La maison ensorcelée

It's good to see that the tradition of people in horror films making bad choices goes back to at least 1906. Here the characters decide to stay in a haunted house overnight, eating dinner, and even trying to sleep as though they are in a regular inn. What is very odd is that the main characters are made up to look like clowns in a circus with false noses and makeup rather than just normal people.

Melies had been making films with these kinds of "tricks" in them for some time, but this was an early attempt to use these tricks to tell a story versus just demonstrating the odd effects.

What is particularly well seen in this film is that humans, although immersed in a non-human universe, continue to behave quite normally as humans, as if nothing had happened, that is to say say notwithstanding the horror.

A great lesson that horror cinema will take hold of is that there are only two ways for cinema heroes to fight against terror: either to become terrible themselves or to take refuge in everyday gestures. But horror cinema can only lay claim to humor by adopting this second path; the human must be surprised in his derisory daily existence for the terror to reach the laughable.

The film is known in English as The House of Ghosts or The Haunted Hotel.

It's not a bad 6 minute watch. Great stop motion for the time era - that took a lot of work to pull off the ghosts serving breakfast. There isn't much of a story line to this short - that is my disappointment with the film. It seems the film is mainly to show off the superb stop motion they learned during the time era.

7/10.

I noticed the other reviewer talked about how Segundo de Chomón imitated Georges Méliès. When he used many of Georges Méliès' trick camera tricks (such as starting and stopping the film to make things 'appear' or 'disappear'), I often liked his films as he STILL managed to make them his own. Sadly, sometimes Chomón simply stole Méliès work (a great example is his "Excursion to the Moon" which was an outright copy)--and I have a hard time enjoying these ersatz films. As far as this film goes, I would definitely put it in the former category--as it uses some of the other artist's techniques but is essentially Chomón's film from start to finish.

The film consists of three folks coming to an old haunted house. For the rest of the film, the house torments them and many of the tricks it plays are funny, though the movie ends with a scary demonic face that probably sent a few shivers down the spines of audiences at the time. Today, it all just looks silly--but in an enjoyable way. Clever and funny--and worth your time.

At its heart, this is a variation on one of Melies' most imitated -- especially by himself -- shorts: some travelers enter an abandoned house, and then, inside, everything goes all pear-shaped, as chairs vanish, the house rocks back and forth and the travelers are, eventually, scared out of their wits.

As such, it is not much. However, its director, Segundo de Chomon, elaborates the theme enormously. First, this one is shown in a dozen separate scenes, as first we see the travelers approaching the house and the spirit haunting the place is shown. In the middle are two major stop-motion pieces as food is carved by invisible hands.. The camera also moves, showing the house rocking back and forth.

But although this is much more elaborate than the usual Melies pieces, it does not depart from the basic situation. It uses the tricks, largely, for their own sake. It would be in the next couple of couples that these camera tricks would cease to be the point of the film and become part of the grammar of cinema.

Segundo de Chomon directed this version of Georges Melies' most imitated movie, THE BEWITCHED INN. Versions were made by every film producer in the decade after Melies' 1897 version, including several remakes by Melies.

The story is relatively simple: some travelers stop at a house or inn for the evening. Clothes vanish, chairs disappear when they try to sit down, food cooks itself and eventually the Devil -- who is responsible for this -- kicks them all out. It's a combination of stage and film illusion that is still engaging more than a century later.

De Chomon's handling here is both more realistic than Melies' -- the first scene shows our travelers tramping about a real landscape -- and much more stagebound -- the sets are not as realistic looking as Melies, the characters are stock Irish characters. The increasing disquietude and terror is punctuated by jokes, as when a bit of sausage, which has been cut off in an elaborate stop-motion sequence, attempts to escape from the plate.

By making the terrifying sections less realistic and breaking them occasionally for comedy, de Chomon was trying to disengage the audience from the events, to make the work sustainable for greater length than unrelieved terror. It was a valiant attempt to see if techniques from other arts would work in the new medium. Although it was not immediately successful, it would bear fruit in a couple of decades. The scary comedy is still a popular genre. Just ask Kennan Ivory Wayans.