The murderous folly of the Great War chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.
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Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.
Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland.
The book he produced in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, has had an enormous influence on film criticism. Perhaps more important, it’s had a deep influence on the way the average person thinks about movies, even if they’ve never heard of the admittedly obscure source of their ideas. Of course, the book’s pugilistic title made it clear that scholars and audiences alike could not view film as simple entertainment. Movies carried political import, not simply reflecting the times but also embodying the horror of the times. Overall, the book denigrates film, and filmgoers, in such a way that it lends credence to the ideas that entertainment means industry rather than art and that all film represents an escape from reality. A critic influenced by such views today might say, for example, that the offbeat comedy Mall Cop (2005) is not much different from François Truffaut’s drama The 400 Blows (1959), while the complex television crime drama The Wire and the tacky reality show Celebrity Apprentice exist in a continuum of mindless satisfaction. It’s a dour view of popular culture that many fans paradoxically hold when they demand that films “leave out the politics” or say that they “just want a good show.”
The people of the Great War’s aftermath found themselves in the time of monsters, and the monsters filled their screens.