House of Silent Scream: Crazy in that good way.

Well, Screamers and Screamettes, we've come to the very last installment of this year's Silent Scream Series: The House of Silent Scream. Before getting to the last anniversary post, I just want to thank everybody who participated and everybody who followed along. I've had a great three years doing this blog and that's due in no small part to the readers and writers I've met online. Thank you all.

But enough of that, on to the guest blogger.

Hey, that's no guest blogger! That's my wife!

Booknerd - aka Jessica - runs the much loved Written Nerd lit blog and is co-owner of the soon to open Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene.

And she married me. 'Cause she's nuts.

Ladies and germs, Booknerd . . .

Truth be told, I’m not much of a fan of the horror genre as a whole. I possess one of those imaginations the Victorians worried about when they advised women not to read too many novels. While I love the fantastic in art, and I usually enjoy the emotional rollercoaster a good story puts me through, I’m too prone to post-viewing nightmares to enjoy most films that are particularly grisly, psychologically tortuous, or uncanny – which rules out most of what CRwM writes about here.

The one counterintuitive exception: I kinda love zombie movies. Sean of the Dead viewings in our house are in the multiple dozens, and I even saw Land of the Dead in theaters. Maybe it’s that the violence tends to be pretty cartoony; maybe it’s the seeming manageability of the supernatural threat (especially with slow zombies). Partly, I think, it’s that zombies are kind of like a natural disaster: they don’t have any particular beef with you, they’re not even really malicious, they’re just hungry, and there are lots of them. Fighting them takes more wilderness survival skills (axes, barricades, traps, etc.) than mystic knowledge or sheer screamy stamina.

Really, what I think I love is the idea of what happens after the apocalypse. I’m one of those delusional, naïve people who thinks I’d be one of the survivors, and that the world wiped clean of civilization would offer all kinds of opportunities. No laws, no systems, a small community of people learning how to live all over again. The untended shopping malls full of loot are as delicious as the chance to re-learn how to grow food and protect oneself from predators. The riches of culture free of charge, plus the prospect of a more authentic engagement with the manual-labor stuff of life: it’s a big part of the appeal of films like 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, and even Mad Max (which I’ve recently discovered I also kinda love). This is way bigger than zombies: it’s a postmodern yearning for authenticity combined with a consumerist desire for all this stuff. Or just a child’s fantasy of running amuck when authority is gone. The downside is all that death and stuff, but the adventure is worth the ickiness.

The Rene Clair short film The Crazy Ray (alternately titled Paris qui Dort or, my preference, At 3:25) presages the whole post-apocalyptic genre – but does it without the icky consequences, making it possibly the perfect non-horrific horror film. In this end-of-the-world created in a more innocent era, everything turns out okay in the end, but our heroes have in the meantime gotten to enjoy all the heightened dramatic experience and freedom from societal strictures that the apocalypse can offer. It’s an eerie, lovely, funny, original film, and one that I feel must have had some kind of subconscious impact on the imagery of later post-apocalypse films, though none have ever pulled it off so elegantly.

The film, set in the gorgeous Paris of the 1920s, opens with a handsome young guard in the Eiffel Tower. On ending his shift around dawn, he descends to the street to find – everyone is gone. The scenes of an empty Paris are as striking as the empty modern London in the first scenes of 28 Days Later, and must have been just as challenging to film (though in retrospect, it doesn’t quite make sense that there are no vehicles in the street – more on that later.) The young man, increasingly distraught at the lack of Parisians, finally comes across a few folks (a pickpocket, a cop, etc.), but they seem to be in an unusual state of suspended animation (whether asleep, or frozen in time, the film never makes entirely clear, but it’s a Sleeping Beauty’s castle kind of situation).

Finally the young man comes across some other folks in a state of full consciousness. Turns out they just arrived in Paris on the plane from Marseilles, leading them all to conclude that their altitude somehow protected them from the sleeping sickness that has afflicted the city, if not the world. The company includes a cop escorting a bad guy, a “butter and eg man” (a great old slang term for a rich but unsophisticated businessman, the “bridge and tunnel crowd” of his day), and the requisite lovely young lady, among others. They wrack their brains to figure out what has happened, but of course they can’t. So they do what every small band of survivors does in the wake of the apocalypse: they go out to dinner.

In one of the most hilarious and charming set pieces of the film – all the more so because it’s done entirely with body language and gesture – the characters sit down in a restaurant and, with the influx of free champagne from the untended kitchen, become increasingly aware that all rules are off. They dance on tables, they insult the aristocrats sleeping nearby, they dance with the sleeping girls, they pick pockets and take clothes off others’ backs, they laugh and weep. It’s like the mall madness in Romero’s movies, but with a rather Parisian elegance to the debauchery. Finally they stagger out, with the butter-and-egg man attempting to stuff some bills in the pockets of the comatose maitre’d.

When the band of survivors decides to hole up in the Eiffel Tower, just in case the unexplained incident returns, another part of the post-apocalypse story kicks in. There’s only one girl, remember? The male members of our band of outsiders begin to feel unkindly toward each other, as the title cards remind us “The last woman on earth!” But unlike the unpleasant misogyny of the “save the breeders” mentality of 28 Days, or the genuinely uncomfortable sexual tension of other last-girl films I can think of, Rene Clair plays it as a largely comical love octagon. There are moments of real drama when the two youngest suitors grapple on the edge of the tower, with terrifying panoramas of Paris below them, but somehow it all still seems in good fun – the naughty glamour of the weird post-nuclear Ann-Margret lounge number about “thirteen men and I’m the only gal in town”, with a St. Germaine stylishness.

More delightfully transgressive incidents occur; the robber with his skill at lockpicking becomes a valued member of the company, for example, and the butter-and-egg man finds his comatose Paris tart in the arms of another eggman. Eventually, a telephone call leads the company to the source of the apocalypse: a crotchety but not particularly scary scientist, who seems to have produced the eponymous Crazy Ray as an experiment in putting the world to sleep and then forgotten to check on the results. With the help of his daughter, the company manage to convince the old gent that he has to put it right, and some very scientific equations on chalkboards ensue. But fix it he does, and in such a way that the world starts up again at 3:25 AM, just the moment when it went to sleep, so that presumably, no one is the wiser. The film ends with the cop chasing the robber again – all’s right with the world.

I find it interesting that the same scenes and tropes that inform world’s end sagas now are present in Rene Clair’s film, but also that they’re so rarely infused with this amount of cheeky fun. Presumably all the heroes are worried and terrified about the lack of other conscious humans, but in reality it all seems like a bit of a lark. It almost feel s like cheating to get all the post-apocalypse fun without the actual apocalypse – and of course it is cheating. Where were the crashed cars on the streets if everyone fell asleep simultaneously? How could the scientist possibly fail to notice that he’d caused the end of the world? Why didn’t the sleeping people starve to death after sleeping for weeks? But of course, those kinds of logical problems are present in the most deadly serious horror films as well, with results that are often far less enjoyable.

