Honey of a Horror for Halloween
A 1929 Chiller-Diller Finally Got Right
Been since 1967 a good idea to keep eye out for Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), it showing up in Carlos Clarens’ An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (page at left), a $6.95 book many boys wanted from Santa that year. I got mine, read, and faced reality of not having seen and probably not ever getting to see, most of films “Illustrated” by Mr. Clarens. Seven Footprints to Satan was among these, The Gorilla (1927) and The Terror (1928) tantalizing on a same display. After enough years, you resign to denial of ones vanished long before, Seven Footprints to Satan among then-missing, so how is it a private enterprise called Serial Squadron offered a Blu-Ray for which there was a high-quality You Tube preview? Per such proof that here was the genuine article, I ordered. Squadron has added a score with screams and gunshots to emulate Vitaphone discs of long ago. Rediscovered Seven Footprints to Satan, “re” misapplied as when did any of us “discover” it to begin with? --- gives life to imagery Clarens and other monster mavens dangled via stills and/or blurs online even a most patient seeker could not endure, me thankful never to have sat for any such clouded transfer, the better to be swept away now by joy that is this Blu-Ray.
Easy to overlook is early-on readers of An Illustrated History of the Horror Film old enough to look back less than forty years at first-runs of what was lost to ones of us younger at the time. Had I been age of now in 1967 and buying this book, all of what Clarens described would be, if not fresh memories, at least still vivid ones, like what it was seeing Jaws or The Godfather: Part Two when new. Imagine if those crumbled to nitrate dust in such interim. Must have been sad not being able to revisit favorites and having but memory and a few stills to know you saw them once and would not again. Movies in that sense were more live performance, equivalent to “I heard Caruso sing … saw Houdini get out of handcuffs … watched Maude Adams as Peter Pan,” varied you-had-to-be-theres-or-forget-its. Seven Footprints wrested out of Satan grip spins imagination toward grails that are A Blind Bargain with Chaney, or dare we suggest, London After Midnight. Had someone suggested a year ago we’d get The (silent) Bat back, let alone The Bat Whispers on wide and crisp Blu-Ray … well, dreams can come true it seems. Accounts I hear of reels by thousands lacking only time and manpower to identify them … but best not light up over that, might as profitably quest for Yetis or unicorns because after all, there are those who claim to have seen them. How was Seven Footprints to Satan sold, perceived by a public coming to it fresh? Ads tell at least a partial story, one here with promise of “28 Baffling Scenes, 1001 Gripping Thrills” (with all that to advantage, how/why did it lose money for WB?). Having now seen Seven Footprints to Satan, I would sign affidavit to effect that there really are 28 baffling scenes, likely more. It’s fun to be frightened!, bally and barkers used to say, fun the key because who sought to be truly scared by films where living dealt scares enough? Always seemed to me monsters should be arresting, not revolting, side trip I’ll not take today. Enough to say that seeing The Cat and the Canary, or any of the Bats, should prepare you for quasi-chilling and comedy that is reality of Seven Footprints to Satan, so no complaint please over “cop-out” or letdown at its ending. Them was the rules then, and they were inviolate.
Comedy as relief was essential to what was determinably light amusement. No one was for leaving theatres unstrung or depressed. Enough of what waited for them outside saw to that. Seven Footprints to Satan, in its final outcome especially, was ideal fulfillment of what makers and their audience desired from a “mystery thriller.” Our expectations having changed so radically over a succeeding century does not make us right and them wrong. We get pleasure in what they thought would “thrill,” as yes it does satisfy to see devices untried since silents and grotesqueries foreclosed for one reason or other from modern films. Less explicable is supernatural events always rationally explained at that time, as if maintaining Code of its own that no ghosts shall walk among us. Was industry being “responsible” in the face of spiritualism and belief in back-from-dead gripping multitudes after a first World War? Too many it seems were talking to departeds via false mediums, charlatans of all stripes. Famed proponent Arthur Conan Doyle was put under microscope of is he right, or what? I’ve not seen above feature asking that question (see lobby card), film which we assume is missing, but would figure it no way supported Doyle’s notion that the dead could come back and talk with us. Motion pictures as sensible outreach assured such things had no basis in reality. I’m trying to think of a full-on silent spook story and can not so far come up with one, but what if there were several among so-called “lost” features? Are always rational explanations what it took to keep a twenties viewership calm? Difficult to know how vulnerable folks in the twenties would have been to latter-day horror assaults, us not better off now for being numb to them. Seven Footprints to Satan is like Grand Touring a haunted house as conceived by long past era that may itself have been a little haunted. '29 photos and film can convince us so, but then there are those who’d say circumstance of a mere decade ago might have a same unsettling effect on us. Each generation seeks their own level of fear, or level of same they go to for recreation.
