Hey, everybody! Happy October! Since its Halloween month I
wanted to do something special. And so I’d like to introduce: Fear and Film,
where we look at one horror movie per decade from the past one hundred and
twenty or so years until now. I’m really excited to go on this trip
through time and look at these films and how they change and evolve as we
progress. So let’s start back at the beginning by looking at Georges Méliès’ Le
Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle), released in 1896.
I was thinking about looking at multiple films from this
decade simply given the fact that films at this time are very short. To put it
in perspective, The Haunted Castle has an ‘ambitious’ runtime of three
minutes, 18 seconds. But it feels like a disservice to these films to do
shorter reviews of multiple entries, so we will just be talking about The
Haunted Castle, considered by some film historians to be the very first horror
movie.
To start things off, what I found most fascinating about
watching this film was the special effects. This film is 121 years old, what we’re
seeing is special effects like the stop trick (or substitution splice) at the
time of discovery. And these effects aren’t used sparingly, either. Méliès starts
the story off with one, as a bat transforms into Mephistopheles and ramps it up
in the ensuing chaos. Even though Mephistopheles is a demon, the bat
transformation and other imagery such as the specters/brides have led some to call
this a vampire (or perhaps proto-vampire?) movie. If that were the case it
would also be the first of that genre. As to the effects themselves, they are
really well done. Méliès wasted no time in making the most of this technique
with awesome results as things appear and disappear throughout the runtime,
from single items or creatures to entire groups of specters. Even jaded,
cynical, modern me watched it bright-eyed, exclaiming ‘this is so cool!’ to
myself.
The story of the film is pretty simple: Mephistopheles
appears and he and his minion make a woman in a magic cauldron. Two ‘cavaliers’
show up and he proceeds to mess with them as much as possible until he is
finally scared off by a large crucifix. The acting is very pantomime, which
makes sense for the time, Méliès’ theatre and magic background, and the fact
they are conveying the story without the assistance of sound. There is one
actually quite funny part near the end when one of the cavaliers decides he
wants no further part of this and takes his leave rather… abruptly. There’s
another part that I didn’t notice until my third or fourth watch where they
actually jog the set and the whole thing moves. It doesn’t distract from the
whole experience, though, and kind of adds to it. I looked to see if there was
a (hand) colorized version to watch, but if any were made they do not appear to
have survived the passage of time. Although to be honest, I don’t think that
would affect my level of enjoyment one way or the other, but it would have been
neat to see. It's not scary in any way to a modern eye, but to audiences of the 1890's? Might have been a different story.
In conclusion, this was a fantastic way to start off a
retrospective on horror movies. I had so much fun watching Le Manoir du
Diable/The Haunted Castle, and I would one hundred percent recommend
people check it out. This is the first time I’d ever watched a movie of this
kind of age, and it was a wonderful start to exploring movies at their very
beginning. I hope you all enjoyed this and come back next time when we are
going to look at the film from the turn of the 20th century!
So cool!
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