Dante’s Inferno
Produced in 1911, Dante’s inferno has no cgi, no 4k resolution but a camera, actors, stunning set design and a horrific descent into hell. The story itself has been simplified for the purposes of the film which demonstrates a more compact timeline of events for Dante’s journey.
The most terrifying part of this film is the use of human actors instead of cgi demons, meaning the tormented souls seen on screen feel terrifyingly closer to reality. The lack of modern equipment and resources is notable but not vital to the film as its own special effects are clear enough to still manifest fear into the viewer, most famous examples include Lucifer eating Brutus and the maimed souls.
This classic feature by today’s genres could easily be classified as a body horror with many tortured souls, maimed, dead, eaten and burned alive, again the use of actors instead of edited demons makes this a hard watch. In regards to Stephen King’s 3 tiers of scare factor, Dante’s inferno easily fulfils both the horror and terror requirements as the icomprehensible is presented in a naturilistic manner of filming. To add to the atmosphere of this already haunting film, the plot is accompanied with a ‘Pink Floyd-esque’ soundtrack which allows the mind to soak in the atrocities witnessed during the 1hr 11min runtime. The film is silent but as with most of the supposedly limiting factors this also works in favor of the script as to bring voice into this agonising journey would only bring comfort thus providing a safety net from the constant fear and confusion.
Older horror films that work within the technical parameters and do not attempt to exceed them often excell in delivering fear as there is something unfamiliar in black and white grainy images that simply cannot be expressed in high resolution projects. For example, in Cronenburg’s ‘The Fly’ Brundle sends a monkey into his telepod, it enters alive but arrives at the other pod as a bloody hairy rag. A prop was used for this instead of an all-revealing, hyper-realistic monkey carcass we are given something that inspires the mind to comprehend the pain rather than have it handed up on a silver platter. More modern films such as Barbarian, Hereditary, Nope and others are all horror in their own right but the better quality of sound and visual the more familiar the film feels to audience, everything can be seen and heard unlike in Dante’s Inferno where you are left to imagine the 9 circles of hell, the torment and pain of the souls being tortured, and the horror each character endures.
It should also be stated that modern technology naturally induces more immersive atmosphere but so too does dated technology as there is an atmosphere created by the grey areas i.e features or visuals of the film that could not be conveyed with clear direct precision. This being said Dante’s Inferno arguably incorporates the best of both worlds, figuratively and literally, by showing severed bodies and hellish creatures eating fellow demons in a surprisingly clear and brutal way considering the technology available.
So where Dante’s Inferno is ahead of its time it succeeds whilst maintaining the best features of its time to construct an overall horrific portrayal of the infamous descent into hell in the most vague and visceral way possible.