The Crazy Ray is unlike any other film I’ve ever seen, but also seems to inform so many. I’d highly recommend it for fans of the post-apocalyptic genre, for a look at how the world might have ended at 3:25 – not with a bang or a whimper, but with a champagne toast.

House of Silent Scream: Know when to fold 'em.

It's possible that you might be reading this blog even though you have no interest in the horror genre. You might have some obsession about glow-in-the-dark plastic fangs or maybe you've mistaken me for somebody else. For the unlikely few who read this, but no other horror blogs, it's a real pleasure to introduce you to Curt, master o' The Groovy Age of Horror and one of the horror blog world's essential figures.

I could talk talk talk about Curt's blog: His wide and varied interests, his thorough explorations of ideas and works, his humor, his smarts. But I want to actually get to his guest post, so I'll focus on just one thing. Of all genuinely popular blogs I know, Groovy Age is the only one that evolves out in the open. If Curt starts diggin' on Green Lantern or neuroscience or whatever, then Groovy Age will incorporate it. And incorporate it well. Most horror blogs find a schtick and they stick with it. You'll have a handful of aggregator fodder rituals designed mainly to capture Horror Blip points and a few running gags, but you don't risk the dip in readership by going too far off the reservation. But not Curt. With the Groovy Age you can watch somebody deeply in love with genre entertainment explore everything that means, going where it takes him rather than trapping it into easy, lazy concepts and categories. It's the reason Groovy Age remains required reading no matter where Curt takes it.

Ladies and germs, I am very proud to present Curt Purcell!

Richard Sala's comics are stuffed with visual elements, character types, and narrative tropes that seem ripped from the iconic stills and posters that have glommed together in my imagination to form some impression of what the more lurid silent serials may have been like. I've seen almost no silent cinema--NOSFERATU, VAMPYRE, METROPOLIS . . . that's about it--but Sala's comics certainly made me curious about the distinctly European arch-villain genre. When CRwM invited me to participate in "House of Silent Scream," it seemed like the perfect excuse/motivation to finally delve into some of that material.

I turned to DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER, Fritz Lang's 1922 two-part, four hour adaptation of the original novel by Norbert Jacques. I'm sorry to say, I found it to be a transitional fossil of mainly historical interest.

For a thriller that promises suspense and action, it moves at an excruciatingly leisurely pace, making for a very long four hours indeed. It delivers, pretty modestly and without much pizzazz, only meager dollops of the stuff that makes Sala's comics so fun--disguises and secret passageways and hypnotism and all that sort of thing. Then, what little visual punch it strives for depends more on effects that are now atrociously obsolete than on the striking designs and compositions that make NOSFERATU and METROPOLIS enduringly iconic classics that will never cease to look amazing.

What disappoints me most about the film, though, is the way it doesn't seem to grasp its own core concept. Mabuse is supposed to be a mysterious arch-villain and master of disguise--so why do we see his real face within the very first frames, and for much of the movie thereafter?!? From the beginning, he's never a mystery to the audience, and he only becomes more familiar, further weakening his air of menace.

Having said all that, I can see glimmers of promise that certainly must have shone brighter back in the day. However obsolete it looks to me now, I'm not terribly surprised that DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER was popular and influential.

House of Silent Scream: After midnight.

That the mind behind "When Is Evil Cool?" (the 2009 winner of the just now created "Best Blog Name Award) is both genuinely funny and genuinely interesting would be enough to recommend that fine blog to any and all folks who dig what I do here.

But wait, there's more! Have I mentioned Warrior Wednesdays: a post series dedicated to the single greatest film about tragic death of community organizer Cyrus, the One and Only, and the consequences thereof?

Now how much would expect to pay? Don't answer yet. Because you're a great crowd, wiec? is going to throw in an extra blog. That's right, a whole other blog, free, gratis, for nothing, just cause we like your face. When you dig on wiec?, you also get "Random Picture Day," a blog with twice the brilliance of your average blog, without all those pesky words!

Now how much would you expect to pay? $10.99? $56.23? $1.7 billion?

All this can be yours for the low, low price of reading the following guest post in our third anniversary Silent Scream Series. Boys and girls, I introduce wiec?

When I was a little kid we’d visit my grandma in New Jersey about every other month. The car ride was very long and so my dad would pull over to a deli called The WaWa and let me pick out some comic books from the rack to read on the long ride home. I’d usually grab a Green Lantern or an issue of Rom the Space Knight. They also had a magazine there in New Jersey that I could never find at home at the local five and dimes. The magazine was called Famous Monsters of Movieland. Whenever I saw it I definitely used to snatch it up.

For an 8 year old kid Famous Monsters was a treasure trove of black and white goodness. The pictures were from mostly black and white horror movies from yesteryear. It had articles about said movies but I usually just skimmed those. The best part, were all the photos. I used to cut them out of the magazine very carefully when I got home from Grandma’s and taped them to the wall. I had a huge collage going that went from the floor to the ceiling and practically covered an entire wall of my room. There were Frankensteins of all stripes. Draculas everywhere. Tons of creatures and ghouls great and small from movies I had never heard of. One of my favorites was this picture from a movie called London After Midnight.

It seems the writers and editors of Famous Monsters really liked Lon Chaney. They were especially fond of his portrayal of a vampire in London After Midnight. It’s easy to see why. The scraggly hair popping out from under the top hat really made him stand out. The wide unblinking eyes and the jagged teeth stuck in a perpetual smile made him seem cartoonishly ghoulish. Chaney’s vampire was one of the freakier looking portrayals of a vamp out there. 9 out of every 10 issues of Famous Monsters featured the vampire from London After Midnight in one form or another. And 9 out of 10 times that picture was cut out and taped to my wall.

The story to London After Midnight is a pretty silly one though. The movie is not a straight up vampire flick. At first it seems like it might be a sort of Twilight Zoney sort of Tales from the Crypty kind of affair but it quickly dissolves into a who done it and why with a bunch of over the top, unbelievable detective work that would have no place in either the Jessica Fletcher or the Colombo playbooks of detecting.

In other words the story is a bit hard to follow but I’ll do my best to explain it. It starts off with an old man who is found murdered in his home. A detective (played by Lon Chaney) from Scotland Yards is dispatched to investigate. It is apparent that it was suicide after a note is found. The detective is skeptical but life goes on and the investigation is called off. 5 years later the old mans house is empty and in a state of disrepair seeming to be all but abandoned. All of a sudden a creepy guy in a top hat (Chaney) and a pale woman dressed in a long robe are seen prancing around the old man’s yard.

