The supernatural was a compelling subject long before motion pictures existed. Indeed, mankind's interest in the occult and the supernatural -- or what I personally prefer to call the "extra-natural" -- dates at least as far back as prehistoric cave paintings; ghost stories go back as long as people have been telling stories. Judging by the success of the Psychic Friends Network and its competitors, and sales of "non-fiction" books on vampirism and demonic possession, the growth of scientific education hasn't helped diminish the interest in this area. But beyond the ranks of the true believers, which have shrunk considerably with the growth of compulsory education, people have always been entertained by stories of supernatural phenomenon. Ghosts, witches, curses, and demons have been enduring fixtures of stories and stage plays -- Shakespeare's {~Macbeth and {~Hamlet being the most famous of the latter -- for centuries.

The development of motion pictures made it possible to create images and apparitions that the theater could only simulate crudely with the greatest difficulty and under the most difficult conditions. The first man to discover the ability of motion-picture film to reshape reality -- specifically time -- was George Melies. A stage magician and director, Melies added motion pictures to his theatrical show in the mid-1890s and had taken a camera into Paris to shoot footage of his own during 1896, when the device jammed intermittently during filming. When Melies developed the resulting film, he was pleased and amazed to see objects appear and disappear from frame to frame and immediately realized the possibilities inherent in film to distort time and space and the relationship between the two.

Magicians lived for the ability to make objects appear and disappear in the blink of an eye -- in England, they were known traditionally as "illusionists," which explained the activities of their trade -- and the bigger and more impressive the object, the better. Melies saw a chance to revolutionize his field, and the whole nature of entertainment, with motion pictures, and he quickly learned the different ways in which he could exploit the medium with double-exposures, stop-frame photography, and good model and costume work, coupled with such familiar stage accouterments as smoke bombs and flash powder.

Melies became one of the world's most popular filmmakers over the next dozen years, and many of his movies were fantasies containing all manner of apparitions -- his Trip To the Moon (1902) showed a lunar surface populated by demon-like creatures that vanished in flashes of light and puffs of smoke in the blink of an eye. Long after Melies' popularity waned, amid the growing demand for more complex cinematic material in the teens, the popular taste for films dealing with ghosts, demons, and other apparitions remained. A look at movie lists from across the twentieth century reveals hundreds of titles and plots that refer to curses, ghosts, life-after-death, heavenly (or Satanic) intervention, and other supernatural phenomenon.

If films about the supernatural have always been with us, however, they have also gone through periods of greater and lesser popularity, principally in reflection of the public's mood. In times of great national stress or distress, the public's willingness to accept stories drawn on mysticism and the supernatural -- possibly as a diversion -- grows, while in periods of stability, that willingness declines. The first great wave of supernatural films during the sound era began with the great wave of horror films spawned by Universal during the early 1930s and the release of Todd Browning's Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi and Edward Van Sloane. The release of this movie took place amid the depths of the Great Depression. At a time when the lives and jobs of millions of Americans were dislocated through economic events beyond their control, there was more than entertainment value to be found in this tale of vampires -- there was validation, of a peculiar kind.

Horror films had been popular in the 1920s, but unlike many other genres -- which were forced by the coming of sound to become more realistic -- the horror film actually became less realistic and rational. If anything, the horror movie of the 1930s was even more steeped in the supernatural than its 1920s counterpart. Where Bela Lugosi and Edward Van Sloane in Dracula should have looked foolish talking about the undead and ancient curses, they instead made perfect sense to audiences, who perhaps found some subtle validation for their sense that the world was in the grip of forces larger than themselves, whether economic or demonic. It is no accident that this same period, from 1931 through the middle of the decade, saw a phenomenal growth in the influence and prominence of religious leaders such as Father Coughlin, Aimee Semple McPherson, and the Rev. Billy Sunday, whose followings nationwide from radio -- then an even bigger medium than movies -- amounted to tens of millions.

