Why do we laugh at old horror films?

Can you patronise the dead?

The Prince Charles Cinema, just off Leicester Square, is one of the best independent cinemas in London (partly by lieu of being one of the only independent cinemas in London). A lifetime membership at the cinema entitles you to money off tickets and snacks, a weekly £1 screening of a random film, as well as a pair of free tickets to any film, all for about £60; somehow, over my own lifetime so far, I’ve managed to buy two of these memberships for myself. It’s a favourite haunt of film nerds turned directors like Edgar Wright and Emerald Fennell, and often shows older and out-of-circulation films, including by member request – for example, recent seasons focused on Wong Kar-Wai, and Noah Baumbach. A lot of things are described as “cult” these days; the PCC is perhaps a little too well-known to be truly cult, but it comes close. Before screenings, if you’re lucky, you’ll be treated to a pre-recorded video of exploitation legend John Waters telling you to “Turn off your phone, asshole!” Tommy Wiseau regularly flies in from the States to host screenings his infamous film The Room, dubbed one of the worst ever made. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time split between this cinema’s two screens.

Way back in frozen, dark January, the Prince Charles hosted a screening of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu. You might have heard of it: produced in Germany following the First World War, it’s a famous early retelling of Dracula, although the filmmakers were sued by Bram Stoker’s heirs, and most copies of it were destroyed by court order. Nonetheless, several prints survived, and so we’re lucky enough to be able, today, to see the film as those a century ago would have seen it.

Nosferatu is a deeply weird and creepy film, not least when considering the context around its production. The war pervades it. Albin Grau, the occultist who produced the film, claimed he came across the legend of the undead while fighting in Serbia, where a farmer supposedly told him about his (the farmer’s) father’s death and subsequent resurrection as a vampire. Director F. W. Murnau also fought in the war, first on the Eastern Front, and then as a pilot in the newly formed Imperial German Flying Corps, during which time he survived not one but eight crashes without serious injury (his lover, the Jewish poet Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele – Murnau was gay – was less lucky, and was killed on the Front in 1915). Max Schreck, the intense and somewhat morbid actor who played Count Orlok, the film’s stand-in for Dracula, would reportedly take long solo walks in the German forest during production, and preferred to keep his own company. It has been speculated that he was suffering from shellshock during the film’s shoot.

The climax of Nosferatu sees Count Orlok sail from Romania to the small town of Wisborg in Germany (changed from Whitby in Stoker’s book), disembarking along with thousands of massed rats which go on to spread plague throughout the town. Nosferatu has been remade twice since 1922, once in 1979 by Werner Herzog, and again this year, by Robert Eggers. During his production, Herzog dyed 11,000 rats grey and released them in the Dutch city of Schiedam, which stood in as his Wisborg. It’s not hard to see where men like Murnau, Schreck and Grau, who had spent months in the trenches, might have been convinced of the visual impact of this detail.

Haunting and bleak, the film’s silence only adds to the sense that you’re watching something oppressive and otherworldly. The film’s subtitle is A Symphony of Horror; at the Prince Charles, a musician called Hugo Max improvised a minimalist but affecting live soundtrack just off to the left of the screen, all creaky violin and droning atonal dread. The stage was set – literally, in this case, given the downstairs screen of the cinema is an old theatre – for something memorable. I was excited to finally see an undisputed masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema on the big screen.

And then the first time Count Orlok appeared on screen, half the audience started laughing.

Look – I get it, even if I find it annoying. Horror films, more than almost any other genre, age quickly and poorly. Orlok… well, he’s not the scariest creature ever to appear on screen. When you’re used to cheap jumpscares in horror films, and the increasing sense of dread that filmmakers have had a literal century to work on since Nosferatu, the tension feels a lot higher today. Compare Nosferatu to this year’s Longlegs, say, whose trailer I can barely watch without clenching my, well, for decorum’s sake let’s say “fists” and “toes”, and there’s no competition. Even horror films from the 2000s feel a little dated, by this point.

Guy needs to see an orthodontist, pronto

Nor was Nosferatu the first time I’ve seen this laughing-at-horror phenomenon, although it is probably the most egregious. One Halloween at university, there was a screening of The Shining in what was essentially our student union. It being a student audience, there was a mixed bag in terms of how much attention was being paid to the film; people were walking in and out and drinking and having conversations throughout. There was certainly widespread disgust at some of the more visceral bits in the film, such as when the rotting woman gets out of the bath during one of Jack Torrance’s is-it-real-or-not visions in the old Overlook Hotel. But later on, after Torrance dies in the hedge maze and Kubrick smash-cuts to his distorted, ghoulish face, something odd happened: half the audience screamed, and the other half cracked up.¹

What I want to ask is this: why do people laugh at this sort of moment in old horror films, even subconsciously? I think there are a couple of reasons.

