Fascism in the Horror Film
Horror and the Fascist Mob
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Horror Cinema and the Fascist Mob: 1925 to 1941
Fascism as an authoritarian political movement, begins at Mussolini.
In 1922, the Italian leader Benito Mussolini brought together a variety of societal and governmental concepts under one moniker: fascio. From his crucible, the contemporary Fascist World took shape.
Cinema was born at the cusp of the Fascist World. As the pre-20th-Century versions of fascism boiled (little more than a nebulous radical political stew), the frames of the film flickered on walls and sheets in Paris, Berlin, Rome and New York. With the advent of conditions for distilling the disparate into the concentrated, cinema did what it would always do - capture the neurosis and inner quandary of a people, then project outwards.
THE PROTO-FASCIST MOB
If the undercurrent of anti-materialism and anti-individualism that would mark Mussolini's brand of fascism was already coursing through the masses, horror cinema in the 1920s was marked by that tidal force. By 1941, the individual versus state dynamic would come to a painful and acutely pointed head, in fact, in one telling moment.
Before that moment, the events of a European world tilting toward fascism is particularly notable in the crowd scenes of several major horror films. In these scenes, the radical individual is pursued by a crowd of nobles, peasants - elite and poor - who have dropped their class identities and united to form a single and powerful front. Interestingly, in most cases the elite are less capable than the common people, and almost always overrun by them by the clamoring horde.
Deep beneath the Paris Opera House of Rupert Julian's 1925 "The Phantom of the Opera," Erik the Phantom wages war against the elite and powerful who frequent the performances above. He has no friends among the lower class, however, for the Phantom slays stagehands as readily as he drops chandeliers on the bejeweled audience.
What the Phantom represents in "The Phantom of the Opera" is a vestigial organ of revolution, a reminder of past individualism writ large, and a physically different as well as philosophical opposite to the establishment. In the wine cellar, we are reminded of the Phantom's revolutionary identity when Vicomte Raoul de Chagney (Norman Kerry) and Inspector Ledoux (Arthur Edmund Caroux) discover that his barrels are not full of wine, but of gunpowder.
The mob sequence of "The Phantom of the Opera" starts with a gathering of Parisian working people, led by the infuriated aforementioned stagehands. One of the stage managers has lost his brother to the Phantom. He vows vengeance and the crowd throws in.
Below, the Phantom holds Christine Daae (Mary Philbin) captive in his lair. Her lover, Chagney, and Ledoux search the sewers for a way into the Phantom's lair.
Already, both elements of Parisian society, upper and lower class, seek the same thing. They both identify the Phantom as an enemy of the state, but for slightly different reasons.
The mob grows, swarming the streets of Paris until it finds the sewers. The mis en scene effectively shows the increasing force of the rushing crowd. Rupert fills the screen, shot by shot, from bottom to top.
In the lair, the Phantom forces two choices upon Daae, to join him or cause Chagney to perish, then to save Chagney or cause the entire opera house to perish. It is a progression of complicity, in which the subject first hands over her personal life and then hands over her right to citizenry.
It is not a simple situation. Daae first choses the Phantom over Chagney's death, but her mind clearly does not belong to the Phantom.The second choice is symbolic - freedom from the Phantom (exploding the opera house) or a life of enslavement for her and her lover. The one lever, shaped like a grasshopper represents the leap to freedom. The other, a scorpion, represents the poison tipped choice - the inevitable nature of paralysis and capture.
It is not a cut and dry choice for Daae, whose hand lingers over the opera-house-annihilating lever briefly before selecting the Chagney (scorpion) lever. Daae makes her choice through prayer, she is still of the religious world - which further implicates her apartness from the mob outside (which will eventually threaten even her, for her inability to transform). She clenches her hands and looks upward twice, considering the grasshopper and the scorpion.
Meanwhile, the mob spills from the mouth of a dragon into the sewers. An older force is at work here, not the Judeo-Christian Paris (which fails when Daae chooses not to sacrifice but to survive) but the sectarian and elemental force of fire (torches) and raw numbers.
When they finally break through the Phantom's door, the oppositional dynamic between the aristocratic lovers, the police and the Phantom is delineated.
Daae and Chagney have spent the interim reuniting, then struggling with the Phantom, while Ledoux lingers prostrate. All three parties have been rendered into one ineffective whole, and all three flee the oncoming mob together. For a moment, as the screen turns red in "The Phantom of the Opera" the crowd recognizes only quarry - aristocrats, authority figure and outsider.
The merger of aristocrat and working class into a unified entity occurs in the next sequence, completing the ideological journey toward a fascist model.
The Phantom steals Daae and races through Paris with her in a carriage. The mob and Chagney now pursue together, a single force running the outsider to the literal edge - in this case the banks of the Seine. Parisians come to their windows, looking down at the surging mob that chases the Phantom and the scene comes to its climax as Daae at last throws herself from the carriage into the way of the onrushing crowd.
