Cursed first
Would you believe the first horror movie in the history of cinema is a comedy? Seems implausible, like if you were to claim the first Paul Rudd movie was a slasher! (Oh wait.) But it’s true. At least, it’s true with various provisos on genre labels and “first” declarations, as is true of all of early cinema milestones. But the story is as such: After founding his Star Film Company in May of 1896, French magician Georges Melies capped his first calendar year of production with his seventy-eighth film. (This means he was cranking out a film every three days — especially impressive when you consider that he had to invent his own camera, nicknamed “the coffee grinder” for how much noise it made while filming, after the Lumieres initially refused to license their device to him.) This three-minute film is called “La Manoir du diable” and had a variety of English-language distribution titles before film historians settled on The House of the Devil.
The House of the Devil was especially ambitious for Melies at this phase of his production capability. He was a few years away from his masterful mini-fantasy epics like A Trip to the Moon. Three minutes, while obviously quite short for a motion picture, was much longer than most, probably all, of the films he had made up to that point. Of the 77 films he made before it, only seven survive with complete extant copies, and they max out at one minute in length. (This is probably why he allotted The House of the Devil numbers 78, 79, and 80 in his production catalog — because it used triple the normal length of the films he typically projected.)
The film takes place on a single stage set, decorated to appear as a medieval castle. A large black bat — presumably a marionette or otherwise hanging from a string — flies onscreen then transforms into the devil, clad in black tights, a silly hat, and a bear. This Mephistopheles summons minions and fiendish devices before vanishing. Shortly thereafter, two gentlemen enter the scene. The devil and his crew spend the rest of the runtime tormenting these two humans, appearing and disappearing and pranking the humans with mirages. At the end of the film, one of the gentleman flees and returns with a crucifix, which causes the Devil to cower then vanish. Fin.
Now to investigate the claim I made in the opening of this review: That The House of the Devil is the first horror movie but is actually a comedy. There are three parts to this claim. The first is whether this is a horror film. Obviously this depends on your definition of “horror,” but it passes the eye test: It is filled with Gothic horror imagery and a monster startling and tormenting humans. The contours and iconography of horror are there, even the basic narrative structure: we meet the threat with a “cold open,” then the protagonist who ventures into the danger zone, then gets terrorized by a series of spooky events, then overcomes the monster in act of final heroism. You could use that outline for Dracula and Suspiria and plenty of other horror classics.
The second question is whether this is the first horror movie. And the answer to this appears to be yes as well. On the open-source TMDB, it’s the earliest listed horror film; IMDb lists another Melies film, the minute-long The Vanishing Lady, which was made a couple months earlier, as a horror film. Its case is more dubious, though — it’s a narrative-free magician’s act of a woman appearing, briefly reappearing as a skeleton, then completely reappearing. The Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Horror (passage pictured below) sides with The House of the Devil, explicitly calling it the earliest horror film (in fact, going further and calling it the first vampire movie since someone transforms from a bat), which solidifies the matter in my eyes.
Now the last, and trickiest, question: Is this a comedy? Pretty much all fictional films pre-1900 are works pantomime — exaggerated stage performance captured on film. Melies sprinkled in trick film effects to make it more exciting and to create effects impossible to achieve in a live show, but the vaudeville spirit is still there, and the result is a tone of whimsy and wonder and slapstick. It’s not especially eerie or upsetting. The closest to creepy the surprise appearance of a skeleton. The demon banishment ending is the biggest suggestion this isn’t meant to be entirely comedic. But I do think that Melies designed this to be a comedy, and it carries as such, though it’s the most subjective of the three claims.
But overall, The House of the Devil is a hoot to watch. Melies gets really silly with the substitution splicing, making objects appear and disappear and transform every couple of seconds. And he throws in some double exposure and elaborate props and set components for good measure — a smorgasbord of Melies goodness in a single scene in three minutes. It doesn’t get to the heights or sublimity of his later triumphs, but it’s the most complete and entertaining of his extant 1896 films.
Like many Melies films, particularly from his first few years, the mere extancy of The House of the Devil is a bit of a miracle. Like the large majority of of Melies’s 1896 and 1897 films, it was a lost film for decades after interest in Melies’s career among film historians surged. But it a decent quality copy was discovered in a collection in New Zealand in the 1980s — nearly a century after the film was made.
Melies would remake the film a year later, with a shorter but better-staged and pleasingly hand-colored film. That film, sometimes regarded as the first remake of a narrative, is called Le Château hanté, typically translated to The Haunted Castle. It’s a bit better preserved and has sharper imagery, but The House of the Devil has more of a spirited, kitchen-sink feel to it.
- Review Series: Georges Melies
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
A few words on "Is It Good?" ratings for early cinema.
Follow Dan on Letterboxd or Twitter. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.