Things are being born of the wizard’s seed.

In 1910, Edison Studios releases Frankenstein, a 16 minute adaptation of Mary Shelley’s reflection on the relationship between god and man, but the emphasis here is on the grisly wonder of the monster’s creation and its promise to be with his creator on his wedding night. This first horror film is a lurid distillation of the most sensational moments of the classic story, a suitable ancestor for so much of what will follow.

Film flowers in this decade, though precious few of the blossoms survive. By one common estimate, 75% of all silent films are lost, turned to silver and ash. After Frankenstein, other directors make Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at least twice, another version of Frankenstein, and Richard Marsh’s bestselling Egyptian horror novel, The Beetle. In Hungary, young Michael Curtiz directs the first film of the popular German horror novel Alraune.

But the darkest, most pungent flowers are growing in Germany. In the last days of the Great War and in the spare years that follow it, German cinema invents the language of the horror film. Before 1920, Germany gives the world golems and doppelgangers and the uncanny stories of Poe and Stevenson.

Film grows up in this decade. D.W. Griffith makes Intolerance, a multi-layered epic aimed at elevating the spirit of mankind, but there is astonishing growth in the darkness too.

Drake’s Pick: The Student of Prague (1913)

We love mirrors and we hate them. We affirm ourselves in the depths of the glass but we detest the imperfections, the shadows under our eyes, the cynical curve of our smile.

The Student of Prague is a nightmare about mirrors.

Early horror cinema is obsessed with doppelgangers, duplicates with unknown motives, or “other selves” that are strange and menacing. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is filmed twice between 1910 and 1920. Edison’s Frankenstein monster vanishes when confronted with its own reflection and, when Dr. Frankenstein enters the room, he sees the monster in the mirror as his own image.

The Student of Prague is authored by Hans Heinz Ewers, the Stephen King of 1913 Berlin. Ewers is a perverse visionary who has written a bestselling novel called Alraune, about a girl of pure evil bred as an experiment in negative genetics, and another astonishing novel, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, about American Pentecostal excess in a backwoods Bavarian village. The star and co-director of The Student of Prague is Paul Wegener, who will be best known for his trilogy of movies about the Golem.

The Student of Prague draws heavily on folklore and on the Faust legend to tell the story of Balduin, a high-spirited student who makes a bargain with the devil that costs him his reflection in mirrors. Under the devil’s command, Balduin’s free ranging reflection becomes his physical double and eventually leads him to death and damnation.

Relentlessly dark in its vision, romantic but grounded in nihilistic pragmatism, The Student of Prague looks forward to decades of later horror films, not only in the shadow-haunted compositions of its cinematography but in its stark assessment of the human condition.

In the mirror, and in the movies, we all have the capacity to be monsters.