I was going to spoil the rest of this movie for you (and I still am) but I’m going to avoid a play by play account of the events. Mostly, I’m not going to do this because the events of the movie make no sense. I mean, it is just such a silly story. Lon Chaney plays the detective sent to investigate this mysterious stranger (who is played by Chaney). All the suspects of the old man’s murder 5 years back all seem to live in a house next door to the house were the murder took place and were the stranger now lives (the movie shows that the stranger has bought the dead man’s house’s deed). Then it appears that the old man is still alive and living in his house and that stranger and his silent female partner are vampires. A bunch of talking between the suspects goes down (that all goes nowhere. Remember this is a silent movie after all). The detective hypnotizes all the suspects. The “vampire” skulks around with a lantern. The hypnotized suspect reenacts the murder and is caught red handed by Chaney’s detective. Case closed.

“Huh? “ you might be saying to yourself. None of that makes sense.

I’ll explain: Chaney’s detective figured the dead old man didn’t kill himself 5 years back. He was murdered. How does he know this? He just knew. He then waits 5 years and comes back dressed as the vampire stranger. Buys the dead old man’s house. Hires a guy who looks like the dead old man to live there. Hires a girl to play his vampire wife (just because) and the two of them do all their skulking about to make the suspects next door nervous. Because the suspects are nervous they hire Chaney’s detective character to investigate. He investigates and hypnotizes them all and then waits. Under hypnosis he figures which ever of the suspects originally murdered the old man will try it again with old man decoy he hired to live in the house. He figures right and arrives just in the nick of time. In other words, the stuff of nonsense.

You might be wondering what the point to this movie was. The story is pretty thread bare in the logic department and when it’s all said and done makes zero sense. The critics when it was originally released didn’t much like it and most audiences where left confused. However the movie is considered to be a minor silent movie classic. The reason why is it’s history and place in silent picture lore plus some of the weird events that surrounded it. Also the iconic make up gimmicks Chaney used to portray the vampire stranger made it a stand out and a favorite to silent era fans over the years.

Instead of trying to make sense of the actual story to London After Midnight let’s look at the story behind the story or film rather London after Midnight. Here are 5 things I uncovered…

1) London After Midnight is one of the silent era’s most important “lost” films. A lost film and there are plenty from the silent era, are movies that were lost or destroyed over time. Over the years studios would make movies that would disappear from their vaults due to theft or were sadly in hindsight junked by studios to make room in their vaults for newer films. Other lost films are gone because the nitrate in the actual film they used back in the silent era was very flammable. Fires in studio vaults would happen often and would wipe out tons of archived movies. Also the nitrate film they used back then was very unstable and if not stored at the right temperature the film could deteriorate quickly. Movies would literally rot inside their canisters.

Also London After Midnight was made before TV and video. Most studios didn’t see the point of keeping and archiving movies after their original theatrical run. The storing and archiving of old movies was expensive too. Sadly it is believed London After Midnight was destroyed in a fire at the MGM studios in the mid 1960’s. There are no surviving copies of it to be seen anywhere. Next to Erich von Stroheim’s 10 hr long film Greed, London after Midnight is considered one of the most sought after of the lost films.

2) The make up design for Chaney’s vampire stranger is considered by some to be an example of his best make up work. Lon Chaney was known as “the man of a 1,ooo faces.” He solidified his rep with the stuff he did to himself in Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre
Dame. Early works like his portrayal of a legless and abusive gangster in The Penalty and as an armless knife thrower (he used his feet) in The Unknown showed Chaney would put himself through anything to get a good performance out of himself.

The vampire stranger is one his best loved characters. The frightening look of the character was what fans of the movie really liked. Even though the character spends much of the movie skulking around hallways and doing very little else (in other words no murdering) the work Chaney did to himself to get the character out was quite stunning. Chaney made special thin wire circles (like lenseless monocles) that he fit into the inside of his eyelids to get the hypnotic googly eye effect and wore special wire attachments inside his mouth and the sharp teeth dentures that held his mouth in that perpetual fanged up grin. Both were said to be very painful for him. Also the way the vampire stranger walked was quite creepy. He had a sort of stooped over gait that made him look dangerous and sinister. Movie experts speculated that Groucho Marx famous walk was fashioned after Lon Chaney’s vampire stranger.

London After Midnight also briefly showed Lon Chaney’s famous make up kit. The kit was a treasure trove of simple gadgets and makeup that he used to pull off some his beloved characters through the years. It is shown briefly when Chaney’s character explains to the folks in the movie how he dressed up like a vampire. Chaney’s make up kit now resides in The Los Angeles County Museum where it was donated for safe keeping after his passing. Many consider it to be the central artifact in the history of film makeup effects.

3) London After Midnight was written and directed by early horror and thriller director Tod Browning. Tod Browning made several silent pictures with Lon Chaney and later went on to direct early talkies such as Freaks and Dracula with Bela Lugosi. While Chaney and Browning made much better films together in the years before London After Midnight it turns out Midnight was their most successful. It raked in $500,000 at the box office when it was released in 1927. Most reviewers (and me) thought it was not some of their best work. With some major changes to the plot, years later Browning remade Midnight into a talkie called Mark of the Vampire. Mark of the Vampire starred Lionel Barrymore as the detective and Bela Lugosi was cast as the vampire stranger.

4) London After Midnight was used as part of the defense for a man accused of murder in Hyde Park London in 1928. He saw the movie at his local theatre and claimed Chaney’s vampire stranger’s performance was so scary he temporarily lost his sanity and strangled a woman in the Park. His plea of temporary insanity was later rejected and he was found guilty and convicted and jailed for the crime.

5) If there are no existing copies of the movie out there how did I see it? How can you see London After Midnight if you are so inclined? In 2002, Turner Classic Movies commissioned famed film restoration producer Rick Schmidlin to produce a 45 minute long reconstruction of the film using only still photographs and production photos. Working from Browning’s script it was well received by horror fans. Most people who had seen the original theatrical version felt it was an adequate adaptation of the confusing film they saw back in 1927 and film historians praised Schmidlin for his efforts. He won a Rondo Award later that year for his work. It can be seen late at night around Halloween on AMC.

I saw Schmidlin’s piece when I rented The Lon Chaney Collection from Netflix, It’s a box set of some of Chaney’s best loved and lesser known films. On the same disc as London after Midnight is one of his lesser works The Unknown. That’s the one where Chaney plays a man pretending to be an armless knife thrower. He actually has his arms (and a hand with two thumbs. Oops spoiler alert.) who’s wanted in connection to some murders he may or may not have commited and is well worth checking out. Also on the same disc is a documentary of Lon Chaney career in movies and is narrated by Kenneth Branagh. The documentary is very through and is straight up excellent.

