The Dark Séance: It Comes Off the Screen Right At You!

In 1860s France, a new macabre entertainment was rapidly becoming all the rage. Known as “Diableries” or sometimes “devil tissues,” these stereoscopic cards “depict a whole imaginary underworld, populated by devils, satyrs, and skeletons which are very much alive and, for the most part, having fun,” according to the homepage of the London Stereoscopic Company.

“The scenes depicted in these Diableries were made in clay, on a table-top, with amazing skill, by a small bunch of gifted sculptors, and then photographed with a stereo camera. The resulting stereo pair of prints was made on thin albumen paper, and water-colors were applied – not to the front surface, as in the case of normal stereo cards, like the ‘Scenes in Our Village’ cards shown elsewhere on this site – but to the back of the prints. The eyes of each skeleton were then pricked out with a sharp instrument, and small pieces of red gel, or blobs of reddened varnish, were applied to the back of the pricked holes. Behind this pair of prints was added a layer of tissue paper, which hid the ‘works’ to the rear surface of the view. The print and the backing tissue were then mounted together, sandwiched between two cardboard frames – each with twin cut-out ‘windows’ for the prints, and the whole was glued together to make a French Tissue stereo card.”

When inserted into a stereoscopic viewer, these Diableries not only appeared to be three-dimensional, they could also be either “illuminated from the front, for a normal ‘day’ appearance in monochrome, or illuminated from the back, transforming the view into a ‘night’ scene, in which hidden colors magically appear, and the eyes of the skeletons leap out in red, in a most macabre way!”

Popular until around 1900, these “devil tissues” would have been contemporaries of the “cabarets of death” in Montmarte and the Theatre du Grand-Guignol on Paris’ Rue Chaptal – more ingredients in the boiling cauldron that would eventually become the horror film. They were also early examples of 3D entertainment, though they were far from alone.

The earliest stereoscopes were invented in the early 19th century, but modern readers may be more familiar with their mid-20th century offspring – patented as View-Master in 1939. The View-Master that many of us grew up with uses the same theories as the earliest stereoscopes, which presented two nearly identical, two-dimensional images, side-by-side, which were viewed through prismatic lenses to give the illusion of depth.

Attempts to apply this same technique to motion pictures existed as early as 1852, if not before. However, such early experiments were difficult to produce, and it took nearly a century for 3D films to really catch on.

Despite several earlier efforts at 3D film processes, it was not until the 1952 release of Bwana Devil, the first feature-length 3D sound film in color, that cinema experienced its first “3D boom.” The advent of television had begun causing anxiety in Hollywood, with 1949 historically referred to as “the year of the television jitters.” This led to an array of new technologies and techniques to try to lure audiences back to theaters, including a variety of widescreen formats such as Cinerama, CinemaScope, Vistavision, and others. 3D was by far the most successful, at least for a while.

The films of the early 3D boom were almost all shown via a polarized system, not dissimilar to the process used by big-budget 3D films such as Avatar half a century later. This polarization process had been pioneered by Edwin H. Land as early as 1929, originally as a way to reduce nighttime glare from sources such as car headlights.

These Polaroid filters – early steps that would eventually lead to the instant cameras with which Land’s process are, today, virtually synonymous – allowed the exhibition of 3D movies, but they had their drawbacks.

Polarized 3D involved two film strips being projected at the same time. One carried the images as they would be seen by the right eye, one carried the images as they would be seen by the left eye. These had to be projected simultaneously and in perfect sync by two projectors onto a silver screen, as the matte white screen common in movie theaters today would depolarize the image.

The audience wore polarized glasses, the lenses of which were designed to admit only the light for the relevant eye – meaning that, while both images were being projected at the same time, each eye saw only one of them, and thus the 3D effect was achieved. The anaglyph 3D effect using cardboard glasses and cheap lenses (usually in magenta and cyan) was primarily used in comic books and magazines at this time, and wouldn’t see widespread use for 3D films until the second 3D boom later in the 20th century.

