In literature, graphic descriptions of menace and dismemberment by monsters are as old as Beowulf and much, much older still, though it wasn’t until Horace Walpole’s 18th century novel The Castle of Otranto inspired the gothic romance novel that horror-qua-horror came into fashion. Without Walpole, and better-known gothic innovators like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, we’d likely never have had Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King. But nowadays when we think of horror, we usually think of film—and all of its various contemporary subgenres, including creepy psychological twists on good-old-fashion monster movies, like The Babadook.

But from whence came the horror film? Was it 1931, a banner horror year in which audiences saw both Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula? Certainly classic films by masters of the genre, but they did not originate the horror movie. There is, of course, F.W. Murnau’s terrifying silent Nosferatu from 1922 (and the real life horror of its deceased director’s missing head).

And what about German expressionism? “A case can be made,” argued Roger Ebert, that Robert Weine’s 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari “was the first true horror film”—a “subjective psychological fantasy” in which “unspeakable horror becomes possible.” Perhaps. But even before Weine’s still-effectively-disorienting cinematic work disturbed audiences worldwide, there was Paul Wegener’s first, 1915 version of The Golem, a character, writes Penn State’s Kevin Jack Hagopian, that served as “one of the most significant ancestors to the cinematic Frankenstein of James Whale and Boris Karloff.“ Even earlier, in 1910, Thomas Edison produced an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s monster story.

So how far back do we have to go to find the first horror movie? Almost as far back as the very origins of film, it seems—to 1896, when French special-effects genius Georges Méliès made the three plus minute short above, Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle, or the Manor of the Devil). Méliès, known for his silent sci-fi fantasy A Trip to the Moon—and for the tribute paid to him in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo—used his innovative methods to tell a story, writes Maurice Babbis at Emerson University journal Latent Image, of “a large bat that flies into a room and transforms into Mephistopheles. He then stands over a cauldron and conjures up a girl along with some phantoms and skeletons and witches, but then one of them pulls out a crucifix and the demon disappears.” Not much of a story, granted, and it’s not particularly scary, but it is an excellent example of a technique Méliès supposedly discovered that very year. According to Earlycinema.com,

In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. Whilst filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene – objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects.

Thus was born The Haunted Castle, technically the first horror film, and one of the first movies—likely the very first—to deliberately use special effects to frighten its viewers.

The Haunted Castle has been added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

For many Open Culture readers, the Halloween season offers an opportunity — not to say an excuse — to re-experience classic horror films: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunted Castle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we suggest a home screening of the formidable work of vintage cinema that is 1968’s The Astro Zombies? Written, produced, and directed by Ted Mikels — auteur of The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Devils — it features not just “a mad astro-scientist” played by John Carradine and “two gore-crazed, solar-powered killer robot zombies,” but “a bloody trail of girl-next-door victims; Chinese communist spies; deadly Mexican secret agents led by the insanely voluptuous Tura Satana” and an “intrepid CIA agent” on the case of it all.

You can watch The Astro Zombies for free, and newly remastered in HD to boot, at Kino Cult, the new streaming site from film and video distributor Kino Lorber. Pull up the front page and you’ll be treated to a wealth of titillating viewing options of a variety of eras and subgenres: “Drive-in favorites” like Ape and Beware! The Blob; “golden age exploitation” like Reefer Madness and She Shoulda Said ‘No’!; and even classics like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire.

True cult-film enthusiasts, of course, may well go straight to the available selections, thoughtfully grouped together, from “Master of Italian Horror” Mario Bava and prolific Spanish “B-movie” kingpin Jesús Franco. Those looking to throw a fright night might consider Kino Cult’s offerings filed under “hardboiled horror”: Killbillies, The House with 100 Eyes, Bunny: The Killer Thing.

Few of these pictures skimp on the grotesque; fewer still skimp on the humor, a necessary ingredient in even the most harrowing horror movies. Far from a pile of cynical hackwork, Kino Cult’s library has clearly been curated with an eye toward films that, although for the most part produced inexpensively and with unrelenting intent to provoke visceral reactions in their audiences, are hardly without interest to serious cinephiles. The site even includes an “artsploitation” section containing such taboo-breaching works as Curtis Burz’s Summer House. Among its general recent additions you’ll also find Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos, perhaps the most daring high-profile provocateur currently at work in the medium. Since Kino Cult has made all these films and more available to stream at no charge, none of us, no matter our particular cinematic sensibilities, has an excuse to pass this Halloween un-entertained — and more to the point, undisturbed. Enter the collection here.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

It didn’t take long after the invention of cinema for its sheer power of spectacle to become clear. Arguably, it was apparent even in the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers, though they attempted only to capture images familiar from everyday life at the time. But in a decade or two emerged auteurs like Fritz Lang, who, having grown up with cinema itself, possessed highly developed instincts for how to use it to captivate large and various audiences. Released in 1927, Lang’s Metropolis showed moviegoers an elaborate vision, both fearsome and alluring, of the industrial dystopia that could lay ahead. But it also had dancing girls!

