The House of the Devil

MOVIE #1,189 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.12.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! Just like Tuesday's gimmick, today's double feature also features an old-as-shit silent film and a more recent horror (one made in 1896 and the other in 1986). This is my first Georges Méliès review, a man who's often cited as one of the fathers of the artform that is CIN•E•MA. And just like The Sealed Room this is free to watch embedded on your local Wikipedia. This is also notable as it’s often referred to as “the first horror film” a distinction that’s probably impossible to fully prove or disprove so let’s just run with it. It clocks in at a full THREE minutes which was also considered very ambitious for the time.

I thought this one was a delight and really so much more technically pioneering than that DW Griffith film made over a decade later. Méliès, who started out as an illusionist, was playing with in-camera tricks and clever editing right from the get-go and why the hell not? There’s only so much you can do inside that void and silence. I think I finally found the kind of pre-talkie picture I like and that is very exciting. (I mean it's not THAT exciting but I don't have a whole lot going on.)

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,188 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,190 ⫸

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The House of the Devil (in French, Le Manoir du diable, lit. The Devil’s manor), released in the United States as The Haunted Castle and in Britain as The Devil's Castle, is an 1896 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès.[1] The film, which depicts a brief pantomimed sketch in the style of a theatrical comic fantasy, tells the story of an encounter with the Devil and various attendant phantoms. It is intended to evoke amusement and wonder from its audiences, rather than fear. However, because of its themes and characters, the film has been considered to technically be the first horror film. Such a classification can also be attributed to the film's depiction of a human transforming into a bat, a plot element which has led some observers to label the work the first vampire film.[3] The film is also innovative in length; its running time of over three minutes was ambitious for its era. It was released on December 24, 1896.