As we can imagine, syncing two projectors simultaneously was a lot of work, and usually required an intermission to run a feature-length film, all of which contributed to the first 3D boom being short-lived – even while it was also enormously successful.

Along with his brother, who was an optometrist, M. L. Gunzburg was one of the inventors of the process known as “Natural Vision” – the technique by which films such as Bwana Devil, William Castle’s Fort Ti, and House of Wax were all shot.

In a 1953 book, he explained the reason why 3D film had previously been limited to short subjects, “because of the taboos placed on 3-D movies by the ‘variable-interocular’ type of photography and the fact that 3-D cameras in most all instances photographed directly ahead (as though the eyes in the head peer straight forward, which they do not), all of which made it impossible for audiences to tolerate 3-D for more than a reel or two without suffering serious eye discomfort.”

His Natural Vision technique helped to eliminate this problem and bring 3D films “out into the audiences’ laps,” even if the challenges associated with displaying such films would eventually lead the first 3D boom to fizzle out. Still, Gunzburg had high hopes. “One hears a great deal these days about wide-screen, giantscreen, etc., to all of which, incidentally, Natural Vision is compatible, and about which we are most enthusiastic. Yet our greatest enthusiasm is for the ‘no-screen.’ We feel that the day will come, and soon, when audiences will watch a motion picture performance as though the screen were eliminated entirely, and life itself unfolded.”

He was perhaps overzealous about how soon it would take place, but refinements in the 3D filming and exhibition process opened the gateway for subsequent 3D booms, when films were able to be displayed using only a single strip of film and a single projector. Beginning in the 1960s, various films were released using this technique, often in either red/green or magenta/cyan anaglyph 3D, culminating in the second major 3D boom, which started in 1981 with the release of the 3D western Comin’ at Ya!

The second 3D boom began to taper off after Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983) – by some accounts the most expensive 3D film to date – underperformed at the box office. The end of the 20th century and the first few years of the 21st, however, saw 3D’s biggest boom to date, as polarized 3D returned to theaters, first in IMAX and then in mainstream movies.

Thanks to advances in technology, the polarization technique no longer needed two projectors to function, and the glasses themselves were more reliable as well. In 2003, James Cameron released Ghosts of the Abyss, a feature-length IMAX documentary shot using a newly-developed Reality Camera System, which could shoot in 3D without film, ushering in a new wave of mainstream 3D movies.

By 2009, many major films were either being shot in 3D or post-converted and released in 3D using the same system. That year, the vogue for new 3D movies saw what was probably its apotheosis with the release of James Cameron’s Avatar – one of the most expensive films ever made, and arguably the highest-grossing film of all time.

For whatever reason, though, 3D seems to be a fad that is doomed to an endless cycle of boom and bust, and by 2011, the appetite for 3D movies was already beginning to wane, with fewer and fewer customers choosing to see movies in 3D. In 2011, some 47 films were released in 3D, and yet overall box office receipts declined by around 18%, and those who did go to the theater were less likely to choose the more expensive 3D options.

Those diminishing returns led to fewer movies and, once again, the 3D boom died out… at least, for the most part. More than the specifics of how it works or the way it is applied to all kinds of films, what really sets 3D apart from pretty much every other gimmick ever trotted out by Hollywood is that it never seems to go away – not entirely, at any rate. So, while 3D may be out of fashion again right now, it’s still hanging around.

In 2022, James Cameron released his long-overdue first sequel to Avatar. Like its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water was released in both “flat” and 3D formats, though it failed to usher in another renaissance of 3D films in its wake.

In the meantime, cinema’s most persistent gimmick is still out there, waiting. Who knows when it will come roaring back to life, and we may all yet see a day when M. L. Gunzburg’s prophecy comes to pass and audiences sit in the dark to “watch a motion picture performance as though the screen were eliminated entirely and life itself unfolded.”