This Monster Will Not Die
The Golem haunts screens from silent movies to The Simpsons
by Arnon Z. Shorr
AT THE END OF OCTOBER, when ghosts, ghouls and goblins appear with greater frequency on TV and in movies, there’s another ghastly horror that gets decidedly less play but whose cinematic perseverance proves hauntingly enduring.
The Golem, an abominable creature forged from clay, entered popular culture in the 19th century, though its provenance traces millennia. Iterations of this miscreation have featured in a number of films and TV shows since the silent era. And while the Golem remains an obscure monster, it has had a significant impact on many of our most familiar horror stories, particularly on screen.
The Golem legend originates in the Talmud during discussions on creation — and whether or not man can achieve God’s creative power. These Golem stories focus on formation and destruction; the creatures are benign, merely examples in hypothetical discourse. They remain exclusively Jewish pieces of folklore until the late Middle Ages, when the legend evolves into its most famous incarnation: The Golem of Prague.
In that tale, Rabbi Judah Loew (elsewhere called by his acronym, The MaHaRaL), a 16th-century Jewish leader in Prague, creates a mighty manlike creature from the mud of the Vlatva River. He commands that creature to protect the vulnerable Jews of the city from the anti-Semitic violence that plagues their community. Invariably, something goes wrong, and Rabbi Loew is compelled to destroy his creation.
Golem stories spread through Germany in the 17th and 18th centuries, with the Prague legend making its way to print in the early 19th century. Versions of this story eventually crossed into the literary mainstream, influencing non-Jewish storytellers, particularly Mary Shelly, who, after a trip through Germany, tells a secular variation of the tale in her novel Frankenstein. It is interesting to note that in Shelly’s novel the monster is created not as a protector, in the way the Golem stories evolved, but as an object of scientific inquiry, more in line with the Talmudic narratives. The chaos that follows the creature’s creation, however, aligns neatly with the trends in the German legends.
The first appearance of the Golem onscreen occurs in 1915. Cinema is brand-new, and some of the foremost leaders in visual cinematic innovation are German expressionist filmmakers. Der Golem, the first in a series of Golem films from Paul Wegener, is released in 1915. Although entire versions of that film and its sequel are lost, the third film in the series, The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) was also released in the United States and survives. These films explore the Prague golem legend and represent the earliest onscreen depiction of the creature.
James Whale, the great American filmmaker of the ’20s and ’30s, was familiar with the German Golem films when he directed the horror classic, Frankenstein. That film, released in 1931 by Universal Pictures, is strongly influenced by the style and substance of German expressionist horror.
Frankenstein is a huge hit and spawns sequels, remakes, spin-offs and imitations, but the Golem makes only a few more appearances in cinema. Obscure films like Le Golem (1936, French/Czech), The Emperor and the Golem (1951, Czech) and It! (1967, British) feature the monster but are quickly forgotten.
The heart of the Golem legend survives, though, in the form of “Frankenstein narratives,” stories about people who create and then regret (and sometimes destroy) their creation. Jurassic Park (1993) is perhaps the obvious example, but consider [spoiler alert!] Singin’ in the Rain (1952) or The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Both of those films are about prideful people creating “monsters” and doing too good a job of it.
In Singin’ in the Rain, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) creates a Frankensteinian monster out of movie star Lena Lamont (Jean Hagen) by combining her on-screen performance with the voice of another actress, Kathy Seldan (Debbie Reynolds). He stands to ruin Kathy’s career if he doesn’t destroy the monster he created. In Bridge on the River Kwai, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) leads his fellow prisoners of war to build a bridge, but they do too good a job, and the bridge, although perfectly constructed, becomes a menace that must be destroyed. These stories all contain the DNA of the Golem legend, the tension between the allure and the danger of the act of creation.
Starting in the late ’90s, less metaphorical Golems began to reappear in media, in mainstream television shows such as The X-Files and even The Simpsons. The latter example occurs in the 2006 episode “Treehouse of Horror XVII,” one of the animated sitcom’s annual anthologies of horror-themed shorts timed with Halloween. The episode introduces a Golem that looks much like the one in the 1915 German expressionist film.
Just in the last few years popular network programs Sleepy Hollow, Supernatural and Grimm featured a Golem in some episodes. And just a month ago, the most overt Golem reference in ages hit cinemas in the form of a giant, monstrous hockey goalie, the “Goalie Golem” in Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers.
In August, Lionsgate greenlit a feature film adaptation of The Monolith, a DC Comics series about an explicitly Golem-like creature in contemporary New York. And in September, The Limehouse Golem, based on the 1994 novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Early reviews, however, seem to indicate that the Jack-the-Ripper-style serial killer from which the murder mystery takes its title resembles the traditional Golem only in name and not in literal or thematic terms.
Are we in the midst of a minor Golem renaissance? Will giant earth-man costumes soon join the ranks of vampires, ghosts, zombies and the other traditional monsters that haunt Halloween parties and trick-or-treat caravans? Regardless, the clay creature’s influence on horror storytelling and creation fables looms fully formed.
Arnon Z. Shorr is an award-winning filmmaker. Among his numerous films, he wrote and directed a short film about a Golem in 2009, and has written an unproduced Golem feature. Much of his completed work is available online. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
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