The public's taste for the supernatural was also reflected in the fantasy films from the 1930s, such as Paramount's Death Takes A Holiday (1934) and MGM's On Borrowed Time (1939), both movies (based on popular plays) that gave an earthly, human face to death. In the former, Death -- in the guise of Fredric March -- decides to take human form and move among mortals to understand us, but in his absence from his job, the balance of the universe is threatened as people fail to succumb to fatal illnesses and injuries. In the latter, Death -- in the guise of Mr. Brink (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) -- is chased up a tree by a feisty old man (Lionel Barrymore) who refuses to leave at his appointed time; a similar crisis ensues as everything stops dying; the old man is later forced to release Death in order to release his grandson from his fatal injuries. RKO weighed in with a somewhat less prestigious -- but dramatically equally successful -- vehicle entitled Beyond Tomorrow (1939), about a star-crossed young couple (Jean Parker, Richard Carlson) who are helped by the ghosts of a trio of kindly old men (Sir C. Aubrey Smith, Charles Winninger, Harry Carey Sr.) who befriended them in life.

But the best supernatural tale to come from Hollywood during the pre-war era was The Devil And Daniel Webster (1941), produced and directed by William Dieterle and starring Walter Huston, Edward Arnold, James Craig, Ann Shirley, and Simone Simon. Produced at RKO during the late winter and early spring of 1941, this adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet's award-winning short story was a delightful mix of demonic fantasy, early American history, and cinematic fable, sparked by uniformly superb performances and a directorial technique that recalled the best elements of Citizen Kane, which had been done on the same lot only a season earlier. Alas, it failed to make money, largely as a result of its being misperceived as a costume drama by a movie-going public singularly uninterested in historical drama.

The coming of World War II pretty much removed horror films from the realm of the supernatural -- although George Waggner's The Wolf Man (1941) presented werewolves as supernatural creatures, the constant exposure of audiences to the ever-increasing real-life horrors of the war made it impossible to maintain that explanation. By the time of House of Frankenstein's release in 1945, the existence of werewolves was explained as the result of a brain disorder resulting from an infection, while vampires were suffering not from an ancient curse, but from a blood disease.

The supernatural manifested itself during the 1940s in the form of the life-after-death fantasy, a reaction to the carnage of World War II. Beginning with the release of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1943), both Hollywood and British filmmakers courted viewers with stories in which good men (and women) were shown as eligible for an afterlife in heaven -- with millions of casualties from the war, audiences found this notion reassuring and even appealing, whether it was presented as drama (A Matter of Life and Death, aka Stairway To Heaven; A Guy Named Joe) or comedy (Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait). The artistic success of these films can be measured by their continued popularity across the decades -- both Here Comes Mr. Jordan and A Guy Named Joe not only retained their audiences for decades afterward but were remade in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, as Heaven Can Wait (no relation to the 1943 film of that name) and Always.

As a backdrop to this group of successful, big-budget "A"-pictures, the supernatural also showed up as the subject of a string of extremely successful low-budget films produced by Val Lewton at RKO. Beginning with Cat People (1942), Lewton scared audiences half-to-death with his quickly made supernatural chillers which relied on suggested rather than visible horror -- I Walked With a Zombie (1943) was probably the best of them, a close-up look at voodoo ritual grafted onto a story lifted from Jane Eyre and moved to a Caribbean setting. The Lewton films were among the most mature and thoughtful supernatural thrillers ever made in Hollywood, and they set the stage for the next phase of supernatural horror stories that would follow in the 1960s, as well as serving as a proving ground for such young aspiring directors as Robert Wise (Curse of the Cat People). During this same era, Hollywood also produced its first mature ghost story, in the form of The Uninvited (1944), a compelling romantic tale with overtones of psychosis and lesbianism, starring Ray Milland, Gail Russell, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, and Cornelia Otis Skinner.

The end of the war saw the continued popularity of supernatural tales, among them the delightful Abbott and Costello fantasy/comedy The Time of Their Lives (1946) -- in which Lou Costello portrays an inept ghost stumbling around a Revolutionary War-era mansion with fellow ghost Marjorie Reynolds in tow -- and David O. Selznick's haunting and lyrical Portrait of Jennie (1948). But by the early 1950s, the country's mood had darkened and the ghost story disappeared from Hollywood.