Thanks for reading my exhausting account of London After Midnight. And thanks to CRwM for letting me blather on about it. Good Night everyone.

House of Silent Scream: Dig that cat.

It is very likely that the next guest blogger needs no intro. Iloz Zoc has a major horror blog of his own, Zombos Closet of Horror (with affiliated twitter stream) and he's also the League of Tana Tea Drinkers' own George Washington.

That's enough for us to respect him; but why should we love him?

We dig hard on Iloz Zoc's work because, in the fine tradition of late night television horror hosts, his blog is populated by a cast of eccentric horror types who not only make his post a pleasure to read, but remind viewers that behind all the screaming and shouting, the real reason anybody gets into this horror stuff in the first place is because it is fun. Even when Iloz and company pan something, they're having a ball doing it. To steal and maul a phrase from Lou Reed, "He's Zombo, and his worst film-going experience is better than the best one a snark's ever had."

ANTSS thanks Iloz and the entire Zombo cast and is proud to present them all to you. Enjoy.

"No, that's not it," said Sosumi Jimmy Jango, Zombos' lawyer. He continued to search his memory while pulling yet another paper from his briefcase.

We were sitting in Zombos' library, waiting for Jimmy to shuffle through a few more papers before he read Uncle Hiram's will. After twenty years gathering dust in Zombos' Irish tin box, it was time to finally reveal old Hiram's wishes. He passed away while moose hunting. The annoyed moose helped him on his journey. Seated around the table were Zombos, myself, and Zombos' furthest relative from Nova Scotia, Clorinda. Billy Bounce Boukowski and Jeremy Singleton, distant relatives on Zombos' side of the pond, were also in attendance. Glenor Glenda, our housekeeper, served drinks all around.

"Glad to see everyone could make it," said Jimmy, reaching deeper into his briefcase. "I got it!"

"The will?" asked Zombos with much hope in his voice. He was getting tired of sitting so close to his distant relatives. I never could get him to explain their names or lineage.

"No, the movie this all reminds me off," said Jimmy. "The Cat and the Canary, the 1927 version. It starts off with an old geezer's will being read after twenty years, too."

"I know that one," I said, "the geezer was Cyrus West, and his relatives are summoned to his old dark mansion, overlooking the Hudson River, by the family lawyer Roger Crosby. Twenty years after his death for the reading of his will. He and Uncle Hiram must have been twins.

"On a dark and stormy night," added Jimmy, chuckling. "Just like tonight." We looked at the rain drops splashing against the library's windows when he said it.

"So, what happens?" asked Billy Bounce. His gruff voice punctuated the Bounce part of his name really well. He tipped his third Jack Daniel's, daintily held in the baseball glove he had for a hand, over and down in one gulp.

"It's a silent movie directed by Paul Leni, a German Expressionistic director, who talents included blending humor with his stylishly-filmed horror," said Zombos.

Billy smiled. "Sounds like an oxymoronic, don't it? Funny horror?

"It does," I replied. "But Leni's movie provided the creative template--hairy arms reaching through secret panels and around doorways, sliding bookcases leading to secret passages, upright bodies stuffed in closets, flopping down when you open the door, sinister housekeepers, spooky mansions--stuff like that was recycled in the old dark house movies that followed, and it provided much comedy fodder for Abbott and Costello, too."

"Hold That Ghost!" piped up Jeremy. "I love that movie. Keeping the money in the moose's head. Hilarious."

"Oh, and Laura La Plante is so marvelous in it." Glenor spilled a drink as she spoke. "I wish I'd inherit a vast fortune like hers."

"When you do, let me know so I can send you the dry cleaning bill," said Zombos dryly, grabbing a napkin to daub off the wet stain on his jacket.

"Whose Laura La Plante?" asked Clorinda.

"She plays Cyrus West's most distant relative, Annabelle," answered Jimmy. "Anabelle's the looker who winds up getting all of West's inheritance if she can prove she's sane enough to keep it. Of course, the trick is to make her go loopy during the night so the next in line will get the money. An escaped homicidal lunatic from a nearby asylum--he's called the Cat-- is on the prowl, too, spicing things up."

"So who's the guy who saves the dame?" asked Billy. "There's always some guy around to save rich dames in movies, am I right?"

"Right you are," I said. "That would be Paul, played by Creighton Hale in glasses and much chagrin. He's not much of a hero type. Skittish from his own shadow, really. Being a woman in a 1920's movie, Annabelle can only be rescued by her potential suitor, of course. I mean, woman weren't expected to be unmarried with vast fortunes pending and all that. Paul provides the comedy relief, but eventually succeeds in subduing the killer and winning the rich dame's hand."

"I'm not sure I'd want to immediately get married if I inherited a fortune," said Clorinda. "I mean, why spoil the fun of all that solitary spenditure."

"I don't know, but so far it doesn't sound too scary," said Billy.

"Well, of course in its day I'm sure it had enough fright per frame to make it the box office success it was, but Leni directed it more for black humor." I took my White Russian from Glenor's serving tray and took a sip before continuing. "Still, his sharp direction keeps the horror elements moving briskly through the cobwebs and gloom. His eye glides past long hallways filled with billowing curtains from opened windows, it plays with each relatives' sinister potential for thwarting Annabelle's inheritance with its expressive closeups, and it goes beyond verisimilitude as emotionally charged superimpositions coalesce into dramatic scenes. I would have loved to see his camerawork in Browning's Dracula."

Jeremy, Billy Bounce, Jimmy, and Clorinda looked at me.

"Superimpositions," interjected Zombos, "are images put on top of other images."

"Oh, I get it," said Jimmy. "You mean like the towering medicine bottles that slowly turn into the mansion's ominous silhouette, or the image of the grandfather clock's gears striking midnight over the scene of the reading of the will, as everyone is gathered around the table in the library."

"Right," I said. The Hermle Grandfather clock in the west hallway starting chiming the twelfth hour.

"Ooh, that gives me goosebumps," said Glenor shivering.

"Speaking of goosebumps, that creepy housekeeper, Mammy Pleasant--love that name--played intensely by Martha Mattox, provided the role model for sinister butlers and maids in subsequent films," I said. "She reminds me of that other creepy housekeeper in Robert Wise's The Haunting, trying to scare everybody with talk of ghosts and such. Of course, being the only person in the mansion for twenty years, it's no wonder she's a bit nipped around the buds."

"Now this is odd," said Jimmy, holding up two envelopes. "I only remember one envelope from your Uncle Hiram, not two. That's funny. This is exactly what happened in the movie. The killer slipped in the second envelope into the wall safe just before the reading of the will. It named the next relative in line for the inheritance should Annabelle not last the night."

