“On the Devonshire moor, the ancient legend of a spectral hound still haunts the Baskerville family…” 

A gloomy manor house on a winter’s night—gothic windows and arches, art directed to perfection—atmosphere seeping in from the moor without. Gentlemen drinking port and smoking, seen from various vantage points, through chinks and keyholes. Eyes behind a gargoyle. Who is watching whom? A dreadful howl: Lord Charles Baskerville takes to the moor to investigate—and is soon found dead, near the tracks of an enormous hound. The executor of his will comes down to London to plead for Sherlock Holmes’s help. Among troubling letters warning him to stay away from the moor, Sir Henry, the heir to the Baskerville estate, has returned from Canada to take possession. He must be protected from the curse, the Hound, or whatever force is behind the violence. Holmes sends off his trusty, phlegmatic companion Watson to look after Sir Henry, while he secretly launches an investigation of his own. 

Traversing layers of secrecy and mood through dramatic landscape and setting—cave, cliff, moor, tor, a murderous bog—and unnerving effects, including the titular hound, a slavering killer that fairly bulges off of the screen, Der Hund von Baskerville animates all manner of interpretation. Does the generational curse of the ghostly dog suggest return of the repressed? Of the crimes of the past? Of the wildness of the id? Is there in fact a rational explanation for everything (or even anything)? 

Richard Oswald, a Viennese Jew who pioneered queer filmmaking (Anders als die Anderen) as well as the horror film (Unheimliche Geschichten, 1919), produced bold, early works on then-taboo subjects like abortion and STIs. But throughout his career, he was haunted, not unlike the Baskerville family itself, by the Hound. Fourteen years after filming a three-part adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1914-1915, he created this sly, drippingly atmospheric 1929 German feature, the silent era’s final Holmes adaptation. With its international cast led by the American-British actor Carlyle Blackwell (who fairly glows with cultivated cogitation as the great detective), Der Hund also offers a parting shot—a fire signal across the dank moor of time—of a lost era of transnational cinema, before sound and then the war changed everything.

Now in a beautiful new restoration produced by San Francisco Silent Film Festival in partnership with the Polish National Film Archive, turn off your AC this August and open up a browser window to this bracingly chill blast from the bog. (Martin Schwartz)