Reveiw: Weird Tales (1919)

The anthology horror film, in which several short stories are presented with a framing story or a narrator to link them, has come and gone in popularity, with high points in the 1940s (Dead of Night) and the 1970s (The House That Dripped Blood, Trilogy of Terror). But the form's roots go deeper and farther back than that, with the German-made Weird Tales (which has also been shown under names like Eerie Tales, Five Sinister Stories and Tales of the Uncanny) possibly being the earliest surviving example.

An antiquarian book dealer is shutting down for the night when three aggressive, mischievous spirits--one of whom is played by Conrad Veidt, the somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (also released in 1919)--chase him out. The spirits, two men and one woman, then start picking up books at random and reading stories. We get to see the five stories they read, each of which involves a lover's triangle of one kind or another (and features the three actors playing the spirits as well):

Story one: A man walking through the park helps a young woman who's being accosted by her seemingly insane husband. He takes her to a hotel room for safekeeping and (of course) falls instantly in love with her. The woman in question, however, is far more--and far less--that she appears to be.

Story two: Two men fall for the same woman. (Don't you hate it when that happens?) One strangles the other and, years after he's married the woman of his dreams, is haunted by the spectre of the man he murdered. (Don't you hate it when that happens?)

Story three: A drunken man murders his beautiful wife and seals her body up in a wall. Unfortunately for him, he seals up their cat as well. (Sound familiar? It should: It's a fairly faithful adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's famous short story, "The Black Cat.")

Story four: A man walking through the woods spots an unusual house (always a bad sign). He's told that the house is empty, but when he visits again he finds it abuzz with activity. He sees a beautiful woman (of course) in one of the windows and is captured by the inhabitants, who turn out to be a secret club that plays a game every night: everybody draws a card, and the one who pulls the Ace of Spades must die. This leads to a tense duel of wits between the man from the woods and the club's gamemaster--a duel to the death.

Story five: The bored wife of an aristocrat becomes fascinated by the stories of a fop (who looks a hell of a lot like modern British comedian Rowan Atkisson), who brags of all sorts of acts of bravery and daring-do when he is, in reality, a coward. The husband gets pretty annoyed with this nonsense and leaves on a trip. Before the lying fop can seduce the lady of the house, though, strange things start happening, like objects moving on their own and....

Director Richard Oswald tells most of the stories with strange, ominous shadows and low-key lighting--typical of German Expressionism--with the second story as probably the closest to scary and the fourth story as the most engaging, worthy of a feature-length treatment. Only the last tale is played for comedy, which weakens the film as a whole--it would have been more effective to end with a more powerful, truly scary story than to conclude with a laugh.

Still, it's a reasonably entertaining silent film--which was long thought to be lost--carried off with considerable style. And a restored print of it recently toured the country, so who knows? Maybe it'll be on DVD sometime soon--a survivor from an era from which the majority of films (90%, by some estimates) don't exist at all.