Do current haunted houses dwell on dwarves, gorillas, “dog men,” Asian agents of harm? Based on '29 Footprints, I'd say not. Apes loosed seem archaic to us unless they carry a chain saw. Footprints is keyed to thrills outlandish enough to indicate an all-in-fun finish. To be surprised or let down by same is to not know conventions in place when Seven Footprints to Satan was new. 2024 is so determined for chillers to terrify as to be almost unreasonable about it. What if early filmmakers had served them our way? They sort of did with Freaks and Island of Lost Souls and look what happened to those. Seven Footprints to Satan was OK for children to enjoy, and I’ll guess they were sophisticated enough in 1929 for Mom-Dad not to have to explain that it’s all a frolic so don’t get skittish. Too bad Ackerman, Bradbury, other first-run veterans, aren’t around to tell specific what those experiences were like (plenty of anecdotal evidence re Phantom of the Opera, but what of obscure others?). Fact is I'm just guessing at how Foot falls fell. Old Famous Monsters magazines are spotted with imagery and comment about Seven Footprints to Satan, the title thus presence in my life from early on, one of reasons it satisfies to finally see the feature. Director was Benjamin Christensen, who we’d know better if more of his films survived, Christensen rather like Paul Leni, whose films do survive, even if Paul himself did not. Christensen’s House of Horror and The Haunted House, coming before or just after release of Footprints, are gone as footprints on Egyptian sand. We get sense of fun in Satan’s making from cast-crew captures here, appeal-crossing-all-genres Thelma Todd as lead with Creighton Hale, latter not dissimilar from who he was in Cat/Canary, if less simpy and ineffectual. There are favorites Angelo Rossitto and Sojin plus Sheldon Lewis who had done creepy serials and was in Jekyll-Hyde with Barrymore, also Charles Gemora in ape skin. It was Italians and the Danish who preserved Seven Footprints to Satan, prints for years ragged and with foreign subtitles. I much enjoyed Squadron’s presentation. If Halloween has a highlight for 2024, Seven Footprints to Satan is it for me.
6 Comments:
Wow! Can't wait - will probably spring for the BluRay rather than any downloads. Man, how I remember staring at those tantalizing stills of silent era horrors! Even as youngsters we knew most of this pre-Dracula stuff was probably explained away at a so-called 'rational' climax, at least in American films. Maybe it was for the best, we thought, that we'd never ever see the actual films, since the it-was-all-a-hoax/dream wrap-up was bound to disappoint. Well, now we do get to see at least some of these hidden treasures and the endings are actually part of the fun - the wildly contrived explanations are more far-fetched and unbelievable than a simple supernatural suggestion!
On a side note, I love you calling out ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE HORROR FILM as a beloved Christmas gift. Warmly in my heart, I remember early movie books as specific birthday and Christmas gifts to an adolescent me! The Clarens book was one for me too, as was Everson's THE FILMS OF LAUREL & HARDY and Ray Stuart's IMMORTALS OF THE SCREEN. Hell, I had taken Joe Franklin's CLASSICS OF THE SILENT SCREEN so many times out of the public library, my parents just up and bought it for me, no special occasion! And, yes, we all know Everson ghost-wrote that one too.
Seven Footprints to Satan is an absolute delight, and probably my favorite classic horror film. It's the old-dark-house movie to end all old-dark-house movies. It had to follow the Cat and Canary template of comedic scares with an ultimately rational resolution, but did so in the most self-parodic, over-the-top way possible. It was, as they say in the UK, "taking the piss" out of the sub-genre. No surprise that Benjamin Christensen, the man who once filmed a coven of witches lining up to kiss Satan's keyster, viewed the assignment as an opportunity for perverse fun. He turned the film as a glorious f-you joke by amping up the monster thrills and pushing the obligatory "letdown" ending into delicious absurdity.
Hey John, thank you for alerting me to the existence of "Seven Footprints to Satan" -- been wanting to see this for decades upon decades. That still of Thelma Todd with Sheldon Lewis brought back memories of me wondering if I was going to live long enough to see it.
