Adam O'Rourke - Response Paper #1

Early Cinema and The Building Blocks of Horror.

The Edison/Porter shorts speak to the wide breadth of material being made on film from the onset of the motion picture. These shorts span a wide array of topics and genres; some are very short little clips of people performing an act of specific activity. These feel like a sort of old-timey, homemade GoPro movie- a kind of “look at what I can do!” short film. Similar videos make up much of the content on YouTube and the web today. It’s funny to see how such subject matter has been making use of film since it’s invention. Coney Island at Night is similarly experimental, making use of film to capture the lights of Coney Island at night, in a series of panoramic landscape shots.

The Wonders of Magnetism uses film to a much more scientific and educational end. It is a compilation of experiments demonstrating the amazing and rather unintuitive things that magnets can do; how they behave. It is much more of an educational piece of film than the other shorts we looked at, but this style of video is still very present in the world today as a way to record and share scientific experiments.

Some of the other shorts we looked at make use of film to perform magic tricks, like Vanishing Lady. They make use of (sometimes) well executed edits to make the impossible reality, at least in the viewer's eyes. However, some of these tricks are better executed than others. The edits are very hard to spot in Vanishing Lady, but in other films they are much more obvious and jarring. This tradition of “movie magic” has certainly continued to today, but has been refined substantially since these early shorts.

Other films such as Another Job for the Undertaker and The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend have much more narrative. Although there is no sound, they tell comprehensive stories with characters. These films also make make full use of that movie magic to produce physical humor. Another Job for the Undertaker also has an element of modern horror to it as well. The short centers around a man being harassed by a ghost. His belongings disappear and things move around the room seemingly without anyone touching it. Although such supernatural activity is used for comical effect in this case, it’s easy to see how such effects would be used for frightening effect later on in cinema history. The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend is a similarly narrative driven comedy. It too,  makes liberal use of editing and stop motion animation to trick the audience into believing his strange and comedic dream is actually happening.

The Teddy Bears is even more grounded in narrative, as it is clearly an adaptation of the Goldilocks and the Three Bears fairy tale. The story translates well to a silent film thanks to the very physical acting performance from the Goldilocks character. The young actress uses exaggerated reactions to the porridge and beds to convey her feelings to the audience, without the need for sound or text. Similarly, actors in humanized-bear costumes use very physical acting to express their outrage. This short also has a flair of macabre to it as well. The fairy tale traditionally ends with the girl running off unscathed, but the film continues on past this. The family of bears pursue the girl through the snow, in what's is possibly one of the earliest chase scenes in film. The girl is saved by a hunter she encounters along the path and the story takes a turn for the grim. The hunter shoots and kills the mama bear and papa bear, but the young bear is saved by restraint on behalf of the girl. Instead, the young bear is taken captive and they all go back to the bear cabin to loot the place. Due to the humanized nature of the bear family (they wear human clothes and seem to live like humans), this gives the film a darker tone. Perhaps this was the intended effect, making audiences think they are watching a light and friendly recreation of a fairy tale, and they play on those expectations to surprise the audience with something much more bleak. Setting up expectations and then doing the opposite is very prevalent in today’s horror genre, and perhaps this is it’s genesis. Burlesque Suicide, no. 2 has a similar reversal by making the audience think the man in front of the camera is going to shoot himself. He doesn’t kill himself, but instead looks right down the camera and laughs at the viewer for thinking that he was actually going to kill himself.

Some of the other shorts are similarly grim. Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and Shooting Captured Insurgents make use of editing and some practical effects to recreate executions. It seems the intention of these shorts is to shock their viewers, and make them question if what happened was real or faked- elements still very pervasive in today’s horror genre.

Although the horror genre did not fully develop until a couple of decades after these shorts, many of the core elements of horror, and mechanisms for frightening an audience, are present in these films. Editing, costumes, and practical effects were all used to produce even in these early films to make the impossible a reality on-screen. Death and the macabre are often used in excess in the modern horror genre to shock audiences. Techniques of twisting viewer expectations that were pioneered by these shorts are also used in modern cinema to toy with emotions and surprise viewers. The connection these films have to the horror genre is unmistakable.