The First Horror Film Ever Created is a Beautiful Nightmare
“It’s a spooky place to wait for midnight, here among the dead.”
When you think about the first full length horror movie that was ever made, you probably think of Nosferatu,the 1922 film loosely based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The film made an unexpected impact on its viewers, and the spectral form of the titular vampire is still instantly recognizable today.
However, there was another, lesser known film made only a year before, which claims the honor of being the first full length horror film. It’s called The Phantom Carriage, or “Korkarlen,” in Swedish.
In this film, a drunken young man must grapple with the fatal mistakes of his past during a long carriage ride driven by a familiar friend, who became a messenger of Death after he met with his own fate.
It’s a hauntingly morbid tale, depicted in eerie images on a backdrop of complete silence that makes the saliva dry in your throat with dread. To understand why this film is so unsettlng, you’ll have to go back almost 100 years exactly, when this film premiered on New Year’s Day, 1921.
The Shadow Kingdom
Films from this era have a unique quality to them. In silence, the flickering forms of long dead humans pass back and forth in front of a lens, opening their mouths without audibly calling out, captured forever in a roll of film.
Maxim Gorky, a soviet dramatist, described moving pictures as “not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.” He called it The Kingdom of Shadows.
Most films did their best to eliminate this unsettling effect, and to make their characters seem as close to life as possible. Soundtracks were added to create a more uplifting mood, and eventually the slides would be painted by hand, to add blush to the cheeks and brightness to the screen.
Even an early adaptation of Frankenstein from 1910 was alteredfor the screen. The writers “carefully omitted anything which might be any possibility shock any portion of the audience.”
The Phantom Carriage offers no such courtesies, and in fact, it relies heavily on this shadowy portrayal of life to carry its imagery. Death is the pervasive theme of the entire piece. Death isn’t just part of the story. Death is the entire driving force behind the script.
While most films in the 1920s were doing their best not to alarm moviegoers, The Phantom Carriage wanted them to feel something. Primarily, it wanted them to feel afraid.
From the first scene, it’s clear what this movie is about. A young Salvation Army sister is dying, and she calls for a man she once gave a blessing to.
This man is David Holm, who will die before he reaches her. Everything from the tense ending scene to the exposition, which takes place in a graveyard, is about death.
Even more than death, this movie is about guilt. In some ways, it’s a spiritual predecessor to films like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” because we watch a central character grapple with their life’s choices; the mistakes that were made, the possibilities that could have been, the future to come. But The Phantom Carriage is anything but tender. It offers very little in the way of emotional shelter. It’s a bleak portrait of life in reverse that has a way of making the viewer squirm, as if they are the one being judged, not David Holm. It’s one of the very first examples of a horror story in which the monster is not some otherworldly beast; it’s all of us.
Horror and Realism
Frankenstein (1910) are very different films, with very different ethos behind them. But it’s not hard to figure out why, in the span of only ten years, filmmakers were no longer afraid they would startle their consumers.
In 1921, the whole world was at war for the first time ever. Our perceptions of what was “shocking,” or “horrible,” were changing fast. The public had demonstrated that they were not the same timid crowd that had cowered at the approach of an imaginary train in 1895; they were survivors of a bigger, deadlier war than any generation that came before them.
Suddenly, the populace wasn’t delicate or fragile. They were prepared to see things that no one else had seen, even if they were unpleasant or uncomfortable. They were ready for the first full length horror film: The Phantom Carriage.