Let’s start with the film’s title. Stepping backwards: Le Manoir du diable, the film with Star Film Company numbers of 78-80 and made in 1896, was distributed with several titles. In addition to its French title, it was distributed as The Haunted Castle in the United States and The Devil’s Castle in the United Kingdom (though we must keep in mind that all of these practices were a lot less standard and well-documented in the pre-Hollywood days; calling it “distribution” is generous). When that film was recovered in the 1980’s, English-language film historians typically titled the film The House of the Devil or The Manor of the Devil, a more direct translation of its French title, even though it was never distributed as such in its time. The Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Horror lists most of these variations of the film’s name in its entry; IMDb goes with The House of the Devil whereas the open-source TMDB (which Letterboxd uses as a data set) settled on The Haunted Mansion, the orginal US distribution title.

I bring up the title of the other film because this film has some collision, and given that both were produced within a couple of months of each other, it causes some confusion if you’re not paying close attention. This film, the remake, was titled Le Château hanté by Melies. It was distributed in the US as The Devil’s Castle and in The Haunted Castle in the UK. These days, film historians all typically land on The Haunted Castle, a direct translation of the French and the title used in the UK. All modern sources I’ve seen have used this name. This is the same title that TMDB uses for the original 1896 film as well, meaning that the original and remake have the same name on Letterboxd.

So, thus far, that’s actually not too complicated: Other than TMDB/Letterboxd, if you see The House of the Devil, it means the 1896 film, and if you see The Haunted Castle, it means the 1897 remake. Don’t worry, it gets more complicated. You see, Melies was good friends with another performer and filmmaker, an English fellow named George Albert Smith. In his day, Smith was best known as a psychic and hypnotist, but he was also a magic lantern and film innovator. He bought a print of The Haunted Castle from Melies, as he was interested in trick film techniques like the ones Melies deployed. The bulk of Smith’s films are lost, but as his work was studied, film historians included in his filmography a lost 1897 called The Haunted Castle.

We do not know if George Albert Smith ever actually made a film called The Haunted Castle, or if this is a record-keeping error, and the film attributed to Smith is just Melies’s film. But most sources still cite it as a distinct film, and this ambiguity has resulted in several sources mistaking Melies’s film to be directed by Smith (including the embed included above!). Most film databases, including IMDb and TMDB/Letterboxd, list these as separate films.

So let’s summarize: There is at least one 1897 film called The Haunted Castle, and it’s directed by Melies, though some contemporary records call it by other names. It’s a remake of an 1896 film by Melies usually called The House of the Devil, but occasionally called other names, including The Haunted Castle. Also, there might be another 1897 film called The Haunted Castle by George Albert Smith that is lost, although it might just be Melies’s, but some records mistakenly say Melies’s film is Smith’s, which it isn’t, except it might be.

Clear as mud!

Now that we know what film we’re actually talking about, a brief summary of this 45 second film: Two men are in a castle room; one has a ghostly, double-exposed translucency, while the other corporeal and opaque. Both are dressed like gentlemen. The ghostly man offers the corporeal man a seat, but then vanishes and moves the chair as if by magic. Turns out he’s The Devil! (Or perhaps some other nasty spirit.) The next 30 seconds or so are a few more slapstick pranks that verge into the creepy, mostly repeated bits from The House of the Devil: A spooky skeleton appears, e.g. And then it ends without much conclusion.

A few things to note about the film as a remake of The House of the Devil: Unlike the original, it neither features the intro of the Devil arriving and scheming, then the gentlemen arriving (we’re straight in medias res), nor the finale of Mephistopheles being banished by a crucifix. It’s also more zoomed in and flatly staged, giving Melies less space to work with. The overall effect is of a simpler, nearly non-narrative, story with very basic blocking. It’s more crisply made than the original, but much less fun to my eyes.

The Haunted Castle’s single most striking formal feature represents another major milestone for Melies: It is hand-colored, and that coloring has been preserved. This is the oldest surviving French film to be hand-colored. It is quite possibly the first live-action narrative film to be in color in cinema history. (Edison’s team had tinkered with hand-coloring as early as 1894 with “peep show”-style proto-films, but I don’t count those as narrative.)

The Haunted Castle features a sharp red in its coloring. Given the film’s subject is the devil, you’d naturally think that the devil character is colored red, but you’d be wrong. It’s in fact the gentleman being tormented by the devil who is red: The shape-shifting devil is actually white.

