Speak of the Devil
By T.J. Tranchell
I often imagine living in 1922. The Great War had ended, the next one not quite two decades away, and the Great Depression had not yet hit homes around the world. In many places, things seemed to be going well. Entertainment was still dominated by live performances, but that — along with so much more — was about to change.
I imagine being an innocent viewer, likely someone with deep Christian beliefs, as many were at the time, and walking into Häxan (1922 and later subtitled Witchcraft Through the Ages). The premise of the silent era classic is that this was a documentary about witchcraft. Seeing dark magic and even a variety of devils on the screen might have given me a heart attack. Much of the audience was told this was real. Whether they believed it or not is harder to say. What I know is the child-like awe of seeing a movie and being convinced that what is happening really happened.
Häxan greatly influenced later found footage and faux documentary films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and if one watched the films as a double feature, the influences would be more obvious. The black and white portions of the latter film and its parts that lack sound are right out of silent era horror. And, yeah, a lot of people thought Blair Witch was real. But Häxan wasn’t the first or even the best of the silent era. Silent era horror films offered audiences a chance to see the devil speak even if they couldn’t yet hear him.
In her book The Shoemaker’s Magician (2023), Cynthia Pelayo documents a search for a particular silent film: Georges Méliès’s The House of the Devil (aka The Haunted Castle, 1896). Like many films from the period, it was thought to be lost forever until a print was discovered in New Zealand in 1988. That’s not the version Pelayo’s characters are after, however. They seek an original print — THE original print — because it is thought to be one of film history’s “cursed” films. Watching the original print drives audiences mad, causing insanity, self-harm, and even murder. You, dear reader, can watch it on YouTube. It’s three minutes of classic silent era spooks and edits. To modern audiences, the movie magic is somewhat less magical, but with an open mind, it is still enjoyable.
Other silent horrors hold up better than others. We watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) for its use of shadows and light that would eventually influence film noir. We watch Nosferatu (1922) to see the first filmed version — albeit unlicensed — of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Silent films gave us our first adaptations of The Wizard of Oz, Snow White, The Portrait (Picture) of Dorian Gray, and A Christmas Carol, each with their own ghosts and goblins ready to frighten fans at the nickelodeons and burgeoning cinemas.
Perhaps what holds up the most is the movie makeup, and that means we have to talk about Lon Chaney. First, however, we should mention John Barrymore of the famous acting family which eventually led to Drew Barrymore. The senior Barrymore first portrayed the doomed Dr. Henry Jekyll and his alter ego Edward Hyde in 1920 for a Paramount Pictures film. He exudes the uptight Jekyll which makes his Hyde all the more frightening. While the on-screen transformation of Fredric March in 1931 is better known, Barrymore’s change into the monstrous Hyde is worth watching. Make-up plus editing is where many of the most magical moments in film happen.
For Chaney, however, we didn’t need on-screen transformations. In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Chaney lives in the tortured body and deformed face of Quasimodo for the two-hour length of the film. His working eye and drooling mouth say so much more than simple words ever could. Hunchback, however, is not as watched as cinema’s first acknowledged jump scare. The revelation of Chaney’s face in 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera is still cited among horror’s greatest moments. Christine is in The Phantom’s lair beneath the Paris Opera House, he’s playing the organ. You even know the song: “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach. Engrossed in his performance, The Phantom does not notice Christine sneak up behind him and quickly pull the mask off his face. The screams when this was first seen must have been delightful.
It’s a moment that, like Chaney’s previous performances and much of silent film, doesn’t need a word spoken. It exists as pure visual cinema, even if we can hear that song as we recreate the picture in our minds. That’s the true strength of these early horror films. They meant to assault your eyes with something you had never seen before. Imagination and technology were the only limits but even then, they didn’t know what they couldn’t do because it hadn’t yet been tried. It’s true of non-horror silent films, too. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin pulled off stunts that still blow my mind and do what the best movies have always done: they make us ask, “How did they do that?”
For some audiences then — and let’s be real, for some audiences now — movies were the work of the devil, not just a subject of them. Even when the devil’s voice was silent, we can still hear the call to come and watch. Maybe you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published the novella Cry Down Dark and the collections Asleep in the Nightmare Room and The Private Lives of Nightmares with Blysster Press and Tell No Man, a novella with Last Days Books. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp in 2017. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on X @TJ_Tranchell.
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