Each fall sparks a Hollywood blitz of horror flicks. But before this modern movie genre had a name, the first scary sound film—a sanctioned adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" more than 70 years ago—was billed as a love story, according to a Case Western Reserve University faculty member.

Robert Spadoni, Case's new assistant professor of film in the College of Arts and Sciences' department of English, is an expert on thrillers. He teaches the university's popular introduction to film course and plans to enlighten students spring semester with a survey course that investigates the horrific in cinema from its beginning in 1895 to the present.

Film as an interdisciplinary study in the humanities is another course Spadoni said he envisions developing with collaborations among a burgeoning number of Case faculty members with film expertise.

According to Spadoni, moviegoers received their introduction to the horror sound film with "Dracula" in 1931. They were primed with a number of soundless forerunners, including a 1919 German silent film, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." But since Hollywood didn't know how to describe "Dracula" when it arrived in movie theaters across the country, the first modern horror film was advertised as a romance.

Spadoni said reviewers were perplexed by "Dracula" when very few love scenes came across the screen. So rather than discuss the plot, many movie critics wrote about the ghostly sounding dialogue and haunting silences that sent shivers through the audience.

"The filmmakers picked up on the audience's perceptions and reinforced them in subsequent horror films," Spadoni said.

How an audience receives a film and how viewers influence production is a new direction for film scholars, and Spadoni is on the cutting edge with his exploration of the horror movie. Though initially well respected, the horror film quickly found a niche as a low-budget genre aimed primarily at the juvenile market.

"While films and reams of production records exist to tell us about how a movie was made, understanding what the audience did with the films takes sifting through reviews and other sorts of writing in newspapers and magazines," Spadoni said. "One needs to be creative in thinking about film reception."

In addition to reviews and ticket-office data, he finds information in film exhibitors' weekly papers, which offer promotional efforts ranging from staging contests in conjunction with local newspapers to having people dress up like zombies and hand out leaflets in town squares to decorating theater lobbies to look like crypts.In his study, Spadoni also uses press booklets sent to exhibitors.

The pamphlets not only describe exhibition stunts but also include ready-made reviews for local newspapers to publish.

"Such fictitious reviews tell us how the studios wanted their horror films to be received," Spadoni said, "and that can help us better understand how the films were actually received."

Spadoni took an in-depth look at this subject in his doctoral dissertation, "The Uncanny of Early Sound Film: Classic Horror Cinema and the Return of Medium-sensitive Viewer." His dissertation examined general audience responses to the first sound films and related those to the emerging horror film genre.

In addition to earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago, Spadoni, who joined the Case faculty this summer following his graduation from the University of Chicago, received his master's degree in cinema studies from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and his bachelor's of art degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He also did graduate course work in film at Northwestern University's department of radio/television/film.

Return to the online edition of the 11-20-03 Campus News.