In this, something additionally is revealed about the creation of the mobilized and militant popular force. Chagney stops to protect the ejected Daae, and the mob nearly tramples them. The aristocrat Chagney, while accepted as part of the mob if his actions coincide, is given no special treatment and is in fact an apparent obstacle to be shoved aside should he individuate. If he stops for personal reasons, the mob overruns and runs past him. Chagney and Daae scramble to escape from the scene, while the purposeful crowd comes to its ultimate confrontation with the Phantom.
Trapped at the banks of the Seine, the Phantom holds high his fist, threatening some kind of device - perhaps an explosive. The mob pauses. The Phantom holds them at bay and then turns to the camera. Addressing the audience, he opens his clenched hand and we see that he holds, in fact, nothing. The outsider is empty-handed. Somehow the joke seems to be on us. Did we imagine anything but martyrdom this way lies?
The mob attacks as the Phantom cackles. The Phantom splashes into the water and vanishes. Only bubbles of the drowning monster surface. But also, in their fervor to destroy the Phantom, some of the mob spills into the river. This is a mob in its purest form, a single-minded entity of which any given individual is less relevant than the whole. Like a fascist army, it is the preservation of state that is paramount. Self-sacrifice (to which individualist Daae could not commit) is the mob's function and prerogative.
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE MANOR
Of the two conditions that "The Phantom of the Opera" indicate as predicates for a fascist mob, the ineffectiveness of the police in controlling outsiders and the irrelevance of self-interested aristocracy, James Whale's "Frankenstein" would pick up both threads eight years later, in 1931.
As in "Phantom," the mob forms in "Frankenstein" in response to the death of a working man's family - in this case a carpenter's (Francis Ford as Hans) little girl (Marilyn Harris). The Monster (Boris Karloff) has fled into the woods following the accidental murder. Whale cuts to the pre-marriage festival in town. Peasants drink beer and eat bread.
Removed from the actual festival, the Frankenstein aristocracy watches from a balcony. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) receives the first of two messengers.
Frankenstein learns first that family friend Dr. Waldman has been killed at the tower in which Frankenstein keeps his laboratory. The Monster's moan fills the Frankenstein house. During a search of the mansion for the Monster, the crowd noises outside become ominous.
There are several key signifiers that the state has been jeopardized by the outsider in this sequence. Its doctor is dead, its home is compromised (and in disorder, as Frankenstein ends up in the furniture strewn rafters of his father's mansion) and the lower classes outside are unhappy.
When the Monster actually penetrates the house, attempting to kidnap Elizabeth from her bride's chamber, Henry and help crash through the door. His bride saved, Henry cares for her, while she gasps, "Don't let him come here, don't let him come here."
Meanwhile, outside, the carpenter also holds a young woman - but in a very different way.
Hans brings Little Maria's body into the village. She dangles lifeless, one arm swinging with the gait of his walk. This stops the festival, by degrees, and it transforms. As Ludwig walks, the crowd first stands, tables of people rising in horror, and then begins to fall in behind him. Similar to "The Phantom of the Opera's" street mob, more peasants come to their windows, looking out on the passing crowd. Hans and what appears to be the entire village arrive outside the Frankenstein manor. The crowd has transformed, police hold them at bay. This is no longer a united village.
"Why bring her to me?" the senior Baron Frankenstein asks. The aristocracy seems to initially recommend that the people solve their own problem (a separation of identity echoed by Sir John Talbot later in "The Wolf Man"). The crowd objects, pumping fists.
Interestingly, inside, Henry Frankenstein is oblivious to the confrontation between state and the masses occurring at his front door. He laments the loss of his wedding day, moaning to friend Victor Moritz (John Boles) about Elizabeth. Again it is shown that the wealthy and powerful have selected only their realm as significant. Frankenstein vows to destroy the Monster, but his goal is not justice or revenge, but the resumption of his wedding.
Baron Frankenstein hasn't the luxury of such personal goals. He has been forced already to rejoin the mob, which fills Whale's screen, carrying torches. The police step forth and the sheriff organizes the crowd into search parties. Finally, whatever his intentions, when Henry Frankenstein emerges from the mansion, the fusion of state, police and people is complete.
"Those are your people," the sheriff says, directing Henry to take a party into the mountains.
What follows is a quasi-military departure from the village, as women and children gather in doorways and windows to weep as their militarized family members march into the countryside.
THE FAMILY OR THE FASCIST
The mob model returns in George Waggner's 1941 "The Wolf Man," but the twist in this film, arriving more than a decade into the history of fascism and situated deeply within the chronology of World War II and Hitler's Final Solution, is that the fascist mob is already institutionalized. When the outsider enters the scenario, a choice between the state and the family is forced.
Larry Talbot (Lon Cheney, Jr.) returns to his family estate in Wales, where his father Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) receives him warmly but not wholly able to forget their previous estrangement.
Larry does not represent the established fusion of state authority and common folk. At the same time, the fascist state shows strain.
In the Talbot's village, the wealthy Talbots, the police captain and the laborers enjoy a carefully delineated but outwardly coexistent relationship - sitting with each other in the drawing room, hunting together in the woods and stepping down to the visiting gypsy festival at night. John Talbot still needs a telescope to spy on the commoners in town, but the common folk do not come to his window to plead for festival or justice they way they do Baron Frankenstein.
