Tomasz Kolankiewicz

Director of the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute

Silent Movie Festival – Step into the Shadows

Film genres emerged almost as soon as cinema began. The forms that would soon evolve into the genres we know today were already being explored by Georges Méliès at the turn of the 20th century. Féeries and cinematic fairy tales, such as Cinderella (1899) and The Infernal Cauldron (1903), along with adventure and science fiction films like An Adventurous Automobile Trip (1905), the landmark A Trip to the Moon (1902) and many others, enthralled audiences across Europe. In the United States, meanwhile, the first proto-genre is widely considered to be the western (naturally), emerging directly from scenes recorded at Thomas Edison's studio in West Orange, New Jersey. A film that achieved iconic status in the genre was Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), starring "Broncho Billy" Anderson in the lead role and containing the shocking scene of a gun being fired directly into the camera.

The beginnings of horror films usually date back to the 1930s and the American series Universal Monsters, a film franchise made at Universal Pictures under the supervision of producer Carl Laemmle Jr. But specific proto-horror films had actually emerged even earlier in Europe, during the silent film era. They began to appear during the turbulent time of war and the collective societal anxieties that gripped European societies, which were reflected in the burgeoning film industry. Horror, and a referencing of so-called weird fiction, soon became a feature of the plethora of films appearing in different parts of the continent that had a significant influence on the formation of leading artistic movements. Examples include Stellan Rye's The Student of Prague (1913) – a pre-expressionist film that paved the way for masterpieces like Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese – as well as The Phantom Carriage (1921) by the ingenious Victor Sjöström, who inspired not only Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921) but also Stanley Kubrick's famous scene in The Shining that featured Jack Nicholson's character breaking down a door with an axe in the Overlook Hotel. In Austria, Robert Wiene had already created the classic The Hands of Orlac, which turns 100 this year, with an outstanding performance by Conrad Veidt.  Yet, undeniably, the biggest hit of silent horror cinema to this day is a film that only narrowly escaped being incinerated (after Bram Stoker's heirs sued for plagiarism, a court ordered all the film stock to be seized and destroyed). Nevertheless, it survived and became a legendary masterpiece, starting possibly the most prolific subgenre of horror cinema – vampire films. This film, of course, is Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, F.W. Murnau's 1922 movie that featured a brilliant performance from Max Schreck.

These films, which all drew heavily on gothic literature and folklore, and at the same time also reflected the dark times and anxieties gripping Europe, inspired filmmakers around the world and sparked a sustained interest in horror. Genre cinema is based on an unspoken agreement between the creators (the filmmakers) and the recipients (the audience). This arrangement implies that when we go to the cinema, we agree to a certain formula and expect certain experiences – whether that means being moved by a melodrama, feelings of patriotic fervour in a war film, or howls of laughter in a comedy. In the case of a horror film, that foundation is universal: we're here to be scared, together. And that is what I wish, with slight trepidation, for you and also myself at this year's Silent Movie Festival.