The Birth of the American Horror Film [Uncorrected Proofs]
Gary D . Rhodes okbu.academia.edu
This is a low-resolution, uncorrected proof of my monograph THE BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN HORROR FILM, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2018. It contains a small number of typos that were corrected for publication. While I am sharing this
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by...

Though it was based on the infamous death sentence of 1587, the Edison Manufacturing Company’s film Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895)—which was also distributed under the less-specific titles Execution and Execution Scene—features no historical context, its narrative consisting solely of brutal capitol punishment that lasts fewer than fifteen seconds.12 It remains arresting cinema, and certainly it predated the work of George Méliès. An 1895 newspaper advertisement publicized Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots as being the very first “Chamber of Horrors” moving picture to be “seen on the kinetoscope,&quot; adding that it was “blood-curdling in the extreme.”3 Twenty years later, when reviewing Kalem Company’s The Secret Room (1915), the Moving Picture World wrote:

This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by particular horror films, they provide viewers with vicarious but controlled thrills, and thus offer a release, a catharsis, of our collective and individual fears.

From episode one to the final credits, whether the audience saw threatened heroes and heroines, or impossible villains, serials of the 1910s were episodic cinematic entertainment known as ‘cliffhangers.’ Born of sensational melodrama and dime novels, the film serial and the ‘thrills’ it attempted to inspire was a complicated genre, a convergence of narrative forms. Such serials include The Exploits of Elaine (1914), Lucille Love, the Girl of Mystery (1914), The Perils of Pauline (1914), Zudora (1914), The Black Box (1915), The Crimson Stain Mystery (1916), The Iron Claw (1916), The Mysteries of Myra (1916), The House of Hate (1918), and The Trail of the Octopus (1919), among many others. Drawing upon trade publications and industry discourse, this essay explores the extensive influence of these serials on the horror film genre of the 1930s and beyond, examining codes and conventions that range from the supernatural to mad science/scientist, uncanny paintings to secret panels, poisonous concoctions to torture devices.

The proliferation of North American horror films in the 21st century has engendered an increase in critical and academic response which has almost exclusively focused on the conventions of mainstream horror cinema. That is, films sanctioned by classificatory bodies, released through mid to large production companies and exhibited via selected to wide theatrical releases. While academic work, drawing from film and cultural studies, has provided a much needed engagement with the popularity and themes of contemporary U.S. horror they have tended to exclude marginal or ‘hidden’ horror film examples. Therefore, working from Antonio Lázaro-Reboll’s work on the ‘archaeology of horror’ put forward in The Spanish Horror Film (2012), this paper (which is part of a monograph on the subject) will similarly seek to “reintegrate marginal filmic and cultural practices” (p.7) into 21st century U.S. horror. Within the paper an account of the aesthetic and thematic strategies of the films will be provided which will work toward supplying a definition of the term hardcore horror. A number of filmic examples will be given (such as films by Fred Vogel, Shane Ryan and Lucifer Valentine) and areas such as production, marketing, and consumption will be addressed. The importance of looking at hardcore horror is that these films operate outside of normative filmmaking practice and in doing so provide a wider examination of the cultural field of U.S. horror in terms of how it is made and experienced. The paper will hope to provide a redefinition of the boundaries of the genre within the context of contemporary U.S. horror, so that overlooked horror films and their revisions and alterations of commercial production, marketing and consumption practices can be included. In turn, this will help to better understand the interface between filmmaker and audience (and scholar), especially when it comes to cultural representations of and experience toward horror.