Poe, Gothic and the Macabre in The House with Closed Shutters (1910)
Pictures That Move #2
Last week I sat down to watch several D.W. Griffith Civil War-themed films included in Eureka Entertainment’s 2013 Blu-ray release of The Birth of a Nation (1915). I’ve had the disc since its release and while I’ve viewed The Birth of a Nation several times, I hadn’t checked out the seven Civil War shorts included as bonus materials. In total, Griffith made eleven one-reelers with a Civil War backdrop, seven of which are included on the Eureka disc (out of print these days, I think, but many of Griffith’s surviving shorts and features are available online).
Anyway, I was struck by one of these short films in particular: The House with Closed Shutters (1910), starring Henry B. Walthall (1878-1936) and filmed in New Jersey after Griffith and his troupe of Biograph actors came back from their first trip out to California, land of sunshine and opportunity.
Walthall would, in 1915, play his most famous role for Griffith: Colonel Benjamin Cameron aka “the little Colonel”, Civil War soldier turned veteran and subsequent (and fictional) founder of the Ku Klux Klan, in Griffith’s paradigm-shifting and massively controversial epic.1 Here, his Confederate man is of a different stripe (the lily-livered stripe).
In The House with Closed Shutters, released August 8th 1910, Walthall co-starred alongside Grace Henderson (1860-1944) and Dorothy West (1891-1980). The latter featured in five other Griffith Civil War shorts for Biograph, as well as one of my all-time favourite Griffith productions, 1912’s proto-women’s picture and bleak western The Female of the Species, which is astonishing and will most definitely be discussed in a future instalment of Pictures That Move.
In The House with Closed Shutters, a young southern gent with a drinking problem (Walthall) joins the Confederates as a dispatcher. When he is fired upon and chased by Yankee horsemen, he swiftly turns chicken and runs home to his momma.
Of course, it’s not the done thing. Either as a man or a southerner. To save the family name from ruin, his sister (West) dons the uniform instead and dies in battle defending a Confederate flag that she herself made. Nobody notices she’s a girl.
News of the death reaches mother and son, via an official telegram, informing them of their son’s gallant demise. Her boy’s cowardice has already put them in a dilly of a pickle, but now everybody they know thinks the lad is a goner on the field of battle. What’s a mother to do?
Well, desperate times call for demented measures. And it is here, the story turns into something unexpected. She decides to lock up her son in the house, closing the shutters and hiding him away for decades. “The daughter” is never seen again. The mother excuses the extreme decision to shutter the house “forever more”, telling people the sister’s grief at her beloved brother’s death is simply too unbearable. He in turn is symbolically buried alive in the house.
The denouement to this short, sharp tale, running at a brisk 16 minutes, sees two old friends and former suitors of the daughter stop by the house - 25 years later - with flowers, for it is the anniversary of their old pal’s brave end and they seemly wish to mark the occasion out of respect for him, as well as the spinster daughter whom they believe is alive and the surviving - and extremely elderly - mother.
Unable to hide the truth any longer, the son, now well into middle-age, with grey hair, throws open the shutters and reveals he is alive. The two friends are shocked to the core. The son sits down in his armchair and gives up the ghost.
The House with Closed Shutters features gender-bending female heroism with macabre fiction trimmings. It’s what makes it stand out from the crowd. Female heroism was a recurring hook in Griffith’s shorts. He liked his young lasses to have moxie. They are forerunners to the adventure serials with daring-do and great stunts.
Another Civil War-themed one-reeler featured on the Eureka disc, Swords and Hearts, also has a young girl donning a male soldier’s cape and hat, all in a bid to distract Yankee soldiers chasing after him. But here, in The House with Closed Shutters, the scope of the story is pitched as tragic and the heroism is futile. It is she who dies the traditional soldier’s death. It is her fearlessness in the chaos of combat which displays sacrifice and virtue. It is her valour stolen by a cowardly sibling.
