When you’re making a war movie, do you really need extra horror? The new JJ Abrams-produced Overlord thinks so, as GIs dropped into Europe stumble across a Nazi zombie soldier-breeding programme. But even if you haven’t seen similar stories (Dead Snow, Deathwatch), Overlord’s war-gore fusion is less novel than it first appears.
In his new book, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror, author W Scott Poole argues that the first world war invented movie horror as we know it. It gave humanity a new vocabulary: apocalyptic landscapes, rat-infested trenches, corpses, mutilation, dismemberment, disfigurement, death on an inconceivable scale. And that’s before you get to the effects on the psyche and the soul.
Those traumas fed straight into the cinema of the age, Poole suggests, and they’ve stayed there since. Overlord’s zombies – and pretty much every other movie zombie – can trace their origins back to Abel Gance’s 1919 movie J’Accuse, a first world war story that memorably climaxes with thousands of corpses rising from the battlefield and marching home to haunt the living. The war had not finished when Gance filmed the scene; he used 2,000 French soldiers on leave as extras.
Then there was German cinema, which gave us seminal horrors such as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and The Golem – stories of corpse-like phantoms and monsters raging out of control. It gave us Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – the archetypal “mad scientist” depiction – and M, the first serial killer movie. Many of these movies’ makers were war veterans, and their war-scarred audiences clearly had an appetite for horror.
The first world war soon reached Hollywood, mostly via European émigrés such as Brit James Whale, who fought in the trenches and served as a prisoner of war. This fed into classic horrors such as Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House. Audiences had never seen anything like Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, a disfigured freak made from parts of corpses. Whale had. In terms of horror, he’d seen it all.
Overlord isn’t the only effects-enhanced war movie around right now, though. There is also They Shall Not Grow Old, a new doc assembled entirely from archive footage, which has been digitally cleaned-up, colourised and 3D-ified, with first-hand narration from veterans. Directed by Peter Jackson, it is probably the best evocation of the Great War ever made. Like the soldiers of Gance’s J’Accuse, these men have been brought back from the dead, you could say, but while there is much that is grim and terrifying in They Shall Not Grow Old, there are also moments of courage, camaraderie, even humour. More enriching and profound than any CGI horror.
Overlord is in UK cinemas from 7 November