In general, the effects are done well here. I’m not sure if it’s the few more months experience, or else the opportunity to focus on a film that’s only a quarter as long as The House of the Devil, but the substitution splices are noticeably cleaner and smoother than before. The double exposure is more subtle. The timing and seams of the edits are less jumpy.

But even with the color and crisp effects, I don’t like this quite as much as The House of the Devil, which better leans into haunted house slapstick and captures a more madcap energy, plus its ambivalent conclusion. But even among the remake and title confusion, The Haunted Castle shows Melies continue to refine his craft and build towards the gems that were a couple years down the line.

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.

As frustrating as it is to confront the reality of lost films, there remains the tantalizing hope of rediscovery. We are probably past the days where intact copies of lost legendary films will be discovered in closets, a la The Passion of Joan of Arc, but that hasn’t stopped people from scanning crumbling celluloid found in warehouses to try and save what we can. The most plausible “white whale” out there is footage trimmed from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons: Turner Classic Movies funded a search expedition for the footage in Brazil just last year (though filming of the associated documentary has wrapped and I’ve read no headlines of the film’s rediscovery).

I bring all of this up because I am reading a book about Georges Méliès’s filmography. It was published in 2000 — more than a century after his career began — and some of his early films have been recovered since the book book was published. It’s crazy to think that more than 100 years have passed and we’re still making significant progress on scrounging up scraps of celluloid from the Grover Cleveland presidency. You’d think we’ve discovered all there is to find, but preservation of early cinema is very much an ongoing, dynamic process. So long as there are closets, warehouses, and attics that remain unperturbed, it will continue as such.

Consider the following miracle: Méliès’s very first two films ever (according to the catalog of his production company Star Film Company), both made in the 19th century, have both been recovered and released in the past 15 years. Playing Cards, his debut, exists in a complete and clean state, published for the first time in 2008.

Conjuring, his second film, was discovered in 2015, but in a more fragmentary condition. (A copy of the print hand-rotoscoped was found a year earlier, as well.) In French, the film has the title Séance de prestidigitation, which is a bit more evocative. All of the copies I can find uploaded online run between 6 and 12 seconds, and it’s not 100% clear if this is a snippet or the complete original film. The fact that both the live action and rotoscoped copies are essentially identical in content suggests that this might have just been a very short experiment rather than an actual film.

Indeed, Conjuring in its few frames shows Méliès breaking new ground and trying a visual technique that would become one of his technical signatures: the substitution splice, i.e. pausing recording (or cutting out film) to suggest something happening instantly, perhaps something appearing or disappearing. (If you ever messed around with a camcorder as a kid like me, this was the first gimmick you figured out.) In this case, it’s to show an on-screen Méliès make a stuffed devil head transport between two containers as he lifts and lowers the containers. He’d go on to use expanded versions this technique for years to come — it’s one of the main special effects in Voyage to the Moon, for example.

Where Playing Cards was a pure actuality, Conjuring shows Méliès’s curiosity in trick film techniques to use the medium as an extension of his magic act. All of this was made when he was still cranking his own homemade “coffee-grinder” camera in corners of his house, before he acquired an easier-to-use Lumiere camera or finished building his film studio. At just a few seconds in length, it doesn’t offer much to soak in, but it remains a compelling curiosity, and one that shows Méliès’s natural entertainment and spectacle instincts.

As a weirdo aspiring film historian who has been smashing his head against a movie (or more) every day trying to better understand the language and legacy of cinema, I keep walking backwards to figure out what led to what. Inevitably, this brings you back to Méliès — often further (see: Lumières), but one must draw the line somewhere. His films bridge the gap between “historical interest only” and “aesthetic curios of enduring appeal.”

Thus I am tentatively embarking on a Méliès dive. I can’t guarantee I will watch every one of his extant films. Hundreds of 1500+ films survive, so even if I assembled notes on one every single day, it would take me months and months. I’m not THAT much of a psycho that I’d turn this site into a Méliès fan blog for the better part of a year. But I’ll try to check in every now and again on “The First Wizard of Cinema,” as his prodigious box set declares him.

The first film ever made by Méliès is in fact a remake of a previous film made by the Lumière brothers. I find it hilarious that even before the start of the 20th century, remaking previously beloved films was part of the movie business. The Lumières are, of course, even more foundational innovators than Méliès: Their first film screening on March 22, 1895 is as good a moment in time as any to declare “the birth of cinema.” Méliès hounded them to license their camera technology, and he wasn’t the only one, but the Lumières declined, so Méliès designed and patented his own, which he nicknamed “the coffee grinder” due to the loud, grating noise it made when filming.

