Die Pest in Florenz (1919)

Some time during the renaissance. The beautiful courtesan Julia (Marga Kierska) comes from free-loving Venice to stuffy Florence, a town dominated by the church on one hand and a deeply conservative council of elders on the other. Her beauty inflames the already existing frictions between the old and the young, particularly putting the lord of the town (Otto Mannstaedt) and his son Lorenzo (Anders Wikmann), who both fall for her instantly, against each other.

Lorenzo kills his father when the old man attempts to rape Julia, and makes himself king of Florence, driving away the churchmen and the elders. With Julia, he starts a reign of incessant partying and what goes as orgies on screen in 1919, getting the intertitles all in a tizzy about their immorality while the 2023 audience whistles a happy tune.

Only a hermit monk named Medardus or Franziskus (depending on which version of intertitles you watch this with, in any case played by the grandly gesturing Theodor Becker) sets himself against the horrors of people fucking. But Julia is so beautiful! And into weird looking monks! And still hot even when they visit hell together in a vision! So Medardus is set up for a bit of a fall, to be portrayed through ever more gesturing and bugging of eyes, of course. Though, to be fair, Becker is rather brilliantly in the scene in which he murders Lorenzo in cold blood. Eventually, God gets so annoyed by the scenes of people frolicking drunkenly, or perhaps the murder, he sends the plague in the direction of Florence.

Otto Rippert’s silent movie epic Die Pest in Florenz may not be an obvious choice as part of my October two-step of horror love on this blog, what with much of it being a historical costume drama with what I can’t help but read as a lot of high-handed conservative moralizing and hand-wringing. It does, however, contain quite a few seeds that would in the future grow into the dark woods of gothic horror on screen. Medardus’s vision of a hell that includes a river of writing bodies and a fire-breathing (one-headed) dog certainly belongs into the realm of the macabre, and there’s a sense of true eeriness surrounding the film’s deeply medieval personification of the plague as an emaciated figure strolling, sometimes dancing, while all around it its victims fall down in pains of death. Medardus’s flight through the catacombs is another moment you’ll find repeated in different forms again and again in the future, as if writer Fritz Lang (in one of his last attempts at writing for someone else) had stumbled upon and scratched free some of the cornerstones of horror, but couldn’t quite bring himself to focus on them. An influence of the macabre was of course part of the zeitgeist of the 1910s and 1920s, so it might simply be Lang living in is time and place.

Parts of the film are often called an adaptation of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, but really, there’s only a tiny bit of inspiration from the tale on screen when Medardus crashes Julia’s last party in a locked down Florence.

In general, there’s a mood of the eerie and the macabre running through the film particularly in its second half, a sense of supernatural doom hanging over its characters. Interestingly, Rippert realizes this mood without using many of the techniques of expressionism; Rippert is more of a naturalist, often positioning his astonishing number of bit players in large arrangements that amount to moving versions of picture puzzles, to be gawked at in the just as astonishing production design.

So, while this isn’t exactly a horror movie as we’ve come to know them, it is certainly of interest to anyone interested in the roots of the genre, like rather a lot of early silent movies.