Screaming Projector Episode 2 - Origins: Horror Through History

Welcome back! This is Episode 2 of Screaming Projector Podcast. In this episode we chart the origins of horror and its lineage from 1930s Germany, to a Director in a studio alone with a synthesizer who would change horror forever. Join us for this, our second and final, origin story before our show pivots to the pairings. Enjoy! 

Transcript

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You're back for more. Welcome back to Screaming Projector, a podcast about two art forms that have always understood each other. Metal and horror. Let's go. Okay, we're halfway there. This is part two of two. This is the last origin story. After this, we can get to the pairings, the matchups, and the arguments. Alright. Last episode we went back to where heavy metal began. The post-war blues, the power of distortion, the moment Sabbath looked at the world and decided soft music just wasn't gonna cut it. Today we're doing the same thing for horror. But instead of amps and guitar strings, we're talking about celluloid, film, cinema. Because before horror became a genre, it had to be invented. And the story of how it was invented, who made it, why they made it, what they were afraid of, is a hell of a ride. Let's go back to the beginning. The silent era. The year is 1920. World War I has just ended, millions are dead. Europe, especially Germany, is a wreck. Economic collapse, political chaos, a generation of survivors walking around with unspeakable things in their heads. And out of that atmosphere comes a film that Roger Ebert would one day call the first true horror film. This is the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Veen, Caligari is unlike anything audiences had ever seen before. The sets are deliberately wrong, buildings that lean impossible angles, shadows painted directly onto walls, a world that looks like the inside of a nightmare. And that was the point. This was German expressionism, an art movement built on the idea that your inner state should bleed out into the world around you. Post-war Germany was psychologically shattered, and Caligari looked like it. The story follows a hypnotist, Dr. Caligari, who controls a sleepwalker named Cesare, using him to commit murders. But there's a twist. It's eventually revealed that the narrator telling the story is himself an inmate in an asylum. Caligari is the director of that asylum. Maybe none of it was real, maybe the monster was always in charge. That ambiguity, who holds authority, who is really mad, was a direct response to what post-war Germans had lived through, and it would echo through horror cinema for the next century. Two years later, 1922 comes Nosferatu, directed by FW Murnow. It's an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. So unauthorized that Stoker's widow sued and had nearly every print destroyed. Fortunately, some survived. And what survived is terrifying. Not the suave, aristocratic Dracula we'd see later. Count Orlock, played by Max Shrek, is a rodent-like, bald, feral monster. Long claws, dead eyes, and a posture like a disease walking upright. Nasferatu also introduced something that wasn't in the original novel, the idea that sunlight kills vampires. That detail alone has shaped every vampire story that came after. Here's what's important about the Silent Era. Without sound to rely on, these filmmakers had to make horror visual. They had to make the frame itself disgusting, the distorted angles, the extreme shadows, the grotesque makeup. These weren't just style choices, they were the language of fear before fear had a voice. That visual grammar of horror, it never went away. You can trace a direct line from those painted shadows in 1920 to every horror film that came after. This is a line, just like Holst's line in the 1800s, to Birmingham, England in the 70s, and Sabbath. Universal Monsters, horror goes mainstream. Let's jump forward a decade. Sound has arrived. Hollywood is in its golden age, and Universal Pictures is about to make horror into an industry. 1931 is the pivot year. Two films, two icons, Dracula and Frankenstein. Both released within months of each other. Bella Lagosi's Dracula is everything Nasferatu's Count Orlock wasn't. Polished, charming, dressed for the opera. He's the monster who doesn't look like one, and that's a different kind of horror. That's the predator you might let into your home. But it's Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's monster that really does something new. Karloff didn't have a single line of dialogue, but he created one of the most iconic characters in film history. And here's the thing about the monster. He's sympathetic. He didn't ask to be made. He doesn't understand why people fear him. He's the outsider, the misfit, the creature that society rejects because he doesn't look like it wants him to. That theme, the monster is a tragic outcast, would define the entire Universal Monster era. The wolfman is cursed, not evil, the mummy is driven by grief. The creature from the Black Lagoon is defending his home. These aren't villains, they're exiles. Sound familiar? We'll get there. Universal's monsters also did something culturally significant. They democratized horror. These weren't avant-garde films for arthouse crowds, they were wide release entertainment. Horror became something everybody watched, something you took your kids to, something that sold magazine covers and Halloween costumes. By the mid-1940s, Universal's Golden Age would dawn. By the mid-1940s, Universal's Golden Age wound down, but it left behind a vocabulary. Horror now had its archetypes the vampire, the creature, the cursed man, and the mad scientist. Every horror film since then has been in conversation with those templates, even when it's trying to destroy them. Psycho and the Turn Inward. Through the late 40s and 50s, horror went through a strange phase. Science fiction crept in. But the film that really cracked everything open came in 1960. Alfred Hitchcock's psycho didn't have a creature, it didn't have a monster from another dimension, it had Norman Bates, a mild-mannered, polite, nervous around pretty women, running a quiet motel off the highway. The horror of Psycho is that the monster is a person, a neighbor, a guy you might feel sorry for. Hitchcock also did something radical with structure. He killed his main character. Janet lays Marion Crane, barely halfway through the film, in the shower, 30 seconds of fast cuts, and a screeching Bernard Herman score that permanently rewired how audiences experienced film