Yes, there were Horror films produced in the US prior to 1931, including some truly great examples of the genre. 1920 gave us John Barrymore, perhaps the finest actor of his generation, headlining John S. Robertson’s version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1923 marked Universal Pictures entry into the genre, with Lon Chaney in Wallace Worsley’s adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Chaney would cement his status as the preeminent Horror Icon of the silent era two years later, when he starred in Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera. He would give one of his finest performances in 1927’s The Unknown, directed by Tod Browning, using themes that the director would revisit five years later, in Freaks.

    So, American filmgoers were no strangers to the Horror genre by the early 1930s, though the horror with which they were familiar was bound by certain thematic restrictions. Horror, at least of the American variety, followed two broad patterns. One was human misanthropy, deformity, and psychopathy; movies such as 1928’s West of Zanzibar, The Phantom of the Opera or The Unknown showcased deranged villains, whose physical deformities bring about their mental derangement. Chaney, with his mastery of make-up and disguise, was perfect in such roles, whether as Phroso, the cuckolded magician crippled when he attacked his wife’s lover in West of Zanzibar, or as Erik, the horribly scarred suitor of Christine, prowling about the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House. Themes of scarred and deformed people were popular with audiences in the years following the end of the First World War, owing to the presence of so many maimed, crippled veterans of that conflict.

    The second theme prevalent in Silent Horrors is what I refer to as, for lack of a better term, the “Scooby-Doo” variety of Horror film. And just like that seminal cartoon from my childhood, no matter how bizarre and otherworldly the creature might appear to be, in the end it always stood revealed as the caretaker, or the lighthouse keeper, or the lawyer. In movies such as London After Midnight, the famously ‘lost’ film from 1927, or perhaps the best example of the form, Paul Leni’s groundbreaking The Cat and the Canary, the prototypical “Old Dark House” movie, also released in 1927, the antagonists are merely people in disguise, despite their horrific appearance.

    The one common thread that both forms of the American Horror Film shared prior to 1931 was a glaring lack of the supernatural, the total absence of demonic, spiritual, or inhuman agency. Whether by choice or accident, American Horrors steered clear of any suggestion of the paranormal in the final reel. Though audiences had no doubt been exposed to such tropes in films produced in Europe and imported into the US, they had been assiduously avoided by American producers. That is, until Dracula made its debut.

    Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula was Dracula. The character wasn’t someone pretending to be a vampire, or who had delusions about being a vampire. Dracula was a vampire; he transformed into a bat or a wolf, he could command an army of rats, he was impervious to normal weapons. He drank blood. He slept, along with his vampire brides, in coffins layered with soil from his homeland during the daylight hours. And he was evil. Utterly, undeniably evil. And not an evil of the mind, as you would find in a human killer. Dracula’s evil was of the soul; a foul, demonic corruption that American filmmakers had thus far shunned.

    Dracula, however, changed that. With the first American supernatural Horror, the floodgates were opened, and Universal was transformed into the original “House that Horror built.” Frankenstein would follow in November of that year, then The Mummy, in December of 1932. Other studios would soon be producing Horror films in this new style, and the Horror genre would never be the same.

    But none of this would have been likely had Dracula not been a success. Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Pictures, had little faith in the “Monster” pictures which his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. wanted to produce. When “Papa” Carl retired from day-to-day operation of the studio in 1928, Junior was free to produce Dracula, a film he was eager to make. Had his pet project been a failure, all of the films that followed it would have probably died in the womb.