La maison ensorcelée

La maison ensorcelée is a remake of J. Stuart Blackton's The Haunted Hotel, which, at the same time, Chomón would remake more ambitiously the following year under the title The Electric Hotel. These remakes were the norm back in those days; as a consequence, copyright issues would arise but, until then, life was all a bowl of cherries to filmmakers.

Blackton's film was so successful in Europe, Pathé ordered Chomón to make a version of it and, even though some of the scenes (especially the one containing food being served on the table all by itself) are copied frame by frame, it isn't fair to give all the credit to Blackton since Segundo de Chomón had released his La maison hantée a year before The Haunted Hotel appeared. Who should we thank then? Méliès again. A bunch of tourists being harassed by spirits at some inn was certainly a recurrent subject matter in his movies, take The Black Devil as an example.

Regarding this movie, the two first scenes (introducing the atmosphere) are quite impressive: it's raining, the trees move as the wind blows and rays were added to the print causing a really shocking effect. It does look like a hell of a night (which couldn't be easy to portray so well in silent films). Three travelers take shelter in a house by the woods in which every kind of funny thing is going to happen: a ghost appears, clothes begin to fly all of the sudden, a painting comes to life, the house starts shaking up and so on.

The copy I had the chance to view came from the Nederlands Filmmuseum and I must say it was pretty neat and very well conserved too. The effects are very successful, scary even to this day; performances are good too, but once again it lacks originality. Chomón was an expert in imitating things and even though he did not invent anything, he helped to develop some important techniques. His use of the stop-motion in this movie is amazing. This is a great film I could watch all over again and again.

Solomon Roth

'The House Of Ghosts (1906)' (listed as 1906 here, 1907 on 'Letterboxd' and 1908 on 'YouTube', where I watched it) is also known as 'The Haunted House' or 'The Enchanted House' and is apparently often misattributed as being the lost film 'The Haunted Hotel (1906)' (also known as 'The Haunted House'). Confused yet? I suppose confusion is to be expected here; the precise history of a film from over a hundred years ago is bound to be a little hard to come by, especially when that film has so many titles. Anyway, this affair is considered by many to be one of the very first examples of a haunted house in cinema, though the concept had obviously been readily explored in literature by this time. It tells the tale of a trio of travellers (two of whom have very strange heads) who come across an abandoned house and decide to rest there, unaware of the ghosts within. Its most impressive sequence is undoubtedly one in which a poltergeist prepares breakfast - consisting of sliced sausage, bread and either tea or coffee - in splendid stop-motion style. It's a wonderful little scene that's integrated into the live-action elements surprisingly well, with fluid animation that feels believable despite its unreality. The rest of the picture makes use of more standard, yet still impressive, special effects; ghosts appear in windows, sheeted spirits dance around, objects vanish without a trace and the room itself tilts and spins with glee. It's an energetic and action-packed short, for sure. It isn't even close to scary and its atmosphere is more manic than anything else, but it feels as though it's actively trying to be amusing so its lack of horror doesn't really matter. It's much more of a predecessor to something like 'Evil Dead II (1987)' than anything more serious. In the end, this is an entertaining affair that is undeniably a little dated but is still impressive considering its post-centennial status. It's enjoyable for what it is. 7/10.

Segundo Víctor Aurelio Chomón y Ruiz (17 October 1871 in Teruel - 2 May 1929) was a pioneering Spanish film director. He produced many short films in France while working for Pathé Frères and has been compared to Georges Méliès, due to his frequent camera tricks and optical illusions.

I was surprised by this one. I've been searching for old movies for quite a while and often I found interesting movies based on how many years they have. But this one (we are talking 106 years ago!) is actually entertaining. A refreshing use of camera tricks for its time and a good 6 minutes watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo2EKNRIQlE&feature=endscreen&NR=1

The existence of films with very similar titles and with alternative titles on very similar subjects causes immense confusion, especially with the films by or attributed to Segundo de Chomón.

Ever since Méliès Manoir du diable back in 1896, haunted house films had enjoyed a particular popularity and naturally the films made in the genre all tend to have rather similar titles - the haunted house, the bewitched inn and so on.

The film that has been reviewed here by "Zbigniew" is in fact La Maison ensorcelée - the bewitched house - by Segundo de Chomón, made not in 1908 but in 1907. There are many more reviews of the film under the correct title. That film was a remake commissioned by Pathé of J, Stuart Blackton's extremely successful The Haunted Hotel of 1906, which is the first film to really contain a substantial sequence of figure-animation (the famous dinner that serves itself). De Chomón's version is however a distinct important on Blackton's. There is more of a story to it, the characters are more interesting, it is better photographed and the all-important figure-animation sequence is more extended and far slicker. The film also has quite a spooky surreal finale which is entirely De Chomón.

To confuse matters more, De Chomón had also himself made a much less interesting trick-film called La Maison hantée - the haunted house - just the year before (1906). I do not know whether this film survives or not; I suspect it is lost. There are however quite a number of reviews of that title. Once again the are, one and all, reviews of La Maison ensorcelée of 1907.

As for La Maison morcelée, I rather suspect this does not exist and has never existed but is just the result of someone slightly deaf doing the transcription. One can imagine the scene. Did you say "morcelée"? No, I said "ensorcelée". Oh, good, morcelée it is then....

To dot the i's and cross the t's, there is and has probably never been such a film as La Maison morcelée. La Maison hantée (1906) very probably does not survive. There is therefore just one film in question - La Maison ensorcelée (1907).

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.