The Birth of the American Horror Film

by Gary D. Rhodes

Although early cinema has long been a key area of research in film studies, the origin and development of the horror film has been a neglected subject for what is arguably one of the world’s most popular film genres. Using thousands of primary sources and long-unseen illustrations, The Birth of the American Horror Film examines a history that begins in colonial Salem, taking an interdisciplinary approach to explore the influence of horror-themed literature, theatre and visual culture in America, and how that context established an amorphous structural foundation for films produced between 1895 and 1915. Exhaustively researched, bridging scholarship on Horror Studies and Early Cinema, The Birth of the American Horror Film is the first major study dedicated to this vital but often overlooked subject.

Genres: Film

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Gary D. Rhodes is Head of Film & Mass Media at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Lugosi (1997), White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (2002), Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (2012) and The Perils of Moviegoing in America (2012). Rhodes is also the writer-director of the documentary films Lugosi: Hollywood's Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004). Currently he is at work on a history of the American horror film to 1915, as well as a biography of William Fox.

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm hard pressed to find words to express my awe and admiration for this work of astonishing scholarship. In my ongoing quest to understand how "horror" came to be a genre, this volume is staggeringly full of data. Rhodes analyzes hundreds of early films in the context of American and imported European traditions, literature, history, folklore, and social trends and identifies those that relate in some way -- even the remotest -- to the modern genre of horror. His tone is a little dry --academic and relentlessly objective -- but I think this is the right approach here because all of this history invites speculation that would weaken the book's value. The vast majority of the films discussed here are lost, probably forever, so Rhodes reconstructs them from contemporary accounts, studio notes, and bits of memorabilia, always meticulous in avoiding guesses and unsupported conclusions. It's a very impressive job of what must have seemed an impossible task.

We're lucky we have so much of Melies, de Chomon, Edison's Frankenstein, but most early film is gone and books like this one are as close as we are going to get to "seeing" it. This is a fantastic account of early film history, full of amazing facts I didn't know and movies I would dearly love to see. Essential reading for any horror film historian.

An aside. A few pages here describe a category of horror film that is almost too horrible to consider -- "lynching films" and execution films, mostly staged but a very few possibly authentic records of atrocities. The scope and meaning of that kind of unspeakable documentation lies outside the concerns of Rhodes' book, but it sure made me wonder what other elements of our worst history were recorded by early filmmakers and what impact they made on their times.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gary D. Rhodes has shown in this book that horror has early and very deep roots in American cinema. The Birth of the American Horror Film takes the reader back to the precursors of film to find some of the literary and visual roots to horror and then after the development of cinema he explores the various “genres” that can be considered horror before 1915. I think the most surprising thing to me was just how many films had been made before what we tend to think of as the birth of cinema. One reason for this is that many of the movies have been lost and have to be reconstructed from advertisements about them or newspaper stories of reactions to them.

This treatment is very insightful. The chapters on supernatural-themed films are particularly good, although Rhodes points out that early horror themes tended to suppress the supernatural. Although an academic book it is quite readable. As typical for an academic treatment it is fairly thorough and has ample notes. It doesn’t have a bibliography (probably due to its length), which is a pity. It would have been very useful. Rhodes has done a service here by pulling together a lot of widely scattered information to form a synthesis of what was going on in early American entertainment, which included movies. I learned a ton from this book.

It is a little odd that it’s printed in four-color (color throughout), since most of the images are grayscale anyway. Color tints, with hand-coloring, were sometimes used and a few colorful posters are shown. The price could probably have been kept down with one-color printing. For anyone with an interest in the development of a genre that has taken on a life of its own, this is a wealth of information. It may suffer from what those in the publishing business often think of as authors out of context (someone from one country writing about a phenomenon in the culture of another country), but that is what academics do. A certain distance can help with perspectives. I wrote about a different aspect of the book here: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.