The Changeling is my favorite horror movie. To keep it fresh, I will only watch it with someone who hasn’t seen it. Like MidnightRadio I grew up with Freddy and Jason et al - plenty scary enough for sleepovers, but not very rewatchable. Do kids today find them scary?
Or the Haystack Code. 
The Changeling has been mentioned three times here, but the only horror film by that title on the Imdb is one from 1980 – well before the period under discussion. Are you talking about a different film?
Nope, there’s only one Changeling – 1980. It probably doesn’t belong in a discussion about classic old horror movies, since the OP is about movies from the 30’s and 40’s. It’s not a classic yet, but it will be.
As has been stated above, yes, things were scarier then. We are jaded. This goes back to the earliest days – when they first showed a film of a train coming down the trach, practically at the viewer, people watching the movie ducked.
When they first showed Windsor McKay’s cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur, people thought that it was a life-sized mechanical contraption.
When Arthur Conan Doyle showed scenes from the as-yet unfinished movie The Lost World to reporters (hinting that these might actually be real movies, somehow), they were amaxzed and perplexed. We’re talking about reporters from The New York Times being taken in by stop-motiion animation so crude by present-day standards that they wouldn’t fool a five year old.
When King Kong first played at the Roxy in New York, there were reports of women fainting. There were other people who weren’t at all taken in, of course, but some folks werre overwhelmed.
As recently as 1951 The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms received an “adults only” “X Certificate” in Great Britain.
When the Brewster ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, although filmed a little earlier) talk about “that horrible movie” ( “Frankenstein”, albeit not named), they’re being accurate, for the time.
More likely 10 seconds. L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1895).
Do you have a cite for this? I’m not doubting you, I’d just like to read more about it. Maybe some anecdotal stories? I just watched Gertie online and it seems more than obvious that it’s animated. I can see how people might have been taken in by stop-motion animation, but not being able to tell the difference between a photograph and a fairly crude drawing… That just blows my mind.
And if you want to watch it, here it is on YouTube
Ever seen the earlier version of war of the worlds? It’s so not-scary it’s actually funny.
Why in the world did people freak out over it? I don’t get it either, man.
I thought people freaked out over the radio play.
Unfortunately, I don’t recall where I read it – but it was a reliab;le source. I’m pretty sure I can find cites for the other things I list, though. I’d have to search for the stuff on Gertie, though.
But I can certainly believe it. Especially when you’re hit with something new, it’s hard to take it all in at once, and you’re an unreliable witness. At the time Gertie came out, there were very few cartoons (There’s an ongoing war about who “invented” animation. Reading the accounts of those who were there, it seems to be that a lot of people came up with it independently. So “Gertie” and McKay’s other stuff is as original as “Humorous Phases” and other early cartoons, and an audience that saw one probably hadn’t seen any of the others). Add to this the fact that some early shorts DID use mechanical dinosaurs (I know of two that did), and it’s not hard to believe that somebody too wowed by the unique experience would get a mistaken impression that I, as a kid who grew up watching cartoons, wouldn’t even think to have. I’m still amaxzed that a reporter from the New York Times could think that some of the Lost World footage was the Real Thing, because a lot of it looks unbelievably choppy and poorly executed. (Not all of it – there are wonderfully fluid scenes , with flowing water matted in. But some of the dinosaur fights look like bad puppetry.)
It’s such fun to discuss things I don’t know about. So I’ll make this a question.
Is there any chance, I wonder, that the phenomenon has something to do with the evolution of the technology itself? I mean, early photographs and, later, early film wasn’t 100% successful at making real people look especially lifelike, action was stuttering or blurred, sound was at first absent and then tinny and unreal compared with reality. What I’m wondering is, could it be that people were used to making allowances for the shortcomings of the recording technology, and therefore likely to attribute any deviance from realism to that rather than to inauthenticity of the thing being filmed/photographed/recorded?
I mean, face it: secret killers, ghosts, vampires, monsters – these are all pretty much by definition scary, then and now. And we have radio and summer camp memories to prove that the evidence of our own eyes isn’t a necessary condition for inducing fear. The problem, maybe, lies with the fact that today we do not consider the contemporary limitations of the medium when watching old movies, and judge the quality of the greasepaint more harshly than we should, whereas our grandparents were used to things that they knew were real looking fake at the movies, and so were better equipped to suspend disbelief.
Of course, language and storytelling techniques have also changed, and the distraction this causes can detract from horror, suspense, comedy or any other effect a movie hopes to achieve. But this can be overcome, I think, by spending more time in films of that era. Like anything else, if you want to appreciate a given art form from an earlier era, you may have to work at it some.
I certainly do, in ways you’re thinking of and in others.
When Universal made The Werewolf of London and The Wolfman they show a guy with wolflike characteristics. But a werewolf was supposed to be a person who can turn into a wolf. So why change it?
1.) You probably couldn’t get a trained wolf to do the things you want.
2.) Puppet wolves would look stupid
3.) A real wolf, even if it performed flawlessly, still wouldn’t look very scary.
So you create a new monster, with wolf characteristics, because it’s something that you CAN do with available make-up technology, and that will look sufficiently odd to be scary. I’ve argued elsewhere that they based the makeup on those sideshow hairy folks, because it filled the bill of “wolflike”, yet was clearly human and – important as well – it left the actor with enough of his face to convey emotion and nuance.
But the ideal werewolf was an oversized wolf that could stand on its hind feet. You saw this in illustrations and comic-styler magazines from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
As soon as movie technology evolved to the point of showing oversized wolf-creatures that could stand on hind legs like that, they did. An American Werewolf in London and The Howling came out at almost the same time. (So did Wolfen, but it didn’t rely on FX).
Nowadays, with CGI, we get the fiull-blown oversized Wolf that Walks, now with Facial Expressions in An American Werewolf in Paris and Van Helsing.
So, no, Lon Chaney or Henry Hull or Warner Oland with hair all over their faces aren’t anywhere near as scary as a fast-moving, wall-climbing CGI werewolf. But you work with what you have.
Are we talking about movies from the 1890s or the 1930s? Because in the movies I see from the 1930s, the action is neither stuttering nor blurred. And the people look lifelike, although often much more attractive than life makes most people.
He’s responding to my comments about Windsor McKay’s Gerties the Dinosaur, which hails from 1914. If you’ve got a bad print (and I’ll bet a lot of tours had bad prints…especially after they toured for a while) and you’re not at all familiar with even the concept of a cartoon, I could see it.
I think he’s speaking much more broadly than just Gertie the Dinosaur. That was long before sound, and he talks about early sound movies.
In case anyone wants to watch it: Gertie
I thought it was cute but it wasted a lot of time with her just rocking back and forth and stuff. I guess when that was novel it was enough for the audience.
In the case of that material, it should be remembered that, as originally presented, McCay is delivering a continuous narration. The points where Gertie isn’t doing anything are points where McCay’s narration would have taken some time to deliver.
Why was the original War of the Worlds scarier than the Cruise remake. ? It was and I think is was the way they handled and built the suspense. I also liked the slow build up to finding what the problem was. But I liked them both.
The original Mummy was scary. Dracula was very scary. The remake of the thing just was a big miss.