Méliès did not use his own camera design for very long, but I believe this first film of his was recorded on “the coffee grinder,” as he did not switch to other equipment until 1897.

This first film of his is drop-dead simple. In a minute and a half, it shows three men playing cards, jovially chatting. One of them is Méliès himself. A second card player was played by Méliès’ brother, Gaston. A girl briefly comes and says hi; this is Méliès’ daughter, Georgette. A woman is summoned and brings a bottle of wine, which the card player uses to fill the glasses on the table. They drink the wine; the man opens a newspaper, appears to read aloud a story, and the card players laugh. And scene.

“Playing Cards,” like the large majority of pre-1900 films, can be classified as an “actuality,” which is a genre of film in much the same way the doodle is a genre of visual art. It’s a necessary prerequisite to get to the interesting stuff: Just a camera capturing a specific shot of something happening for 1 or 2 minutes. The technical and temporal limitations prevent any narrative or meaning. It’s essentially a technical exercise.

And yet, Méliès, in his first go, demonstrates more basic visual instinct than most of his peers. Where the Lumières preferred the visceral kinetic force of motion, most often at skewed angles (like the train coming in or workers leaving a factory), Méliès does slightly more interesting things with the mise en scène. Comparing it to the Lumière version of the exact same setup makes it pretty obvious, actually. The basic dramatic curvature and sense of focus is there — we are able to understand the emotions of each character at each moment, and it’s usually clear whom we should be looking at.

Meanwhile, the texture of the film created by the cigarette smoke and the soft-focus backgrounds — probably a technical artifact, but still pleasing — are more visually compelling than anything done by his contemporaries.

As an early artifact of one of cinema’s first great minds, “Playing Cards” is a deeply intriguing prototypical fragment of film. And it’s a good starting point for me to take a closer look at the works of Georges Méliès.

I found a list online that aggregates every movie included in any printed edition of the book. I will be using that list and order as I watch through. Will I ever finish watching every one of these 1001 — scratch that, 1200+ — movies? Who knows! But I’m going to try, and you readers are going to share my journey. Wish me luck in the 1910s in particular, with its multi-hour serials and racist epics. Yikes.

For the first entry on the list, we have a classic (in every sense of the word) that I’ve somehow never watched the entirety of: A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) by the influential French fabulist and magician, Georges Melies. I watched a hand-colored copy that I found on YouTube. (One nice thing about starting at the beginning of film history is that everything is in the public domain!)

This very short, very early film shows cinema progressed beyond its “actuality” infancy, but still in a prototype phase: It feels more like a filmed stage play for most of its duration, but a stage play with elaborate sets and physical effects, including a large rocket ship prop. There’s a special effect of moon monsters vanishing into dust that is the most cinematic trick here — the clear technique that separates this from stage work.

The iconic image of a rocket ship crashed into the man-on-the-moon’s eye is evocative and foreshadows animation. No wonder it has become a symbol for nascent cinema: It captures in an unforgettable image the power the transporting and imaginative power of the moving picture. Like a great novel come to life, we can experience sights and sounds previously only dreamed of.

The hand coloring in the copy I watched, while degraded, give everything a playful, fantastical look — there’s something heightened about colors added in post-production that adds to the film’s heightened reality.

As with any early picture, it’s tough to evaluate this film with a modern lens. Even beyond being a silent movie with intertitles, already an alien, century-old concept, the language of editing and camera movement and acting for the screen had not yet been fully formed.

Despite its limitations, there’s true artistry in this film, even today. Passion and whimsy fill the frames. Anyone from a child to a passionate cinephile could find entertainment or craft in this short; that is the sign of a fully-formed piece of art. It feels transitional, but over a “hump” of sorts — not a technical experiment, but a piece of art.

It’s delightful to see a very early take on fantasy and science fiction in film, and I’m going to declare the kickoff to this 1001 Films To See Before You Die retrospective a success.

Up next is The Great Train Robbery (1903).

Apr. 2021 Update:

My 3-year-old daughter and I watched the first 4 episodes of Crash Course’s film history series, then watched this together. We talked about how the earliest movies had no sound or color. We narrated the story together — she laughed out loud when the moon monsters would disappear after being whacked by an umbrella. It made me love this even more!

Jan. 2023 update:

Now that I have made it through multiple books and courses on film history, as well as an ongoing deep dive of Melies’s extant films, I can say 1) my review above captures the right spirit, and 2) at some point, probably when I reach this in my Melies chronological deep dive, I need to write an updated review that provides a little more depth and content to what makes this short tick.