As an interloper, Larry moves disruptively through the subtle stratification. He finds and aggressively courts Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), whose father Charles is a shopkeeper - hardly landed gentry. This further disrupts the idyllic village life in that Gwen is already betrothed to John Talbot's gamekeeper Frank Andrews (Patric Knowles).
Despite his apparent disregard for how things work, Larry represents two possible futures for his European relatives - and the division between opinions is significant in defining "The Wolf Man" as a model for the fascist mob in an already institutionalized setting.
Local law enforcement, in the form of Captain Paul Montford (Ralph Bellamy), views Larry as potential muscle for the ranks.
"We should have had him in the guards," Montford says.
But John Talbot would prefer Larry stay at home, caring for the family castle and preparing to assume the family estate. His only other son has died prematurely, another interesting detail when one considers the fascist-model in late World War II ... that the strong young men of a family have died before their fathers.
Larry's outsider status is amplified to symbolic levels by his transformation into a werewolf.
The bite that brings the curse is delivered by an Eastern European, no less, 
the werewolf-gypsy Bela, and his identity as an outsider is thus inexorably linked to the diminutive gypsy mother Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya). Now Talbot is suspected of crimes, and investigated by Montford. John Talbot grows increasingly agitated as his family is drawn into the circle of state interrogation. The choice between family and authority, between blood and consequences, is further focused by this association of Larry Talbot with the persecuted.
Ultimately, the conflict is made bold by Larry's metamorphosis and the mob that hunts him in the forest surrounding the Talbot castle.
Convinced that his son is at least insane, if not an actual monster, John straps Larry to a chair. During this process John Talbot speaks not of the state nor of his place within it, but of "those people," whom he will leave Larry to help.
In the woods the villagers are coordinated by their leaders from a hunting stand. John Talbot spends little time here, making only a token visit before slipping back into the woods. His place among figures of state is no longer comfortable.
Further making the point, enroute to see Larry again, John is confronted by Maleva. The gypsy conducts a kind of mock interrogation - clearly defining what would follow, were Montford or the villagers to discover John slinking home.
Maleva points out, during their brief exchange, John's adherence to the ways of the outsider in that he carries a silver cane for protection against werewolves. Sir John denies her accusations vehemently, resorting to quasi-racial name calling (he denounces Maleva as a witch). She replies by asking him if he's going to visit Larry.
"I wanted to be with my son," he says, his tone nearly apologetic.
This outing of John Talbot as a sympathizer is interrupted by gunfire. The next shot iterates the now-familiar mob mis en scene, the screen filled by human figures carrying torches. At the same time, Gwen finds Maleva, who tells her to leave the woods or "he will find you." Gwen does not listen. Shots of the Wolf Man are intercut with more screen-filling mob shots and then the telling moment.
The Wolf Man approaches the camera, apparently caged by branches, and grips one like the bar of a jail cell. The outsider cannot escape the confines of the forest. Even nature turns against him.
What is left is the choice. The Wolf Man attacks Gwen and the authorities leap from their hunting stand. But it is John Talbot who find her in the clutches of his now outwardly differentiated son. A look of horror upon his face, he clubs the werewolf (outsider) to death with the silver cane. In his decision, he performs an outward act of allegiance to the state.
The authorities gather near the combat to watch. Maleva is visually pained at the sight. The final blows occurs out of our sight as the father destroys his son - the threat to his place in the state - behind a gnarled tree. John Talbot is condemned by his choice to return to the mob. Waggner refuses to let us see the act. We are not implicated, but protected from association with the man who would slay his family to avoid the state's version of Maleva's previous interrogation.
His contrition complete, Sir John is absolved by Captain Montford, who pronounces to the gathered that Gwen was attacked by a beast, and that Larry Talbot fought it off, receiving his mortal wound. The Talbots, for now, will not be stained by Larry. By "turning in" his son, John has protected his place in the state and avoided his own problems with a fascist mob.
LOOKING FORWARD
The parallels between the Talbots plight in "The Wolf Man" and those of Jews and gypsies (among others) in Nazi Germany are fairly clear. The horror film's treatment of the fascist mob undergoes a prescient transformation from 1925 to 1941. Beginning with the formation of the mob in "The Phantom of the Opera," the stories of monsters and how society reacted became a dual scenario, one of watching evil and weakness overcome by community strength at first, but eventually one of the state standards prevaricating from inclusive community.
Out of each crisis, in each of these three films, the mob response places demands upon and creates problems for the principal characters. Whoever its target or collateral damage, the monster (in its quasi-sympathetic role as persecuted) or the aristocrats (pressured or threatened by the surging masses), fascism is predicated upon group thinking in these horror movies. The fear of the streets filled with militant and organized crowds is a thread that could not help but reflect upon the European situation at the time. In the span of less that two decades, the implications and consequences of the fascist state were already the meat and drink of genre film subtext.
Later in the 1950s, the use of mob in horror film would become more refined - and overtly portrayed as evil. In the 1960s, the ideology of the fascist state would be explored through the actual domestic role of fhe family (particularly the female). But in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the fascist mob was nascent and almost purely political.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