"Killer?" asked Billy Bounce. Glenore had given up on refilling his glass and just left the bottle of Jack Daniels with him. "What killer?"

"Well, in the movie, the lawyer Roger Crosby is murdered. It's his body that eventually winds up doing a pratfall from Annabelle's closet. So the movie turns into a whodunnit when that happens." Jimmy cleared his throat. "Umm...well. I'll figure this out soon enough. Zombos, where's the checklist I left you? I want to see if I recorded this second envelope twenty years ago."

"Over in the Irish tin bisquit box, by the bookcase there," pointed Zombos. Jimmy stood up, stretched, and walked over to the bookcase.

"The intertitles are lots of fun to read, too." I added. "Nice transitions are used for the text to create a spooky effect here and there. The opening title credits appear as a hand wipes away the cobwebs covering them. For a silent movie it all moves pretty briskly as Leni's gliding, ever inquisitive, camera keeps the mood gloomy and spooky, and us in the middle of the mystery. It's a testament to the film's novelty that it's been remade five times."

"Speaking of time, I say, Jimmy, did you find the checklist? Jimmy?" Zombos looked over to the bookcase. We followed his gaze. "Now where the deuce has he gotten to? Did anyone see him leave the room?

"I'll go check the closets," I said jokingly. No one laughed.

House of Silent Scream: Let's get ready to robot rumble!

What do you do with something like Alpha Video?

Alpha Video deals mostly in the z-grade public domain detritus of early film. They repackage wrecked prints of (often justifiably) obscure flicks, slap on some evocative cover art, and then clog the bargain bins of America's DVD retailers with the results. I have yet to see a silent flick from Alpha that wasn't transferred from some highly damaged print and matched with painfully modern and cheesy music. Furthermore, their marketing borders on the deceitful. I've been stung more than once by an AV copywriter who decided to pitch a melodrama as a horror or suspense film. They also have the annoying tendency make literally true, but somewhat misleading claims about, say, their films. If, for example, Bela Lugosi makes a cameo, you can be sure he'll get top billing on the cover.

That said, Alpha's often the only source for some of the more obscure silent era flicks. So little of the silent era is still with us. The unstable nature of the film medium, lackluster preservation standards, and popular disinterest means that, aside from a truly tiny percentage of films, most of film's earliest works are lost forever. Consequently, when we talk about the development of film, or a particular genre within film, we tend to make the record the fact and ignore all those data points we know existed, but are no longer present to us. The problem is that what we know is miniscule compared to what we don't. Of all the silent films ever made, experts estimate that only about 10% or 15% are still around. For horror fans, this includes the first two werewolf flicks (The Werewolf, 1913; The Wolf Man, 1924), the earliest adaptation of Dorian Gray, an adaptation of Balzac's trapped-alive tale La Grande Breteche, the first adaptation of Fantomas, another Golem film, a handful of haunted house flicks, and (most famously) Lon Chaney's London After Midnight. And that's just taking into account flicks we know we've lost. The unknown unknowns could include all manner of revelations.

The end result of this legacy of loss is a distorted sense of the roots of the art. We think, for example, that silent horror and fantasy consists of a handful of George Méliès films and, later, Nosferatu and Caligari.

In so much as any added glimpse of the era - especially films outside of those three or four flicks consistently revered by modern horror community - gives us a fuller picture of the past, it is something to be grateful for.

Ultimately, while I wish Alpha had better prints, I'm thankful they've got prints at all.

That includes the chopped up remains of The Mechanical Man, a French 1921 sci-fi action comedy directed by early auteur André Deed. MM is both a treat and a disappointment. Originally an 80+ minute flick, all that remains are a scant 17 minutes. This means that what remains is largely incomprehensible, even with a cheater title card up front that lets you know what the plot is. The upshot is that the titular robot is one of the earliest robots on film (beating Metropolis's Maria out the gate by a few years) and it features what's most likely the first robot vs. robot battle scene.

The story of The Mechanical Man is now only comprehensible through secondary sources. The plot involves an evil criminal mastermind (one of many female kingpins in silent cinema, it was a surprisingly common trope) who uses her gang to steal the plans for a giant mechanical remote control man. She takes her metal monster on a rampage at a opera house only to run into a second mechanical man, this one built to thwart her plans. Along the way there's a jailbreak, a murder, a faked death, and a gypsy. Though, with so much footage missing, it is no longer clear how all those elements fit in. Visually, the interest in The Mechanical Man (or what's left of it) is pretty much in the title character, the intriguing lead villainess, and a few well-performed stunts. It lacks a strong visual style and there's no evidence that, even in its entirety, it would rank up there with better known silent genre works.

Still, as a early example of sci-fi filmmaking, it merits attention. What I recommend is skipping to chapter 5 and just checking out the robot. Here's some action shots.

This chopped up flick is a sadly appropriate monument to tragic career of Deed. Though now largely forgotten, Deed's was briefly a major name in the French film industry. A comedic stage performer, Deed's got into the film biz in 1901, when the industry was just leaving its larval stage. He first gained fame as an actor, appearing in nearly 160 films. By 1905, he was an internationally famous actor. He jumped behind the director's chair in 1909, eventually helming 38 flicks. The last of these film was The Mechanical Man, which he also wrote. In 1915, his fame as a star waned and he started spending more time behind the camera. His last major role was in 1928. He had some small bits in flicks into the 1930s, but mostly he was washed up. He died broke and is now a footnote in French film history.

House of Silent Scream: "The Original Vamps: Silent but Deadly"

Tove is the coolest person I know.

She writes articles on fashion history and culture on her own blog, Thread for Thought, but is just as comfortable discussing what makes the sleazy Brit serial killer pic "10 Rillington Place" so pleasingly cynical. She's just as insightful about the 1936 Soviet anti-American propaganda comedy musical "Circus" as she is about the work of John Waters.

Plus, she allegedly made out with a one-legged French sailor once. Allegedly.

All this meant that, when I decided I was going to look for voices outside the horror blog world to include in this series, she was immediately on the short list of people to ask. I'm very happy she could contribute and very excited to introduce her on ANTSS.

Occasionally fancying myself an exotic woman of mystery too, I have a special place in my heart for that early 20th century icon, The Vamp. When my friend suggested I write about them, I welcomed the opportunity to revisit some silent films when this aesthetic was solidified in concept and look.

THEDA BARA & THE LURE OF THE EXOTIC

Though Theda Bara (1890 – 1955) enshrouded her adult life in mystery, she was born plain old Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, OH. Hollywood producers gave her the anagram of “Arab death,” on the one hand cultivating her image of smoky, exotic sensualism -- claiming she lit incense on her sets and swathed herself in tiger pelts -- and on the other hand, hyping the macabre and frightening side of her.