The first is that films were a lot more melodramatic in the past. Most actors, even up to the 1960s, had been trained on stage, where gesture and tone have to be unnaturally maximised for the audience to pick up on them. Add to that the fact that films in the 1910s and 1920s – i.e. in the case of Nosferatu – were silent, and you can see how technology only exacerbated this effect of overstatement. With that in mind, consider how Melodrama is extremely vulnerable to moments of bathos, and bathos is more likely to feature when you’re watching films whose original audiences had very different reference points to us. Remember that story about people diving out of the way when they first saw moving footage of a train pulling into a station in the 1890s? Thinking that a real train was coming out of the screen somehow to run them over? We might well laugh at them now, but Count Orlok’s silly teeth probably had the same significant effect on contemporary moviegoers thirty years later – Nosferatu is only not scary to us because we’re used to it, and to the techniques it popularised. Instead, moments like Orlok’s introduction puncture the otherwise breast-heaving, swooning tone of drama that characterises the rest of the film.

These films can be a little cheesy, then, and I’ll admit it takes a smidgen of willpower to move past that. But, for some reason, horror films are considered fair game to laugh at, while other, equally melodramatic forms of art are not. You wouldn’t go to the opera and laugh through it, would you? You’d be thrown out.

This brings me on to the second reason I think that people laugh at old horror films, which is to do with signalling, and the fact that these are horror films in particular. When you laugh at Count Orlok or at Jack Torrance, are you not proving to the people around you that you’re not scared? And by extension, that you’re implicitly superior to those who do find the films unnerving or frightening, including those in the past?

It reminds me closely of that phenomenon anyone who regularly goes to see Shakespeare plays will surely have encountered. There will be at least one moment in any contemporary production of Shakespeare where a moment is played for laughs, a punchline or aside delivered in Elizabethan English, and every middle-aged man in the audience will laugh loudly. Much more loudly than the joke deserves, usually. Because these men (and some women, but I do think it’s often dad-types) are self-consciously keen to show that they get the joke. That they are smart enough to understand Shakespeare, and they find A Midsummer Night’s Dream funnier than those lowbrow, aimed-at-idiots comedies like Mrs Brown’s Boys.²

Same phenomenon, no? Laughing to prove your superiority. But the important part here is that I think it’s subconscious. Nobody buys a ticket to an 88-minute, glacially slow silent German interwar film because they want to mock it. I think a lot of the laughter at Nosferatu was accidental, perhaps even surprising. I can imagine people leaving the cinema and exclaiming, a little embarrassed, “Wow, I didn’t think the vampire would be so… funny?” And perhaps feeling a little disappointed in themselves, too, without quite knowing why.

1. A similar incident which I’ll relate here rather than in the main body for length: in 2019, I was working at British GQ, and we covered an event with a drinks brand which had worked with (i.e. funded) Martin Scorsese’s charity The Film Foundation to restore a 1919 French silent film called The Broken Butterfly by Maurice Tourneur. The drinks brand was very proud of how it was helping preserve French cultural heritage and staged a screening of the silent film at the BFI, hosted by the British director Joanna Hogg. Naturally, to pack out the seats, they invited a raft of people to the screening including me, the editor of GQ, a couple of other staff members, and a whole range of C- and D-list influencers and celebrities like Michael Dapaah (of “Man’s Not Hot” fame) and Ella Eyre to fill seats.

What interest these people had in interwar cinema was lost on me, and evidently lost on them, too, because half of the audience spent the entire film on their phones, while the other half cackled at every melodramatic twist and turn Tourneur’s characters were subject to (The Broken Butterfly is a love story which hits every cliché in the book, and ends in the tragic suicide of a mother and her love child… or does it?). Anyway, at the end of the film, Hogg stood up in front of this crowd of unengaged hangers-on, and quietly said: “I don’t know quite why you were all laughing. I found that very moving.” Whatever – they were barely listening. I felt for her, but also thought the event guestlist was mishandled by the brand’s PRs, probably. Anyway.

2. For the record, I agree with them on this point – Shakespeare is funnier than MBB – but I don’t need to deafen every poor bastard sitting near me in the Olivier Theatre to prove it.