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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Silence, sandalwood, and the copper stink of blood—Frenkel’s Herod arrives like a shard of obsidian lodged in the eye of 1908 cinema, a single-reel fever that anticipates both Judith of Bethulia’s grandeur and the clammy psychosexual dread of Murnau’s Faust.
Herod Antipas, puppet-king under Roman strings, lounges amid tessellated courtyards where incense coils around marble like opium smoke. Into this perfumed cage strides John—gaunt, thunder-voiced—denouncing the monarch’s incestuous tryst with Herodias. The camera, stationary yet hungry, drinks in every twitch of the despot’s cheek; you half-expect the frame itself to flinch when he orders the prophet shackled in a subterranean cistern, torchlight carving chiaroscuro scars across stone.
Enter Salome, pubescent and feral, her anklets chiming collusion with the scorpions that scuttle across mosaic floors. She beguiles her step-father with a dance so languid it feels filmed in molten honey—each veil drifting earthward like a guilty secret—until the court’s torches gutter in collective arousal. Herod’s oath, rash as lust, promises half his kingdom; her coy request for the Baptist’s head on a charger detonates the film’s final, lurid implosion. Frenkel cuts from the dungeon’s dripping walls to the executioner’s sword arcing through torch-smoke, then to the narcotic horror in Herod’s eyes when the gory gift arrives. It’s a montage of moral vertigo, stitched together by the thinnest of celluloid sinew.
Shot on a rooftop in Utrecht summer, the blistering sun bleaches whites until they ache, while hand-tinted crimson daubs the blade and tongue—an early, primitive Technicolor of cruelty. Compare this to the reverent monochrome of From the Manger to the Cross or the pageant opulence of Life and Passion of Christ; Frenkel forsakes piety for the erotic shudder, trading sanctity for sweat-slick skin.
Theo Frenkel doubles as director and monarch, his face a battleground of appetite and self-loathing. Watch the moment Salome’s final veil falls: his pupils dilate like black suns, a silent-era semaphore of taboo lust that rivals Nielsen’s lethal grin in Anna Karenina. The dancer, unnamed in studio records, moves with serpentine deliberation—every hip-shift a coded threat, every smile a scalpel.
Released mere months after Méliès’ last gasp and before Griffith’s biblical concoctions, Herod feels like a missing link between carnival peep-show and high-art cinema. Its frank voyeurism anticipates the decadence of La Salome while predating the Expressionist angularity of Dante’s Inferno. Distribution posters promised “The Bible as You’ve Never Seen It!”—a carny come-on that nonetheless scandalized clergy, who picketed Dutch cinemas with placards branding the film “the devil’s own peep-hole.”
Only two nitrate prints survive: one in EYE Filmmuseum, another in a private Turin archive. The 2018 2K restoration reinstates the original amber tinting, letting torchlight pool like molten topaz across Herod’s breastplate. Stream it via archival platforms or catch moon-lit festival screenings—preferably with a live percussion score that rattles your ribcage like the hooves of approaching legions.
Herod is a scorpion of a film—small, archaic, yet wielding a sting that lingers. In its twelve fevered minutes you taste the salt of Judean deserts, hear the clink of golden fetters, and feel the chill of a blade that never quite stops swinging. Frenkel didn’t merely adapt scripture; he strip-mined it for the psycho-sexual ore that Hollywood would refine a decade later. Seek it out, let its venom settle, and discover how early cinema could already whisper: desire is its own executioner.
IMDb 6.4
1932
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