The vamp image, incorporating the requisite sex and death themes.

Most recognize the term "vamp" to mean a femme fatale -- an irresistible woman who leads to the destruction of those who surround her, typically men. But the term was initially coined only after the success of Theda Bara's single surviving film, A Fool There Was (1915), in which her gleefully man-destroying character is listed in the credits simply as “The Vampire.” Based on Rudyard Kipling's poem “The Vampire” (1897) and Sir Edward Burne-Jones' painting of the same name (1897); the visual inspiration is obvious:

Sir Edward Burne-Jones's "The Vampire"

In A Fool There Was, The Vampire is seen in her nightgown several times, casting a spectral quality over her. Opaque and voluminous, they are not lingerie we are accustomed to today, but were risqué for the time, obviously derived from Burne-Jones's sex-laden picture.

The Vampire grinning over her dead lover.

When wearing outerwear, The Vampire wore the amusingly impractical (and thankfully short-lived) hobble skirt, topped with exotic turbans and heavily kohled eyes. To seduce her victim she drops a flower and lifts her skirt to reveal her ankle -- she is unashamed to show blatantly erotic skin.

What differentiated Theda from other actresses of her time was her other-worldliness, which she cultivated with her Oriental aesthetics. The horror genre is filled with tales of distant or remote lands; the audience's presumed unfamiliarity with the locale makes the fantastic tales slightly more plausible; the storyteller prays on the public's inherent mistrust and simultaneous attraction to the exotic, The Other. Though the most exotic location in A Fool There Was was Italy (puzzingly portrayed as a palm tree paradise more suggestive of the Far East), The Vampire produces a non-specific and highly erotic exoticism. Not a tremendous actor, it was largely Theda's unusual costumes and makeup on and off-screen that enshrouded her in Oriental mystique and secured her notoriety.

Theda Bara in hobble skirt and turban ensemble

Promises of harem girls with all the connotations of master / slave dynamics and orgies have been irrevocably linked to soft, sheer, feminine fabrics that simultaneously cover and reveal forbidden flesh (see my post on Innerwear as Outerwear on this subject). Seemingly anticipating the Egyptian madness that occurred after the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, the Far East captivated the imagination of the Western world. Designer Paul Poiret (1879 - 1944) made his mark on the fashion world by morphing the 19^th century S-shape silhouette into un-corseted, athletic figures, and he incorporated many lose-fitting, Oriental-inspired designs to this end including harem pants, “formal” silk pajamas, and turbans. Poiret designed extravagant costumes for stage productions, hosted legendary Arabian-themed costume parties, his fondness for theatrical-scale dress-up evident in the fashions he produced for general consumption.

Paul Poiret, harem ensemble, 1911

Even earlier was Emilienne d’Alençon (1869 – 1946) who performed at the Folies Bergères in the 1890s (with trained rabbits!) and was just as famous a courtesan, who wore an Art Nouveau inspired Salome costumes:

The Ballet Russes' performance of “Schéhérazade” in 1910 was enormously successful, due in large part to the extravagant costumes of vague eastern inspiration:

Ida Rubinstein in Ballet Russe "Scheherazade," 1910

Erte, who worked with Poiret and with whom I am obsessed, was yet another costume designer who marketed sensual Oriental decadence for lavish stage productions.

Erte Fashion Sketch with turban and harem pants

Mata Hari (1876 – 1917), the exotic Orientalist dancer of Dutch descent who posed as princess from Java while acting as courtesan and spy, was executed by firing squad just 2 years after A Fool There Was. Rumor has it that she blew a kiss to her executioners.

Mata Hari

Similar to our Theda Bara, non?

Theda Bara publicity shot for Cleopatra (1917)

Theda tapped into a cultural obsession with styles of the Far East, while exploiting the unease and xenophobia that often accompanies our regard of The Other, rolling it all into a destructive, man-eating "vampire" character. The Vamp concept was to evolve, though never to shake the ruinous qualities Theda imbued in her.

LOUISE BROOKS & MODERN ADVANCEMENTS

As Theda's star waned, a new Vamp talent stepped up: Louise Brooks (1906 - 1985). If Theda was the vaguely ancient, exotic vamp, Louise was her modern flapper vamp successor. As women's rights gained momentum in America, a powerful new woman emerged, wearing visible makeup as she walked to the voting polls, smoking and drinking and dancing in shift dresses that bared shins! Even as many women embraced this freedom, societal concerns of propriety remained and moralist detractors prophesized of hedonistic anarchy. Dress also changed radically in the nineteen-teens, with fewer layers that a woman could slip into (and out of!), exposing more skin than ever. And so Louise Brooks was a very different looking vamp from Theda, even while her characters carried the torch of man destroyer.

Louise Brooks, 1928

Pandora's Box (1929) was adapted from 2 erotic plays written in the 1890s by Frank Wedekind, but updated to modern times. As many young women cut their cumbersome long hair, Brooks as the Lulu character sports her own iconic, modern bob and wears clothes un-constrictive enough that she can do light gymnastics (like swing from a strongman's biceps), hinting at the newly acceptable athleticism for women (see my post on Athletic Aesthetics). The erotic zones had shifted and multiplied since Theda Bara’s time, moving from the ankle to the shoulders, back, legs, and breasts which were often displayed braless.

Lulu appears practically naked in this Y backstrap dress.

Having become a somewhat accidental murderess, Lulu goes into hiding and curls the famous hair, sweeping it off her forehead. Ridiculous as it sounds, Brooks' hairstyle was so recognizable that this shoddy disguise actually succeeds in confusing the audience a little, though Lulu is discovered anyway.

Lulu is a dangerous vamp not because she's dark, controlling and malicious, but because she's a beautiful young woman whose very power is derived from her lack of pretension and seeming ignorance of her own sexual potency, her delicious un-self-conciousness. One-upping Bara's Vampire, Lulu was a double threat desired by both men and women, so potent was her sexual power. The Pandora of the Greek myth was not an inherently evil woman, just one whose curiosity got the better of her, with unfortunately dire consequences. Lulu is not even interested in money or advancing her social status -- she shows equal preference for newspaper moguls and paupers, all of whom are trying to exploit her. However, she shares with other vamps her unrepentantance for acts that inconvenience or even destroy others and herself -- they are all animalistic, with no regrets.

She’s an unusual vamp fatale because she doesn’t have malicious intent. “Money, they all want money!” she complains of her blackmailers and suiters alike. She's not a gold-digger, she's simply a careless and carefree pleasure-seeker -- exactly what conservatives feared about real-life flappers and, by extension, the women's movement.

