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1 - Parallel Modernities: From Haunted Screen to Universal Horror

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2013

Edited by
Jaimey Fisher
With contributions by
Marco Abel ,
Nora M. Alter ,
Antje Ascheid ,
Hester Baer ,
Steve Choe ,
Paul Cooke ,
Gerd Gemünden ,
Sascha Gerhards ,
Lutz Koepnick  and
Eric Rentschler
...Show all authors
Jaimey Fisher
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Technocultural Studies, and Director of Cinema and Technocultural Studies, at the University of California, Davis.
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Summary

For an exile habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally.

—Edward Said

[My father was] a European intellectual who had based most of his thinking on the great minds of the German language, only to find that it led to a stupid monster of an Austrian painter named Hitler. For the rest of his life he tried to understand how civilization could end up in barbarism.

—Arianné Ulmer Cipes

Edgar G. Ulmer and German Horror Legacies

In an extensive interview with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich in 1970, Edgar G. Ulmer made references to two German sources that gave shape to his famous horror film The Black Cat, which he directed for Universal in 1934: “Junior [Laemmle] gave me free rein to write a horror picture in the style we had started in Europe with Caligari,” only to add a few moments later that the film “was very much out of my Bauhaus period.” This puzzling double reference to two very different and aesthetically even incompatible sources holds an important clue to what Ulmer wanted to achieve with his first film produced by a major studio. Most obviously, this can be read as a typical Ulmerian gesture to establish cultural capital.

Type
Chapter
Information
Generic Histories of German Cinema
Genre and its Deviations
 , pp. 27 - 48
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2013

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