Sheldon Lewis also starred in the first Jekyll-Hyde movie (a one-reeler) -- and at the end it was passed off as a dream! What a disappointment.
Dan Mercer on science and war effects on horror, spooks, and such:
I was watching Rex Ingram’s “The Magician,” a beautifully made film from 1926 based on W. Somerset Maugham’s satiric take on Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed “wickedest man in the world,” but it occurred to me that films taking magic and the supernatural seriously would have been rare then, at least in this country. More common would have been spook shows mingling chills and laughter, with a commonplace explanation provided for all the things that go “bump in the night.” Lon Chaney’s grotesques were not exceptions so much as revelations of aberrant psychology, with physical deformity a metaphor.
No doubt the utter ascendancy of science and industry accounted for the relegation of the possibility of a spiritual existence to superstition and fairy tales. The electric light, telephone, steam and internal combustion engines, and astronomical and surgical marvels seemed to liberate mankind from the constraints of the past. As such, mainstream religion relinquished the realm of reason to science, content to occupy whatever it had not yet claimed. And so, the movies would have treated ghosts and demons as the preoccupations of simple folk, but nothing to be frightened of.
Charles Fort would have fun with the presumptions of science in a series of books that cataloged strange occurrences which seemed to have no place, as far as science was concerned. They were “the damned,” which is to say, the excluded by science, such as falls of fish and frogs, people spontaneously bursting into flame, and mysterious lights in the sky. His book “Lo!” noted the many times astronomers confidently predicted the appearance of a star or a comet, only for the astronomical body to prove uncooperative. Most people, though, were content to let him have his little joke, for science was in the big picture, not such little details.
This time of seeming wonders, however, had a heart of darkness, in the terrible devastation of the First World War. Millions of young men had died before weapons of such destructive force as to beggar the imagination. No conception of hell could have eclipsed what the survivors had experienced on the battlefield, the charnel fields seeded with bodies torn up again and again in unending bombardments, with only the rats growing fat and sleek. Science, it seemed, could as well be found in the snuffing out of a life as the turning on of an electric light.
Edgar Ulmer’s “The Black Cat” is perhaps the riposte to what had been a time of optimism and certainty. The glistening, art deco home of the architect, Hjalmar Poelzig, is built upon the remains of Fort Marmorus, or as his antagonist, Dr. Vitus Verdegast describes it, “A masterpiece of construction built upon the ruins of the masterpiece of destruction—a masterpiece of murder!” Poelzig represents the rationality of science, with its streamlined beauty, yet even as his home is undermined by the munitions still stored in Marmorus, his science has been seduced by the greater power seemingly available through the occult. Fallen man had not been relegated to the past after all, but still dwelled within, with science only the latest means by which he would seek expression.
I do not believe that we are necessarily more aware today of the limitations of science or of men, not when “follow the science” is an invocation for ever broadening political power. But as far as films are concerned, horror and fantasy seemed to exist more for carnal pleasures, that is, in graphic depictions of sex or violence. They are in a way not so far removed from the old spook shows, as far as taking the spiritual seriously, but a good deal less innocent.
I hate to correct Kevin K., but Sheldon Lewis's first film appearance as Messr's J and K were far down the list of film versions of the Stevenson book. The first known is a 1908 Selig one-reel version with unknown cast (whatever the imd(um)b claims), then both a 1912 Thanhouser version with James Cruze and an Imp 1913 version with King Baggott, among several others.
Lewis makes his filmic bow in the part in 1920, in a low-budget knockoff designed to compete with the John Barrymore Paramount version that came out at the same time. The Lewis version runs five reels and is somewhat interesting as it was set in contemporary times, and Lewis gives a hammy/silly performance as Hyde.
Lewis did also make a one-reel talkie version for Master Art in 1934, apparently it was a filmed version of his Tab Show/Vaudeville act in which he recreated the role.
RICHARD M ROBERTS
I had the Sheldon Lewis J & K on 8mm. Not a lot of fun. Bit the bullet. Ordered 7 FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN though I have another pretty good version of it. Canada Post may go on strike. Got everything crossed that can be crossed. I bought the download of THE PHANTOM CREEPS. I don't believe we can actually get this as a true download. It stays online which is a real bummer as I want to watch it on the 150 foot screen. Bela is wonderfully over the top.
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