion of industry created substantial changes not only in economics but also in the everyday life of workers and citizens through the consistent introduction of new technologies. The period between 1865 and the beginning of the twentieth century saw change in almost every major category of American life.

Although these dramatic shifts had political, economic, and social dimensions, another way of understanding the tensions is to think of them as a question of national epistemology: How do Americans understand the world around them? Almost by its very definition, and certainly in the way it was articulated, modernity promised a break from that which came before, and this breaking with the old had major ramifications for American culture in the late nineteenth century. Paul Stob contends that during this period “intellectual culture underwent a striking metamorphosis,” one in which “what counted as knowledge, what was necessary to produce knowledge, and who could use knowledge” were fundamentally altered.¹⁵ This transformation in public epistemology took decades, and while the movement of modernity can be observed throughout the West, the American experience was unique in part because of the relative youth of the nation and, in part, because of a deeply felt need for the young American nation “to gain a respected place in the international community of learned men.”¹⁶

Much of this epistemic transformation entailed shifts in academic culture and scientific paradigms, but there was also a remarkably prominent public discussion about the place of superstition in the newly emerging American culture. Put simply, with the advent of modernity, Americans were meant to think differently. They were encouraged to become more rational, more scientific, and more incredulous. Old beliefs and traditions were to be left behind in the face of a newly emerging rational American cultural perspective. Cultural critics, religious leaders, and academics widely discussed the need for this new national epistemology and criticized the persistence of beliefs in spirits, witchcraft, and hauntings. The marvels of the new age were to be derived not from Old World beliefs but, instead, from scientific progress, and Americans were increasingly encouraged to delight in the new technologies of industrial capitalism.

Although others have noted the relationship between spiritualism and early cinema, especially in relation to the stage magicians who produced some of the earliest films, here I want to contextualize this relationship within the broader concerns over superstition and credulity. I pursue this by first exploring the concerns about superstition and belief in the supernatural during the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the first years of the twentieth century. I then attend to the way horrific elements operated in the practices of visual culture immediately preceding the emergence of cinema, what Charles Musser calls “precinema.”¹⁷ Next, I examine the use of horrific elements in the early cinema of attractions before turning to the works of the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès.

“Bewildered by visionary and extravagant notions”

Frederick Hamilt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Cinema, Genre, Nation
• 1. Superstition and the Shock of Attraction: Horrific Elements in Early Cinema
• 2. Weird and Gloomy Tales: Uncanny Narratives and Foreign Others
• 3. Superstitious Joe and the Rise of the American Uncanny
• 4. Literary Monsters and Uplifting Horrors
• 5. Mysteries in Old Dark Houses
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index