Okay so in this entry I will be looking at the origins of the horror movie genre which is the genre we have chosen to do for our opening sequence, (hint the title of the blog).
Alright so the first thing we need to ask ourselves is going to sound very obvious and stupid, but it is important in order for us to move forward;what is horror? Well, if were to give it a very dictionary definition then it would mean 'an intense feeling of fear, shock or digust' now the word horror comes from the Latin of horrere which basically means 'shudder, (of hair) stand on end.'
As long as there have been any kind of stories or story telling there have always been stories about things that will be deemed as being unrealistic and to be fair can you really imagine some psychopath with an axe chasing after you? It seems highly improbable, but I digress. However, the idea of scary stories and 'horror' (you could call it that) comes from early as Abrahamic and Egyptian mythology and these types of stories were mostly populated by darkness or demons for example. Egyptian mythology in particular deals with tales of a world that is not the physical one, mostly a realm of spirits, which are either to be revered or feared. However, classical mythology will focus more on monsters for example Cereberus, the Minotaur, Medusa and so on and so forth. Ancestor worship and the veneration of the dead beings with the Zhou dynasty in China (well everybody needs a hobby), around 1500 years BC. If we look at the modern horror movie genre then it's only about 200 years old but it began to have a form and conventions around the end of the eighteenth century. Every culture has stories that deals with something that is unexplainable and unknown, tales that make the listener wonder 'what if?' Horror movies that you see in the cinema today are versions of epic poems and ballads told around the campfire of our ancestors and this is where I get an image in my head of them singing campfire songs and drinking hot chocolate.
Okay, so that's enough about mythology so lets actually start looking at movies. Alright, so the first horror movies were mostly silent and if I'm not mistaken they were around 1920 or thereabouts. Because the movies were silent it gave pioneers a wonderful place to be able to examine horror. Early horror movies were likely to be dark and surreal, mostly owing their visual appearance to the painters and narrative styles to the Grand Guignol Theatre Company. It was because of these early movies that the conventions that seem so familiar to us now came from. They would draw upon the folklore and legends of Europe and render the monsters into a physical form.
One of the first horror movies that was made is a movie called The Golem (and no it doesn't have anything to do with the Lord Of The Rings, so calm down). It was made 1915/1920 and there were several versions of this movie which became dubbed as the first monster movie, directed by and starring Paul Wegener. This was based on a Jewish legend, based in a medieval Prague. A Golem is a solidly built clay man (see I told you it has nothing with LOTR, so ha!) is fashioned to save the ghetto, but when his job is done he refuses to cease the existing, and runs amok thought expressionist sets, eventually to be confronted and defeated by a little girl.
The second movie which we'll be looking at is called Nosferatu which was made in 1922 and this was the very first vampire movie, badly plagiarising the Dracula story so that they could present Count Orlok, the character of Max Schreck, he would curl this long fingernails around the limbs of a series of helpless victims. It would be described as a movie that actually believes in vampires, Nosferatu gives us a vampire that's much more frightening than anything else (and much more frightening than those weird sparkly vampires) the character of Schreck is simply inhuman and that's all there is to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment