So where does the story of Christmas horror on the big screen begin? Well, given that one of the best loved stories about Yuletide features a quartet of ghosts, it is perhaps no surprise that the first cinematic festive chills come with Marley’s ghost menacing Scrooge. Now, many films from the birth of cinema are now sadly lost forever, but the first version of A Christmas Carol we know about came in 1901 with Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost, which starred Daniel Smith as the famous miser.
This short, silent movie was made by British film studio Paul's Animatograph Works, and compresses Dickens’ novel into a mere six minutes and twenty seconds! Sadly however only half the footage survives today, but what remains of the movie shows us some ambitious ghostly effects which no doubt gave the audiences back in the day a good shiver!
However many more film versions of Scrooge’s tale would follow, with further short and silent versions in 1908, 1910 1913, 1914, 1922, and 1923. The Right to Be Happy (1916), directed by and starring Rupert Julian as Scrooge was the first feature-length adaptation, although is sadly now lost. While the first version with sound was a British short, Scrooge in 1928.
The first full length feature with sound too would come in 1935, with Seymour Hicks as Scrooge, Donald Calthrop as Bob Cratchit, and Philip Frost as Tiny Tim. And every since then virtually every year has seen a new movie version of the Dickens classic.
Now, some versions do lean more heavily into the spooky side of things than others. For example, the George C Scott version from 1984, is wonderfully eerie and wintery, and is drenched in a Victorian ghost story atmosphere. However a straw poll of my listeners revealed that the scariest version was commonly thought to be a short cartoon adaptation from 1971 by legendary animator Richard Williams, which features the great Alastair Sim as Scrooge and Sir Michael Horden as Marley, and is packed full of chilling imagery, making it easily the most phantasmagorical version of the Dickens classic.
But while Mr Marley undoubtedly often provides a chill, and the shrouded Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come has put the wind up many a film viewer, A Christmas Carol is not strictly speaking a horror tale, and so we must venture further afield for the first true Christmas horrors.
In 1913 there was a Russian silent movie entitled The Night Before Christmas which sounds promising. Based on a tale by Nicholai Gogol, this forty minute short begins with a witch called Solokha, calling up a rather hairy devil and together they conspire to steal the bright crescent moon out of the sky, plunging the world into darkness.
However despite this promising start, and featured an impressively monstrous devil make-up, unfortunately this tale which involves drunken Cossacks and star-crossed lovers, is a folk comedy, with many farcical elements including a succession of characters being put into sacks and mixed up.
Another silent movie often mentioned in the origins of big screen Christmas horror is The Phantom Carriage from Sweden released back in 1921. This movie tells the tale of a destitute drunkard, David, who passed away on New Year’s Eve, just as midnight chimes. However anyone who passes away in such circumstances is compelled to drive Death’s carriage to collect the souls of the departed.
Again this sounds just the ticket, but sadly does not quite fit. For the film only begins on New Year’s Eve, and as the unfolding story is something like a cross between A Christmas Carol and the later It’s A Wonderful Life, the majority of the movie takes place at other times of the year, as our lead character, David confronts the various events in his past that lead him to this supernatural predicament.
Now there are some nice ghostly effects, and one of the flashback sequences where a furious David menaced his wife and child with an axe was clearly borrowed by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining. But again The Phantom Carriage is not really a horror movie, and it isn’t really set at Christmas either!. And while this is one of the gems of the silent era, and has been hugely influential, overall this is a melodrama rather than a fright flick, And so our quest continues tomorrow!
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