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Many of film’s future Golden Age directors—Maurice Tourneur, Cecil B. De Mille, Michael Curtiz, F. W. Murnau, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Ernst Lubitsch—got their start grinding out horror films. In fact, among the eight films Tourneur made in 1913, his first year as a director, one was Le systeme du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume (Dr. Goudron’s System), a horror short based on Poe’s story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” the original “lunatics take over the asylum” tale. (Tourneur’s director son, Jacques, would have a major impact on the horror film thirty years later.) The popular German serial Homunculus (1916), directed by Otto Rippert and written by Robert Reinert, centered on the story of the world’s first test-tube baby, who grows up to find he is immensely powerful but soulless, and
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