Gothic Horror Cinema Essay Research Paper The

Gothic Horror Cinema Essay, Research Paper

The genre of Gothic horror film has existed almost as long as the cinema itself, and it has always fascinated me. As the definition above suggests, the word can be loosely used to define any horror story with suitable settings, but such themes as disturbing dreams, desperate, undying love and melancholic romanticisation of death are also usually important in Gothic cinema.

The following is a brief and superficial overview on Gothic horror film and some classics of the genre.

Directed by Robert Wiene in 1919, Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari was one of the first Gothic horror films. Although the more usual Gothic environment was replaced by disturbingly dreamlike sets, this incredibly inventive story of dream, madness, love and evil is thematically more truly Gothic than any of your average graveyards-castles-and-living-dead spook flicks. Being also the film that first introduced the character of a mad doctor to a horror audience, The Cabinet ★★★★ remains a first rate masterpiece nearly eighty years after its original release.

It is obvious that there are few things more Gothic than vampires. This was to be noticed by the world in 1922, when the German expressionist F. W. Murnau made the first ever film adaptation of Bram Stoker.s novel Dracula. Although the Count was called Orlok, and the story was set in Bremen instead of London, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: The First Vampire) was so identical to Stoker.s story that major legal trouble for Murnau followed right after the release. The Count was portrayed by Max Schreck (whose last name is actually German for .terror.) as an undead bestial bloodsucker. In the story, the vampire can only be brought to rest by a woman who shall willingly give her blood to the beast until the sun rises, and the vampire turns to dust in a well-known scene. Many scholars describe Nosferatu as the best film ever made in the vampire genre.

Released ten years later, Tod Browning.s Dracula,1931 gave the character of the Count a different treatment – the one that we now call .the classic Dracula.. (B.la Ferenc Dezs. Blask.) Bela Lugosi.s Dracula dressed in an elegant Victorian suit and a black and red satin cloak, and was closer to a mysterious, charmant aristocrat than a blood-thirsty monster. Despite the fact that neither the film or its sequel Dracula.s Daughter ,1936 Lambert Hillyer were cinematic masterpieces, Lugosi.s immortal portrayal of Dracula would be copied by many, but never quite duplicated. The maestro himself was extremely dedicated to his work, and actually lived the last years of his life in the fantasy world of his films – he was finally even buried in his Dracula cloak.

Shortly after Browning.s Dracula, another classic Gothic novel was made into a film. James Whale.s 1931 film Frankenstein was a simple and popularized version of Mary Shelley.s philosophically very complex novel, but nevertheless stands out as a prime example of traditional Gothic cinema. The immortal sequence must be one of the best remembered scenes in the history of horror. Throughout the film, Boris Karloff (William Henry Pratt) manages to squeeze an amount of dumb emotion through the monster.s deformed face – particularly in my favorite part, the (partly cut-out) scene where he has thrown the young girl to a lake, thinking that she will float like the other flowers. The sequel Bride of Frankenstein(1935) was even more remarkable, and has then become one of the most respected films in the genre.

The 60’s and the 70’s were, in many ways, the golden age of horror cinema. In Great Britain, the legendary Hammer Films produced numerous re-made classics, often based on classic stories about Dracula, Frankenstein, the Werewolf and the Mummy. Usually starring Christopher Lee (Christopher Frank Carandini Lee) as the monster and Peter Cushing as the pure-hearted hero, some of these films were based on traditional Gothic themes and some of them were set in traditional Gothic surroundings. Vast majority of them, however, were both.

Hammer’s stunning series of Dracula films, starting with Terence Fisher’s seminal Horror of Dracula,(1958) laid the basis for a whole new vampire renaissance in cinema. Lee’s masterful portrayal of the vampire count was based on Lugosi’s stylish gentleman bloodsucker, with some additional sophisticated decadence. Whether it was Lee or Lugosi who was the true Dracula shall always be argued, but Hammer’s films were definitely scarier, more seriously Gothic, and generally less B-like than Lugosi’s Draculas.

It wasn’t just the British directors who were making European Gothic film in the sixties. After the genre was finally popularised by Hammer during the ’60s, European auteurs (particularly Italian and Spanish) were free to make their own versions without having to worry about their success. Although these movies had to copy some of their style from the British classics in order to remain popular, some directors showed genuine talent and made classics of their own. These included the Italian Mario Bava, a talented visualist, whose films were filled with beautiful Gothic imagery. Many of those films, including La Maschera del Demonio, (1960) .Mask of Satan. which is regarded as one of the genre’s cornerstones, starred Barbara Steele who soon became known as The Queen of European Horror.