Or rather, it had a dancing girl who’s actually a robot — a Maschinenmensch, according to the script — built by the film’s villain in an attempt to besmirch the heroine who would liberate the titular city’s downtrodden workers. (Both the real woman and her mechanical impersonator are skillfully played by Brigitte Helm.)

In the video above, you can see the scandalous and cinematically innovative spectacle-within-a-spectacle that is Metropolis‘ dance scene colorized, upscaled to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, and newly soundtracked with a track called “Lemme See About It” by Max McFerren. This is recognizably Metropolis, but it’s also a Metropolis none of us has ever seen before.

The production also combines visual material from different versions of the film, quite a few of which have been edited and re-edited, lost and recovered over nearly the past century. (The running times of the officially released cuts alone range from 83 to 153 minutes.) Certain differences in quality between one shot and the next make this obvious, though the consistency of the overall colorization eases the sudden transitions between them. A Metropolis fan couldn’t help but feel some curiosity about how the whole picture would play with all of these enhancements, not that it would resemble anything Lang could originally have envisioned. But then, no single cut exists that definitively reflects his intentions — and besides, he’d surely approve of how the film’s dance sequence has been made to captivate us once again.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Time and again in interviews, Quentin Tarantino has straight-facedly declared that he will retire from filmmaking after his tenth feature. He may already have reached that number with 2019’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, depending on whether each part of Kill Bill counts as a separate film. If not, we have one more Tarantino picture to look forward to. His declaration of imminent retirement is unusual and even dispiriting given that he’s still in his late fifties, an age that has found many auteurs at the peak of their powers. What lies behind it is the subject of the short video above from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter.

“I like the idea that there is an umbilical cord connected to my first film, all the way to my last, and that is my body of work,” says Tarantino in one of the interview clips included. “A bad film on the filmography affects good films.” Being known not just as a prominent director but an obsessive cinephile, Tarantino can surely name off the top of his head dozens of master filmmakers who allowed their own bodies of work to be blemished.

“Artists don’t always notice when their skills are flagging,” as Puschak puts it. “Tarantino is leaving early to prevent crossing that line unwittingly.” Though speculative, this notion has hardly been contradicted by the director’s own words.

Puschak writes about the power of the oeuvre — an artist’s body of work taken as a whole, even as an artwork in itself — in his new book Escape into Meaning. The content of this video reflects only the first section of that essay, a meditation on what it means to consider everything a creator has made as a piece of an interconnected whole. The techniques, references, themes, and obsessions that recur prominently in Tarantino’s movies make his filmography practically invite such an analysis, as well the question asked by Puschak: “Can a well-designed filmography bestow greater meaning onto the films that make it up?” No matter how many more works Tarantino will make, and whatever form they take, the whole of his existing oeuvre assures us that all of them will be thoroughly Tarantinian.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

As of this writing, Mank is David Fincher’s newest movie — but also, in a sense, his oldest. With Netflix money behind him, he and his collaborators spared seemingly no expense in re-creating the look and feel of a nineteen-forties film using the advanced digital technologies of the twenty-twenties. The idea was not just to tell the story of Citizen Kane scriptwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, but to make the two pictures seem like contemporaries. As Fincher’s production designer Donald Graham Burt once put it, the director “wanted the movie to be like you were in a vault and came across Citizen Kane and next to it was Mank.”

CinemaStix creator Danny Boyd quotes Burt’s remarks in the video essay above, “When a Modern Director Makes a Fake Old Movie.” After establishing Fincher’s signature use of computer-generated imagery to create not large-scale spectacles but relatively subtle and often period-accurate details, Boyd explains the extensive digital manipulation involved in “aging” Mank.

Fincher’s artists added clouds, dust, “the gleam of vintage lamps,” grain and scratches, “lateral wobbling,” and much else besides. The cinematography itself pays constant homage to Citizen Kane‘s then-groundbreaking angles and camera moves, even employing “old-school techniques that digital photography and a decent film budget have made increasingly obsolete” such as shooting day-for-night.

And yet, as most of the comments below Boyd’s video point out, the result of these considerable efforts falls short of convincing. Maybe it’s all the shades of gray between its blacks and whites; maybe it’s the smoothness of everything, including the camera moves; maybe it’s all the modern acting. (As the New Yorker‘s Richard Brody puts it, “Our actors are of their time, and can hardly represent the past without investing it with the attitudes of our own day, which is why most new period pieces seem either thin or unintentionally ironic.”) If any filmmaker could overcome all these challenges, it would surely be one with Fincher’s background in visual effects, fascination with Old Hollywood, and notorious perfectionism. For all its success in other respects, Mank proves that one can no more make old movies than old friends.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.