A thief's head kept in a painter's studio for fifteen days, a watercolor that a fictional killer eats inside a New York museum, a canvas stolen on the day the Winter Olympics opened. Each of these twelve pictures was made before the first public film screening, in 1895, and each still holds a detail that unsettles an audience raised on horror movies.
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Painters kept returning to fear because it let them show what most commissions kept out of the frame, from rotting flesh to the inside of a bad dream. Skulls, devils and blood on their own, after centuries of use, no longer frighten anyone.
A creepy painting keeps unsettling people after they have understood what it shows. Each one here holds by a detail the eye did not expect, such as a face turned away, a witness who does not react, or a body painted exactly as death leaves it.
All twelve were made between about 1500 and the 1890s, before cinema, so none borrows its effects from film. Several reached their widest public through copies, prints, novels and touring shows, and the fear traveled with the copy.
It gets worse the longer you look. The fear comes late, from a detail your eye finds last.
Something feels wrong. A figure has no reason to be there, or a calm setting hides what it holds.
It reveals the artist. In a few, you see a state of mind.
12. Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)
A figure on a road above a fjord presses its hands to its head and opens its mouth under a sky streaked with blood red, and nothing in the scene says what it is afraid of. Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893, at about 30, and placed it on Ekeberg, a hill above the fjord and the city now called Oslo.
The answer lies in a walk Munch had written down in his journal the year before, in January 1892. He was out at sunset with two friends when the sky suddenly turned the color of blood. The friends kept walking. He stood still, “quaking with angst,” and felt “a vast, endless scream” pass through nature.
That entry changes who is doing the screaming. Munch said it again in 1895, in German, on a lithograph of the image: “I felt the great scream throughout nature.” With those words in mind, the hands pressed to the head seem to be shutting out a sound that nobody else on the road can hear.
Nobody else, because the two friends from that walk are still in the picture, two small dark shapes farther up the road, walking away. They unsettle me more than the screaming figure, since they hear nothing at all.
At a Glance
Artist: Edvard Munch (1863 to 1944)
Painted: 1893
Medium: Tempera and oil crayon on cardboard
Size: 91 × 73.5 cm (35.8 × 28.9 in)
Where to see it: National Museum, Oslo
About This Painting
How many versions of The Scream did Munch make?
Four painted or drawn versions. Besides this one, the Munch Museum in Oslo holds a crayon version from 1893 and a painted one it dates to around 1910, and a pastel from 1895 belongs to a private collection.
Was The Scream ever recovered?
Yes, both times it was stolen. This canvas was taken from Oslo's National Gallery on 12 February 1994, the day the Winter Olympics opened in Lillehammer, and found undamaged on 7 May 1994. The Munch Museum's painted version, taken by masked men in 2004, was recovered in 2006.
11. James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891)
Dressed in women's clothes and hats, two skeletons go at each other with a broom and an umbrella, under the body of a hanged man. James Ensor painted the quarrel in 1891 in his attic studio in Ostend, the Belgian seaside town where he lived, and on the hanged man he pinned a single word, the kind of label nobody puts on a person.