THE HORROR OF IT ALL.

• Author: ROTHENBERG, ROBERT S.

THE HORROR OF IT ALL MPI HOME VIDEO 63 MINUTES, $14.98

It didn't take early moviemakers long to discover that audiences love to be scared. Moreover, it readily became apparent that film was an ideal medium for creating images that would accomplish that purpose admirably, lending itself to terrifying makeup and eerie camera angles to invoke fear among viewers. The effectiveness of the movie pioneers' efforts continues to hold today, even though some of the films are as many as eight decades old.

Grainy, flickering, silent, and almost ludicrously crude in the acting, pictures such as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Nosferatu," and "The Golem" still have the power to horrify. From them, through the genre's heyday of the 1930s ("Frankenstein," "Dracula," "King Kong") to the post-World War II apocalyptic visions of creatures mutated by the unleashing of atomic weapons ("Godzilla," "Them," "Mothra"), McCarthy-era parables ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), Roger Corman's over-the-top adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe classic tales ("The Masque of the Red Death," "Pit and the Pendulum"), and the Hammer Studios-Peter Cushing-Christopher Lee British versions of the Frankenstein and Dracula legends, cinema and horror have lucratively gone hand-in-hand.

Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Lee, Cushing...