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The three-minute 1896 film “Le Manoir du diable” (known as “The Manor of the Devil” or “The Haunted Castle” in English) by French filmmaker Georges Méliès is considered the first “horror film” ever made, even though the label wasn’t used until...
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The three-minute 1896 film “Le Manoir du diable” (known as “The Manor of the Devil” or “The Haunted Castle” in English) by French filmmaker Georges Méliès is considered the first “horror film” ever made, even though the label wasn’t used until the 1930s. His short, like many movies that followed, as well as Halloween haunted houses, borrowed tropes from the Gothic horror genre of writing that started in the late 1700s. Books by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and others helped create the standard quasi-Medieval horror-story backdrop: Stormy nights, foreboding forests, and old dark castles filled with suits of armor, creaky doorways, and secret passages to the dungeon. And these spooky places, of course, wouldn’t feel complete without bats, trolls, ghosts, demons, or witches with brooms traipsing around. Isolated by German aggression in World War I, pioneering filmmakers known as German Expressionists wrestled with topics like insanity, depravity, and betrayal in silent movies using abstract, angular sets and distorted over-the-top facial expressions. This genre produced some of the first and most revered feature-length horror films, including the “Der Golem” trilogy about a murderous clay statue of Jewish legend; 1920’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” which tells of a hypnotist who manipulates a sleep walker into committing murders; and 1922’s “Nosferatu,” an unlicensed adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 vampire novel, “Dracula.” One of the earliest thrillers made in the United States was 1920’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” starring John Barrymore as the doctor with the split personality. Universal Studios—which unlike Paramount and Fox didn’t operate its own theater chain—recognized the potential of this new genre about resentful, often deformed misfits thought of as monsters and released “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” in 1923, followed by 1925’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” both starring Lon Chaney. When “talkies” took off in the 1930s, Universal...
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