We'll start with the 1921 Swedish film THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE, which has been on my lists a couple years in a row but hasn't made it all the way to Horrorfest until now.
THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE uses the trappings of the horror genre to tell what basically amounts to a morality tale about human relationships. The film starts on New Year's Eve in a small village where a Salvation Army girl (Astrid Holm) is on her death bed. One of her last requests is to see one of the town drunks (Victor Sjostrom).
We find the drunk getting wasted in a nearby graveyard, filling his friends in on the legend of a Phantom Carriage, driven by a ghostly messenger of Death (complete with hooded cloak and scythe), collecting the dead. Legend has it, the last person to die each year is doomed to become the new driver of the carriage.
Here begins a series of flashbacks and side stories filling the viewer in on how the drunk became alienated from his family, involved with the Salvation Army girl and, eventually, visited by the titular carriage. In some ways the movie unfolds as a kind of darker, more sinister IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, as the drunk is taken on a supernatural journey through his past and eventually through the present on a soul-saving journey.
The remarkable aspects of this film all revolve around the special effects. There's extensive use of double exposure in this film to create the ghostly images of the see-through phantoms and carriages. And when I say extensive, I mean extensive. This isn't just a couple trick shots. There are entire sequences built around double exposure. At first glance this might not seem like a big deal for two reasons -- first, that's day 1 stuff by now. We're used to it. Secondly, these days, you can shoot two things separately and combine them later in the lab. Not back then. Back then, you literally had to shoot multiple things multiple times on the same piece of film, on hand-cranked cameras. So this isn't just a matter of printing one image on top of the other. This is a matter of shooting stuff blind with as much attention to detail as possible, hoping the effects come out as they're intended.
Luckily, they do, and they're as effective as anything that comes out of a computer now. Something as simple as a ghost walking behind something that's in the foreground, than passing into the foreground and walking in front of it, is a revelation. The cool thing is, you don't even really notice it unless you stop to think. The movie isn't about the effects, but the effects help tell the story, which turns out to be a fairly melodramatic domestic morality tale.
Still, the effects and the supernatural angle help elevate this material above its leanings toward soap opera theatrics common to other lesser silent flicks, and I consider this a good start to another month of spooky fun.
One interesting note: there's a scene towards the end of the film in which a drunken father bashes down a door with an axe to get at his wife and children. I couldn't help but think of THE SHINING. THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE is famous for influencing Ingmar Bergman, but I suspect Kubrick might have been a fan as well.
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