A Genesis Out of Light

Would it be preposterous to argue that movies are essentially projected books, books made out of light? Even weirder, let’s entertain the idea that Jules Verne’s science-fiction imagery, which finds itself transfigured early in the development of cinema, is not alone: the audience — you, me and everyone watching — dissolves into moving illustrations. “Motion pictures”. A horrifying thought if we “foolishly” believe that our three-dimensional selves could squish, flatten (and like it!).

Dating at least as far back as Georges Méliès, the cinema of bodily transformation did not necessarily equate with “horror” per se. The horror film was eventually codified as genre from the cinema of bizarre attractions exemplified by Lon Chaney, master of grotesque makeups and bodily contortions, but in the early cinema it was standard procedure to have one's detached head inflated to fill the room (The Man with the India Rubber Head) or multiplied into a row of bodiless noggins, singing or rather mouthing in harmony (The Four Troublesome Heads). Then came Nosferatu, preordained to shimmer on-screen. Vampires, immortals of the night, slain by sunlight, rose out their tombs in the movie theaters of the 1920s and never returned. They sit next to us in the dark, having ceded the power of hypnotism to the glowing screen itself. Photochemical vagaries invariably allow movie darkness to behave in uncanny ways; as if the physical properties of film followed no rules, and thus invited us to accept its essential anarchy without question. Before us, the darkness GLOWS.