The Sealed Room

MOVIE #1,185 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.10.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! Good Lord, help me, for I am returning to the world of silent films after swearing them off during the front end of my Hitchcock series, not once but twice this week for some real gimmicky ass shit. Today's double feature is two vastly different Edgar Allan Poe adaptations made 100 years apart. This 11-minute DW Griffith silent short from 1909 and a nonsensical, homoerotic 2009 David DeCoteau feature. I'm currently watching this one sans music via Wikipedia (lol). I'm trying to put myself into the headspace of why and how these were made in a time period I simply can't comprehend whilst simultaneously trying not to look at my phone (beyond typing these very words but now we're getting too meta).

I'm finding the same issues as I've had previously, chiefly: I want more damn intertitles. Unlike the stupid people of 1909, I LIKE to read! I don't think I've truly enjoyed a single silent film yet. Maybe I'm watching the wrong ones? But they are fascinating in a sense: literally seeing the transition into a new medium. It's like comparing cave paintings to Renoir. I am not a serious film critic.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,184 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,186 ⫸

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The Sealed Room (also known as The Sealed Door) is an eleven-minute silent film. Produced by the Biograph Company and directed by D. W. Griffith, the drama's cast includes Arthur V. Johnson, Marion Leonard, Henry B. Walthall, Mary Pickford, and Mack Sennett. It was distributed to theaters on a split-reel with another film, the three-minute comedy short The Little Darling. It was released on September 1, 1909.