But the supernatural remained, in the form of the Almighty. The Cold War was being fought in earnest against the Soviet Union. American movie producers reasoned that if the communists denied the existence of God, then Americans would declare their faith more strongly than ever. The most bizarre supernatural film of this era was William Wellman's The Next Voice You Hear (1950), starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan), telling of the effect on a lower-middle-class family when the voice of God is heard on the radio over a period of six days. Not far behind, in terms of sheer strangeness, was Harry Horner's Red Planet Mars (1952), in which God's voice is heard over the radio coming from Mars, an event that leads to a worldwide religious revival and the toppling of the Soviet Union, which is all part of a plan by a mad ex-Nazi scientist to destroy civilization -- in the end, God's voice saves the world.

By the end of the 1950s, however, the serious supernatural film was a thing of the past. This was, in part, a reaction to television, which could deal with such stories on a much less expensive basis -- series such as Thriller (hosted by Boris Karloff) and One Step Beyond quickly laid claim to the occult as their stock-in-trade, joined occasionally by Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. The supernatural tales that did make it to the big screen were mostly ghost stories (The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, Thirteen Ghosts) and other horror movies, principally the work of William Castle and other exploitation filmmakers who were aiming at juvenile audiences.

The 1960s saw a minor resurgence in adult-themed horror in the form of the highly respected Robert Wise-directed ghost story The Haunting (1963), Cyril Frankel's chilling Devil's Own (1966), with Joan Fontaine as the headmistress of an English girls' school beset by voodoo curses; and Roy Ward Baker's dazzling and sinister Five Million Years To Earth (1967), which effectively mixed science fiction and demonic possession into a genuinely terrifying film. The most popular supernatural film of the 1960s, however, was set in New York City and involved a pair of newlyweds moving into a luxurious but sinister-looking co-op building on Manhattan's West Side. Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), based on the book by Ira Levin and starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and Ruth Gordon, introduced the Devil to a modern urban setting in a surprisingly convincing fashion, thereby setting audiences completely on the edge of their seats. The film was successful enough to make stars of director Polanski, cast members Cassavetes, Farrow, and Gordon, and even of the building -- a celebrated New York architectural landmark called The Dakota -- and yielded a pair of offshoots, The Devil's Daughter (1972) and the official sequel, Look What's Happened To Rosemary's Baby (1976).

Rosemary's Baby was an extremely popular movie but also a very subtle film whose mood of terror was as much suggested as shown.

The next major entry in the field of supernatural thrillers would be lacking in many of those qualities. William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) was a graphic, sometimes silly, but overall effective story of demonic possession that made a star of Linda Blair as the victim and began a string of movies about demonic possession and related matters that didn't let up for over a decade. Even the commercial and critical failure of John Borman's long-awaited sequel, Exorcist 2: The Heretic (1977) failed to dampen the public's appetite for this sort of fare. Somewhere midway between The Exorcist and its ill-fated follow-up, however, a rival in the supernatural horror field appeared, in the guise of Richard Donner's The Omen (1976), starring Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. This film, dealing with an attempt by the Devil to get the family of a highly placed diplomat to adopt his evil child, was massively popular and led to three sequels (so far) over the ensuing two decades, as well as earning a long-delayed Oscar for composer Jerry Goldsmith. The 1980s saw the Devil show up a little less frequently, apart from the periodic Omen sequels -- although one film, Michael Mann's The Keep (1983), is worth noting for its sheer strangeness, as the Evil One (in the guise of a vampire-cum-demon) gets involved with World War II and the struggle between the Nazis and the Jews.

As silly as these movies were, they seemed to feed a need in audiences to play out irrational fears. Other viewers seemed bent on finding God, rather than the Devil, in the cinema -- the 1970s saw the appearance of the Almighty revived in such supernatural comedies (a form virtually unknown since the 1940s) as Warren Beatty and Buck Henry's Heaven Can Wait (1978), based on the 1940s comedy Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and Carl Reiner's Oh God (1977), starring George Burns and John Denver. The appearance of these supernatural films coincided with the establishment of various alternative religions and New Age philosophies that were to intrude on mainstream society over the next several years. Their rise was concurrent with the development of a sweeping religious orthodoxy that overtook more traditional churches, leading to the growth of the "born-again" Christian Right. The movies, as always, seemed to reflect a genuine ferment among people looking for something that they weren't finding in themselves, either on the screens of their neighborhood theaters or, just as often, in their churches and synagogues.