RESURRECTION OF THE VAMP

Since these early 20^th century beginnings, the vamp has been resurrected in film and fashion many times. Blood sucking, literal and figurative, has unavoidably sexual connotations, and fetish gear has both influenced and been influenced by vamp(ire) lore. Fashion photographer Helmut Newton channels the sexy and macabre themes of bondage and female sexual power regularly. Even as women expose themselves in his photos, they seem to retain absolute authority over their settings:

Helmut Newton photo, c. 1990s

Impulse control is often explored in times of economic or political turmoil. True to point, there has been a rash of vampire productions recently including Twilight and the True Blood HBO series, but truth be told, I much prefer the original vamps!

Further Reading:

• Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, Rebecca Arnold
• Fashion Fetishism, David Kunzle
• Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power, Valerie Steele
• Seduction: A Celebration of Sensual Style, Caroline Cox
• “The Girl in the Black Helmut,” Kenneth Tynan

House of Silent Scream: "Watching silent movies as if they were other people's dreams."

Denis, the international man of mystery behind the punctuation enhanced "The Horror!?" blog, was, until very recently, the best kept secret in the genre blog biz. Smart, insightful write-ups on a mind-boggling array of films. He's to horror blogging what Elvis Costello is to music: He's doing great work all over the map. Lucha flicks, kung fu horror, Euro-trash exploiters, Bollywood slashers, chance's are the Denis has been there and written it up.

Talent, like blood, will out and Denis is now also posting work at the excellent "WTF-Film" site - schooling an ever broader audience on the topics such as "the wild man of the toilet" from 2004's "Oh My Zombie Mermaid."

Special thanks to Denis for taking the time to contribute to the anniversary celebrations. Screamers and Screamettes, dig hard babies!

I find writing about silent movies - much more so than actually watching them - exceedingly difficult. While I usually don't even flinch when confronted with differences in style or filmic language, silent movies always seem to come from more than just a different time or place and to deserve a more scholarly treatment than I am capable of.

The problem is amplified even further when a film has been as heavily analyzed as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens. There is probably not much to say about it that hasn't already been said. Fortunately, the nice thing about blogging is that one's personal lack of knowledge does not always need to keep one away from trying to wring out a few words about a film.

Even better - I'm not all that interested in talking facts about movies anyway, especially not about films like Nosferatu which invite one to be read as dreams rather than narratives.
This method of watching silent movies as if they were other people's dreams, forgoing the need for logic, plot and other unnecessary ballast is the best way to derive pleasure from them for me and makes it easier to watch European films of the silent era than the often slicker American ones which on paper keep much closer to our modern sensibilities.

The German filmmakers of the Weimar Republic were a very peculiar mix of the commercial filmmaker of today and the mad scientist of future movies, giving their better films a mood that I find quite close to that of other films better understood as dreams than as narratives - the European exploitation movies of much later periods. Yes, I propose to watch Murnau films as if they were made by Jess Franco.

The commercial interests of Nosferatu are obvious. Taking the basic plot of a novel like Stoker's Dracula (of course without paying the author's estate) as the base for your film is as commercially minded as anything Roger Corman ever did, although Corman would never have been so obvious about it that you could have sued him.

But I don't think that the interesting parts of Nosferatu are those close to the book. It is much more important which parts of the book Murnau and his scriptwriter Henrik Galeen choose to ignore.

I see the original Dracula as a modernization of Gothic tropes for the contemporary British audience of the 1890s and have a lot of sympathy for interpretations of Dracula as standing in for venereal disease and/or the fear of the other. Murnau's film, though, isn't interested in syphilis or modernization of tropes at all (which doesn't mean that he has nothing to say about/to his contemporary world - that part comes automatically). On the contrary, Nosferatu is full of the medieval attacking a present that seems already too much in thrall of the past anyway. Isn't that very German of it?

For me, as someone who finds parts of it still downright terrifying, this is the point from which the film derives most of its strength: Max Schreck's Nosferatu is an ancient, ancient thing come to eat up the future and drag the present back into his past of rats and plague, not so much a corrupting influence as Dracula is, but a regressive one. Nosferatu's horror is the horror of a past that has never been laid to rest and so just keeps shambling on, smothering the young and preventing a future that's worth living.

Seen from this angle, the end of the film itself starts to look horrifying. Even though the past is laid to rest, Ellen Hutter's youth and innocence have to be sacrificed and she herself has to become something exceptionally medieval herself - a saint. And where I stand, there is nothing more horrifying than a saint when you are trying to cope with the present.

House of Silent Scream: An eagle took my baby!

Welcome to the third annual Silent Scream series. Through out the month of September, mixed in with the normal ANTSS fare, you'll find posts subject of genre silent films. This year, we're going to be doing things a little bit different this year. First, I've invited other bloggers to join in the fun, so you'll get posts from new and familiar faces this year. Second, we're expanding our coverage to include films and topics that reflect the diversity of the guests participating.

As this is the opening post of this year's Silent Scream series, I think it's appropriate that today's flick, the 1908 man-versus-nature thriller Rescued from an Eagle's Nest, gives us the opportunity the discuss one of early American cinema's most important figures: the innovative, yet enigmatic Edwin S. Porter.

Born in 1870, Edwin Porter was the son of a well-to-do Pennsylvania merchant and was on of six siblings. Despite the middle-class trappings of his early years, Porter was seemingly a restless youth and, after dropping out of school at the age of 14, Porter worked a series of odd jobs including sign painter, telegraph operator, ship engine builder, and exhibition ice skater. In 1893, Porter joined the US Navy as an electrician. The Navy gave the already mechanically inclined Porter the thorough technical training his wandering youth had denied him. In doing so, the Navy prepped Porter for his future employment with the Edison company and, unintentionally, helped gave the American film industry its first truly important director.

After leaving the Navy, Porter got work at Vitascope, the projector manufacture and film production arm of Thomas Edison's vast commercial empire. The vitascope itself was not actually an Edison invention. Atypically, Edison was slow to understand the commercial potential of movie projectors. When several of his employees who were working on the concept defected, Edison took it as a wake up call. Having lost much of his R & D expertise, Edison did what any good capitalist innovator would do: He bought his way back into the race. In 1895 to inventors, C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat, displayed their phantoscope projector to impressed audiences at the Atlanta Cotton States Exhibition. Their triumph was short-lived. Not long after, the two partners bitterly parted ways and each claimed to be the sole inventor of the phantoscope. Armat showed the system to Edison's men, hoping to secure some sort of developmental support. Edison agreed to manufacture the projectors and create original films for the new machine, but only on the condition that the machine be renamed the vitascope and that Edison be given public credit for its invention. With some minor tweaks, the phantoscope died and the "new" vitascope was added to Edison's long list of modern wonders.

Porter began working for Vitascope in 1896. It was the perfect time to get into the biz: the rebranded projector had its public debut in New York City in April of that year. Porter was on hand as part of the tech crew.