music. After that scene, nothing felt safe. The story could go anywhere. Anyone could die. The monster was no longer ancient or supernatural, it was modern, it was domestic, and it lived next door. That shift from the external mythic threat to the internal human one would define everything that came in the 1970s. The 1970s. Blood on the floor. If psycho cracked the door open, the 1970s kicked it off its hinges. America in the early 70s was in a particular kind of psychological rot. Vietnam, Watergate, the Death of the 60s optimism, a generation that had been told to trust institutions had watched those institutions lie to them repeatedly on camera. Horror felt that, and Horror responded. In 1974, a 29-year-old filmmaker named Toby Hooper shot a movie in the Texas heat for less than $140,000 with a cast of local unknowns. He called it the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You know the film. What you might not know is how deliberately it was made. Hooper reportedly wanted a PG rating. He believed the film was less graphically violent than its reputation suggested. He was right. Most of the gore in Texas Chainsaw is implied, not shown. What makes it unbearable is the atmosphere, the sweat, the heat, the haze, the rural isolation, the family of killers who feel like something genuinely wrong with America, not imported gothic evil, but homegrown depravity. Texas Chainsaw gave horror the masked, hulking faceless killer. It gave horror the final girl, the last survivor who was to face the monster alone. And perhaps most importantly, it introduced power tools as murder weapons, which sounds almost like a joke until you watch the film and realize it doesn't feel like that at all. The horror of Leatherface isn't supernatural. It's economic. It's social. It's what happens when the American Heartland gets left behind and something monstrous fills the vacuum. Two years later, in 1976, comes something completely different. Brian De Palma's Carrie, based on Stephen King's first published novel. Carrie is horror as emotional truth. Carrie White is bullied, abused at home, humiliated at school. She also has telekinetic powers. When those two things collide at the prom, in one of the most cathartic and devastating sequences in horror history, the monster isn't an outsider. The monster is the person everyone made suffer until she couldn't take it anymore. Carrie is the universal monster, sympathetic outsider pushed to its logical conclusion. The creature is still tragic, but now the tragedy turns outward in blood and fire. Between Psycho, Texas Chainsaw, and Carrie, horror in the 70s had done something profound. It had made the genre into a mirror. Not just scary stories, but a place to process things that culture couldn't talk about any other way. Power, victimhood, rage, what we do to outsiders, what outsiders do when they've had enough. Then in 1978, everything synthesizes. John Carpenter's Halloween opens on a single, unbroken point of view shot. We're watching a young couple through a window, then inside the house, then grabbing a knife, then stabbing. When we finally pull back, we realize we've been seeing through the eyes of a six-year-old boy in a clown mask, standing in his front yard holding the weapon. That boy is Michael Myers. Halloween is a masterclass in what horror can be when it's working at peak efficiency. It invented or perfected almost every slasher convention, the babysitter, the suburban knight, the killer who can't be explained, the final girl. But what elevates it beyond formula is Carpenter's almost total refusal to explain Michael. He doesn't have a tragic backstory. He doesn't want anything. He just is. A psychiatrist in the film calls him pure evil. And for once in horror, that's not a cop-out. It's the point. But here's what I want you to really hear about Carpenter. He composed the score himself. Working in the studio, over the course of about three days, John Carpenter wrote and performed the Halloween theme, that iconic 5'4 piano figure on a synthesizer. He taught himself keyboards specifically to score his own films because he couldn't afford composers. The score for Halloween is minimal, repetitive, hypnotic, and deeply unsettling in a way that orchestral music rarely achieves. It sounds like a threat made into a pulse. It sounds like a heartbeat of evil, a heartbeat of terror, a heartbeat of tension. Carpenter has said that the music was inspired partly by Ennio Morricone and partly by Bernard Herman. And his influence went in another direction too. The minimalistic synthesizer aesthetic Carpenter developed across Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, and the Ennio Morricone scored The Thing in 1982 would directly feed into the electronic music of the 80s and beyond. You can hear Carpenter in Synthwave, in dark electronic music, in the atmospheric side of Doom and Black Metal. And that connection, a horror filmmaker composing music that sounds like it belongs in a metal context, is not accidental. We're going to come back to it. But for now, Carpenter is where this origin story ends. By 1982, horror has its grammar fully formed. The sympathetic monster, the final girl, the human killer, the landscape of pure dread, the synthesizer score that sounds like something deep and ancient being dragged into a modern world. It's all there. The pieces are on the board. So, that's where horror comes from. At least on screen. Post-war German Dread, Universal Archetypes, Hitchcock's Terrifying Normalcy, the Raw Fury of the 70s, and Carpenter pulling it all together into something that would haunt the next 40 years of art. Next episode, we start connecting the threads. Because while all this was happening in cinema, something was happening in music too. And the two worlds were listening to each other. More than either one admitted. Until then, stay heavy, stay scared, and keep the lights off. Fulcie lives. That's a wrap on this one. Thank you for listening to Screaming Projector. New episodes dropped regularly. You can follow us on Instagram at Screaming Projector, and you can find everything at Screaming Projector.com. I'd like to hear what you have to say. I want to know what your thoughts are. Hit me up at Dave at Screaming Projector.com. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. It genuinely helps new people find the show. If you'd like to help support what we're building here, we're on Patreon. Every little bit helps. Until the next time, stay heavy, stay scared. Culture lives. Screaming Projector is a production of Screaming Projector Media. Music by D218 and Dave.