Now, I’m not remotely suggesting for a second The House with Closed Shutters is any type of proto-horror film, because it isn’t, I just wished to draw attention to its cross-genre qualities and how, 114 years on, it has remained a cracking little one-reeler.
The scenario was penned by Emmett C. Hall, who also wrote Swords and Hearts plus the two-parter His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled (1911), but I’ve no doubt it was Griffith himself, a pioneer filmmaker of great imagination, who understood the gothic aspects to the storytelling and delivered them to the screen. Griffith’s wee melodrama even ends with the return of the repressed (Freud’s theory which has since been retroactively applied to much gothic fiction). The proverbial skeleton in the closet, the mad woman in the attic, here is rendered as the mad alcoholic son in the house with closed shutters.
Griffith was well-read, as we know. He’d adapted for the screen works inspired by acclaimed authors past and present. It was part of his bid to appeal to the tastes of the middle class. Griffith himself was born into poverty in rural Kentucky, but he was cultured and proud of his family name and Welsh heritage. I personally think his very best work focused on the plight and lives of the working man, ordinary Americans up against the moneyed elites. He could be hugely critical of capitalism, though he was far from a socialist. Anyway, his revolutionary approach to film editing and the implementation of cross-cutting was taken from his knowledge of Charles Dickens.
In her brilliant autobiography and account of her husband’s early years as a director, moving pictures being a job they both fell into by chance, titled When the Movies Were Young (1925), Biograph actress Linda Arvidson (1884-1949), also Griffith’s first wife, recalled a conversation at the studio located at 11 East 14th Street, Manhattan, when her husband met resistance with constructing a story which “jumped about”. Griffith said, “Well, doesn’t Dickens write like that?” To which the reply came, “Yes, but that’s Dickens. That’s novel writing.” Griffith batted back, “These are picture stories: not so different.”2 Of course, in retrospective, it makes D.W. sound like a smartypants and maybe the conversation didn’t quite go down like this, but it is established fact Griffith borrowed from Dickens to finesse cross-cutting editing and thrilling climaxes to his film stories.
Crucially, Griffith had previously made a one-reeler about Edgar Allan Poe. The 1909 short, Edgar Allen Poe (released with the doomed writer’s middle name incorrectly spelled. Doh!). This starred Linda Arvidson as doomed Virginia Poe and Herbert Yost (1879-1945) as Edgar. The Poe film used allusions to The Raven and the author’s short tragic life story, and it has long been noted for its early use of “Rembrandt lighting” to heighten the sense of visual drama.
Fours years on from The House with Closed Shutters, Walthall starred in The Avenging Conscience (1914), a much more sophisticated and fuller take on Poe’s work by Griffith, with emphasis placed on the classic tale The Tell-Tale Heart and the poem Annabel Lee. Walthall earned raves for his role.
The connection was furthered by him starring in Charles Brabin’s The Raven, a biopic of Poe, made by the Chicago-based Essanay company, and released the same year as The Birth of a Nation. The press simply adored Walthall as Poe. They went so far as to expound the leading man “stands in relation to photoplays as Edgar Allan Poe does to literature.”3 Some praise, right?
Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience has a much stronger claim to ties to the foundations of subsequent cinematic psychological horror and gothic genres than The House with Closed Shutters, but, like I said, there’s just something about that narrative twist midway through, of entombing somebody in an isolated country house, complete with monstrous mother, a weak-filled man going mad inside, those are crucial elements of gothic and macabre fiction.
You can watch The House with Closed Shutters on YouTube here.
Henry B. Walthall, an Alabama native, helped DW Griffith during his research phase of The Birth of Nation, by providing crucial information on the Klan, its rituals, etc., as older members of his family had been part of the organisation in the Reconstruction era.
When the Movies Were Young (1925) by Linda Arvidson
Chicago Herald newspaper, 1915. Quoted from Seymour Stern’s The Birth of a Nation, edited by Ira H Gallen, 2015