The vitascope entered a very crowded field. American companies debuted the eidoloscope (a near-exact copy of the not so "new" vitascope), the kineopticon, and the biograph. Competition came from overseas as well. The Lumière cinématographe, which had debuted in 1895 in France, arrived in the United States.

Back then, the film equipment manufacturers acted as the major studios. They made the devices needed to record and project films and they made most of the movies shown on their devices. Not all the movies, though. Even in the early days of cinema, there were independent players in the biz. Independent theaters would lease or buy equipment and then acquire films on their own. Independent filmmakers would purchase filmmaking equipment and then market their wares to the bigger producers, who would act as distributors. Finally, there was an entire class of licensees: freelancers who would rent equipment from the big production groups and then sell back any footage they shot. By the turn of the century, nearly 40 percent of the films sold under the Edison banner were shot by licensees or independents. In 1898, Porter went indie and became the projectionist at the independent Eden Musee Theatre in Manhattan. This job served as Porter's film school. His job consisted of illegally duplicating and recutting films, especially the work of the famed French master of the fantasy film, Georges Méliès. Carefully re-editing the films of others gave Porter an appreciation of film aesthetics, a broad knowledge of the art's techniques, and a nimble mind for the editing process.

After a failed attempt to invent his own camera and projector, Porter returned to Edison. This time, however, Porter was behind the camera. His most successful early films – 1902's Jack and the Beanstalk and 1903's Life of an American Fireman - aped Méliès's style and methods, but Porter quickly started introducing stylistic innovations of his own. His next film, The Great Train Robbery, not only included powerful visuals (most famously, a bandit fires his pistol directly at the camera) but it introduced the method of cross-cut editing to show simultaneous action in multiple locations. A year later he introduced parallel story narrative structure into his The Kleptomaniac. A year after that, Porter introduced side lighting, close-ups, and incorporated changed shots within a scene into a single film. Technical advances seemed to just pour out Porter. Later he would combine documentary and staged footage into a single film and innovate on-location night shooting.

In essence, Porter shifted the basic unit of film from the scene to the shot. In doing so, Porter liberated film from its stagecraft roots and established it as a unique medium. If he'd made no greater contribution to the medium, he would still rank among the most important directors ever.

But, for all Porter's insights into the formal nature of film and his sense of its untapped technical capabilities, he had two profound weaknesses as an artist. First, Porter approached formal innovations as if they were special effects. Instead of building a new language cinema, he tended to treat each new development as a one-off gimmick. He would evolve the cross cut technique for use in one film, further develop it into parallel narratives, and then inexplicably drop the technique to never fully engage it again. This meant the Porter never developed a signature style or revealed a consistent developing talent over time. Second, Porter viewed film as a new way to tell old stories. He never showed any profound interest in creating novel narratives for the screen, preferring instead to rely on documentary and stage sources that quickly seemed dated to novelty craving audiences. Though he liberated the medium from theater tradition, he never grasped that he had a new medium that demanded new stories.

Though it is too much ideological baggage to load on to any one man, it's almost impossible to not see in Porter career the roots of American cinema's most lasting and damning stereotype: that we make technically astounding, but artistically lacking works.

Porter isn't in the director's chair for Rescued from an Eagle's Nest. Rather, he's double-credited as the producer and cinematographer. Still, there are some classic Porter characteristics on display.

The story of this seven-minute flick is simple. Somewhere on the frontier, a lanky lumberjack (played by youthful D. W. Griffith long before he became perhaps the most controversial director in American history) says goodbye to his wife and child and heads off to fell some old growth. His wife returns to her wifely duties in their small cabin, leaving the child outside to play. A massive eagle swoops down and snatches the child. The horrified mother scrambles for a rifle, but then realizes that shooting the bird would mean that the child would plummet to its death. She runs and tells her husband what happened. The husband knows that there's an eagles nest on a cliff not far from their worksite. The husband and wife, accompanied by two coworkers, go to the cliff. The spot the baby in the eagle's nest, but the eagle is nowhere to be seen. They tie a rope around the father's waist and lower him over the edge of the cliff. As he reached the nest, the eagle returns and attacks him. There is a long, energetic struggle before the father kills the not-yet-endangered symbol of America with his bare hands. The coworkers pull the father up. The family is reunited. All exit, screen right, with much joy.

As with most of Porter's projects, the story would have been a familiar one to his viewers. Every year or so, Eastern newspapers would carry some story about an oversized bird of prey making off with some noble frontier family's child. As a weird and anecdotal case study in media effects, Rescued from an Eagle's Nest was released in January of 1908 and, that same year, papers ran no less than four different avian kidnapper stories. The flick is a plot machine. Even by the standards of the early pictures, the story is efficient and lean. It plays out in near real time, the better to emphasize the thrilling tension of the plot. There's little characterization (except for a hysterical coworker whose over-emoting is, I suspect, a bit of improv on the actor's part) those places where the story pauses a bit seem more like pacing slip ups rather intentional moments of reflection. Thematically, the film comes from a pre-conservation time and, while it lacks any sense of historic irony, it is interesting to see a film from an era when nature was unproblematically a resource or a threat. Too thin to be truly involving, the plot does still pull the viewer along. In this, it should be considered to have succeeded on its own terms, even if some viewers would have liked more meat on them bones.

The film was partially shot in Edison's studio in Bronx (that greenhouse-looking building shown above) and partially shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Director E. Searle Dawley makes no attempt to disguise the studio/location split. The sets for the frontier home and the eagle's nest are opulently fake. Though modern viewers may simply put this down as an artifact film's primitive beginnings, placing this overt fakiness side-by-side with realistic location shots was noted by the film's contemporary critics. Critics at the time felt the tone shift this caused was a serious flaw. I disagree. Viewed now, the on-set scenes have a hint of magic realism about them. They give the viewer the agreeable sense that you're viewing a classic American tall tale, with its mix of frontier grit and absurd fancy. The same is true of the puppet eagle, which looks less like a realistic eagle and more like a newspaper artists conception of a monster bird.

The film's only real flaw comes in the clumsy editing. Though the "chase" aspect of the plot calls out for the cross-cutting methods Porter was already familiar with, he never clued the director in on them. There are also several unintentional cuts that weirdly overlap the action, though Porter should have been skilled enough to spot and edit out these slips. It could be that Porter was simply respecting the director's role, even to the degree of letting the director make his own errors. But, given Porter's odd relationship to the techniques he mastered, it is just as likely that Porter didn't care.

For the casual viewer, Rescued isn't essential viewing. For those curious in the origins of cinema, it is worth checking out. This is doubly true considering that it appears in the four disk "Inventing the Movies" collection – a joint Kino Films, MoMA production – that is required viewing.