Diego Carrera put together a supercut of 122 horror films, one for each year since 1895. It starts with The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, which was an 18-second-long film directed by Thomas Edison. It used professional actors and editing magic to show the queen’s head being chopped off. Can you imagine how realistic that was to an audiences that had never seen a movie? After that, special effects really took off. And so did the art of creating dread.
As the years go bye, we get sound and eventually, color, and the movies become more familiar. I bet you’ve seen a lot of them. But even those early ones are scary. Contains one brief shot of post-mortem nudity. -via History Buff