(Credits: Far Out / Sean Benesh / Joshua Hanks)
Sat 4 April 2026 14:30, UK
If you’ve made a successful movie, it makes perfect sense to make another movie on the same topic.
As anyone who has been to a cinema in the past 20 years will know, Hollywood is currently running on franchises and sequels to the point where it feels like it would collapse without them. This seems like the norm now, but the idea had to come from somewhere.
The first official sequel movie came out in 1916 – unfortunately, it was the follow-up to the Ku Klux Klan propaganda piece, The Birth of a Nation, but what about the other way… Prequels are just as common as sequels nowadays, as audiences yearn to learn about the histories of characters as much as their futures, but looking backwards in time feels more complicated than looking forwards – whose bright idea was it to make the very first movie prequel?
While prequels feel like a more modern concept, the idea had existed in literature for thousands of years before it made it to cinema. The epic Greek poem Argonautica is considered a prequel to Homer’s Iliad, while there are also examples of jumping back and forth in the timeline of the Arthurian legends. In film terms, however, we have to head to Germany in the early 20th Century.
Paul Wegener was one of the defining figures of the German expressionist movement, and in 1915, he directed a movie called Der Golem (‘The Golem’ in English), a silent horror movie centring on the mythical Jewish creature.
The story is set in contemporary times and stars Henrik Galeen as an antiques dealer who revives the creature from a long slumber – Wegener liked the concept so much that he decided to expand the film into a series, and while he made a short film called Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancing Girl) in 1917 with a more comedic tone, in 1920, he returned to his horror roots.
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World) is more faithful to the real legend of the Golem of Prague: Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) fears for the safety of his people under the antisemitic rule of the Holy Roman Empire, he creates a huge, human-like being from clay and instructs it to protect the Jewish people from violence… The story is not unlike that of Frankenstein, as the creature quickly becomes demonised by the local population and ‘dies’ at the end of the film.
Wegener is the connective tissue between these two films in more ways than one. Not only did he direct these movies, but he also played the Golem both times. The fact that his version of the creature appears in both films confirms that How He Came into the World is a prequel, granting it the historical status we are recognising today.
In a cruel twist of fate, How He Came into the World is the only one of Wegener’s three Golem movies that survives today. The two other movies are either partially or fully lost, ironically rendering the uniqueness of the saga being told out of order completely void.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 