Scary movies are supposed to terrify. Most of them, I find, merely horrify. But this one just might do the trick.
Released just before Halloween 1915, “The Spirit of Audubon” was a two-reeler produced by the Thanhouser Company and shot in Florida and New York by Herbert K. Job. Teddy Roosevelt himself makes a cameo appearance as Protector of the great wader colonies, but the real stars of the show were Laurence Swinburne as Audubon and two apparently once-famous child actors, Leland Benham and Helen Badgley, the “Thanhouser Kidlet.”
Bird-Lore called the film “interesting and highly educational,” but it also sounds more than a little creepy:
Audubon comes at night and takes two little children from their beds…. at the end the children, standing at the Audubon monument in Trinity Cemetery, pledge loyalty to the birds and to the Audubon idea.
The stuff of nightmares, even 101 years on — and I thought so even before I saw the photo of Badgley.
