The first American horror star – ‘the man with a thousand faces’ – Lon Chaney, starred in dozens of films that experimented with now popular features of horror, such as the deformed central monster (Worland, 51). Films like Nachte des Grauens (Robinson, 1916), Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (Wiene, 1919) and Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Murnau, 1922), all from Germany, established many of the shadowy and disturbingly macabre elements that Hollywood productions like London After Midnight (Browning, 1927) and The Bells (Young, 1924) capitalised on (Worland, 50). Horror in the 1920s found itself very much in the realm of the gothic. Just as the silent era laid the foundations for narrative cinema, it too can be considered the experimental stage for many genres including horror. Indeed, as will be shown, this model could be as relevant to cycles of four films, yet alone four decades. The model is in fact best utilised as a recurring template that is relevant not only to the overarching evolution of the genre, but also to its individual movements. But his consideration of this model is limited to treating the four stages as closed phenomenon: what happens when a genre finishes this cycle? Does it remain in the baroque age for the remainder of its existence? In this essay I will affirm the merit of this model in relation to the horror genre, but also identify the inadequacy of considering the cycle in such a limited way. In discussing Genres, Thomas Schatz adopts this idea to explain the progression of forms like the musical and the Western. Henri Focillon’s schema for the life span of cultural forms suggests four successive states of development: “the experimental age, the classic age, the age of refinement, the baroque age” (10).
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