A woman reclines on a bed in a shadowy room. She holds a letter, raises her hand and begins to read. The film cuts to the hand-written letter: “My beloved! One more night and a day and then I will again be with you. I will take you in my arms … My hands will caress your hair … and I will feel your body trembling beneath my hands.” The camera cuts back and lingers on her as she stares into space, smiling, chest heaving as she begins to clasp the letter to her chest.

This sequence, the opening scene of Robert Wiene's silent film Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac, 1924), carried particular resonance for German audiences after the First World War, evoking the anxieties of soldiers eager to return from the front lines as well as those of the women at home reading their missives with equal longing. Yet Orlacs Hände is no overt war film and does not directly address a soldier's return. Instead, it is a horror film, the story of a pianist who is the victim of a train accident, and whose experimental treatment — consisting of the transplantation of the hands of a convicted murderer to replace his own mutilated hands — leads to his increasing instability and delusion. The horror revolves around a common motif — that of “possession” contingent upon hybrid bodies, seemingly a continuation of the great Frankensteinian fantasy of the nineteenth century: the recreation of life from death, the animation of the mortified object. While Dr Frankenstein's monster is composed entirely of foreign parts, resistant to forming a whole and violently acting out the mood of its inception, here we see the fantasy of an estranged part that transforms the body as a whole. Cinematically, the fantasy takes shape both in remakes of Orlacs Hände, such as Karl Freund's Mad Love of 1935 and Edmond T. Greville's Les mains d'Orlac of 1960, as well as in modern B-horror films such as Eric Red's Body Parts of 1991. In Wiene's film, however, this near-universal image of horror evokes a direct connection between the traumatic reality of war and a home front irrevocably changed, where previously stable hierarchies and social positions were no more.