The Golem Research Paper

The Golem
In 1920 the film “The Golem was released” and was named the first “monster” movie, created by Paul Wegner. This film was based on Jewish folklore legends of a clay man created by a Rabbi who possessed magic.The film was produced three times, in 1915, in 1917 and in 1920, the 1920 version is the only one that survived. The term “Golem” is used to name a creature that is dense and easily manipulated. They are usually made from materials like clay, sand or stone. The most modern example of a Golem character is “Gollum” from J.R.R Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. The Golem character typically possesses qualities such as a split personality and features of a hybrid creature (Gollum is half human and half fish/frog and Paul Wegner’s Golem is made from clay, but still

The similarities even go as far as both characters being portrayed with “gray” features, Wegner’s original Golem is described to be morally gray whereas in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Lord of the rings novel, Gollum is gray in colour to connote the idea that typically the Golem character becomes evil and “morally gray” because of real world evils such as wrath, pride, gluttony, greed or envy. These are a few of the seven deadly sins which also implies a religious influence, linking back to the original Golem legend which emerged from Judaism. The evident relationship between the original Golem character from the Paul Wegner film and the famous, present day Gollum character from The Lord of the Rings Novels and films, suggests that the idea of a monster or non human character is still very relevant and a current fear. However, The Lord of the Rings films are not classified as horror but more fantasy and adventure. This implies that since its beginning, the monster sub-genre in horror has been trivialised and people have become immune to the element of it that originally would scare them; this is probably because nowadays audiences are less likely to believe that creatures like this