“Horror took on a new meaning after the trenches and veteran’s accounts of the savagery they had experienced.”

By W. Scott Poole

NOV. 11, 2018 marked 100 years since the cessation of hostilities in the Great War. At least 16 million soldiers and civilians died in what we now call World War One. Across the globe, in fighting that raged in Africa and Asia and to a limited degree in the Pacific, the war produced close to 40 million casualties.

“Horror,” and its various cognates, became the most common way to describe what soldiers and civilians had experienced. The word had a longer history and stories of the macabre had an enduring place in fiction and folklore. But horror in the modern sense of a physical repulsion to images of death and dismemberment took on a new meaning after the trenches and veteran’s accounts of the savagery they had experienced.

Soon, what had been known as “weird” fiction would be called horror fiction. The horror film would have its definitive beginnings in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Dracula and Frankenstein, all of them directed, written or starring veterans who found in such films a way to speak of the horror that had enveloped the world.

One of the strangest of these new films, one that would only be recognized for its importance much later, began filming even as the war took a million more lives in the twilight of 1918.

French director Abel Gance began making J’accuse just as the Kaiserschlacht faltered and the war entered its final terrible stages. The film sought to tell the story of the suffering of the French soldier in the trenches as a warning to those on the home front. Although containing plenty of melodrama, much of it centered on the perennial anxiety over the faithfulness of the soldiers wives at home, the film ends with an image that appeared for the first time on film; an army of the dead.

Gance did not use the word “zombies” to describe the climatic finale. But contemporary audiences will recognize the hungry monsters in a series of shots in which the French dead rise from their graves to accuse the living of not recognizing their sacrifices. The earth gives way across a field of crosses as the undead soldiers, bandaged and apparently in various states of decay, rise and lumber across the scarred landscape. They are deathshead images of the Great War itself, their shadows shambling under Gance’s elegantly photographed crepuscular sky.

When Maxim Gorky saw his first film in Moscow in the 1890s, he described it as a “kingdom of shadows” where the dead move “as soundless specters.” This conception of film very literally haunts J’accuse. Gance composed his army of the living dead from 2,000 French soldiers on leave from the fighting at Verdun. Some apparently had fought in the slaughter of 1916; many who appeared in the film are recent conscripts, already wounded in the still often savage fighting near the ancient fortress city. They appeared, wounds plainly visible, limbs missing, heads bandaged, no special effects necessary since the war had done the work of horror to them.

The dead rise in J’accuse (1919).

J’accuse featured the living dead in an even more horrific sense. After the film wrapped, most of the 2,000 troops returned to the front where, Gance later learned, more than 80 per cent died in the final months of the conflict.

Blaise Cendrars deserves some of the credit for Gance’s vision. Cendrar, an important Swiss modernist poet and painter, had joined the French Foreign Legion. Serving on the Somme, he had lost his arm after a wound received at the fighting in Champagne where the French Fourth Army had launched a failed offensive in late 1914 that resulted in a quarter of a million Allied causalities.

Cendrars served as Gance’s assistant director and the writer seems also to have been responsible for many of the intertitles of the silent film. His aesthetic sensibility also likely deserves credit for some of the films extraordinary photography.

It’s also a supposition of mine that, although Gance clearly convinced the French army to allow soldiers on leave to take part in the film, Cendrar may have had or fully developed the original conception. Not only did the use of living veterans as the living dead match his artistic interest in restaging war trauma, he also took an active role in the final scenes. Among the unquiet dead, Cendrars, poet, painter and soldier, can be seen, his amputated arm adding to the sense of carnage on the march.  Cendrars would go on to have a long and adventurous life, writing a mountain of poetry, novels, and criticism, much of it about his experience with the Great War. In 1940, at the age of fifty-three, he would be found fighting the Nazi blitzkrieg in Northern France.

Gance’s film released in 1919. He had an extraordinary and seminal idea with the army of the dead but, arguably, he didn’t exactly know what to do with it as the Great War shuttered to a close. Although sometimes seen as an anti-war film, the 1919 J’accuse also can be read as the dead blaming the nation for not sacrificing enough. In this it displays the tendency of many portrayals of the Great War that rightly describe the torments of the Tommy, the Poilu and the Doughboy while ignoring the suffering of civilians on the home front. Moreover, less than a decade later, Gance would make his epic Napoleon (1927), a tribute to the marital traditions of France.

At the same time, Gance frequently called his film a reminder of “the stupidity of war” and it had difficulty finding a distributor in the United States because it allegedly displayed pacifist tendencies.

Gance could not leave the idea alone however. In 1938, he produced a remake of J’accuse in which the supernatural elements of the film are on full display. Although making use of some of the original footage, he used superimposition to create rotting skeletons marching in their uniforms. The message of this remake could not be clearer. Not only do the French dead rise but “the dead of all nations,” Germany included. This time, as Germany prepared for war and gobbled up Czechoslovakia and Austria, Gance subtitled his film in the opening credits as: “A tragic portrait of modern times.”

The Great War represented a convulsion and catastrophe that seemingly could only be looked at from the angle of art, only seen in the shadows of the horror film lest the intensity of the violence seer the eyes. Veterans like Albin Grau helped make Nosferatu, the vampire film that the set designer said represented “the cosmic vampire that consumed the blood of millions.” Bela Lugosi, an infantry officer in the Hapsburg army who had to bury himself under his dead comrades to survive a Russian attack, rose from his coffin as Dracula in 1931. James Whale of the Worcestershire Regiment would tell his tale of a field of corpses come to life in Frankenstein.

George Romero definitively created the modern zombie film in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. A master of political satire, he too used the living dead to question militarism in films like Day of the Dead (1985) and especially Land of the Dead (2005). Films like Joe Dante’s Homecoming make use of J’accuse’s imagery and message almost precisely.  Max Brooks’s novel World War Z, though much more like a traditional American story of a hard but victorious war (it’s modeled in part on Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War Two, entitled The Good War), owes the idea of zombies in combat to Gance and Cendrar’s gloomy vision.

But it was the angry undead of J’accuse that began this parade of monsters. When we see the original we are seeing soldiers portraying the dead who are soon to become the dead,  we watch the wall between the living and the dead collapse, and the Great War stalks us still.

Scott Poole is the author of Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. He is a professor of history at the College of Charleston who teaches and writes about horror and popular culture. His past books include the award-winning Monsters in Americaand the biography Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror. He is a Bram Stoker Award nominee for his critically acclaimed biography of H. P. Lovecraft, In the Mountains of Madness. Follow him on Twitter @monstersamerica