The Ghost of Slumber Mountain

This early film, in my humble opinion, is one of the greatest surviving gems of early film. The stop-action dinosaurs are as good, considering the technology available, as the great Harryhausen figures in the 60's and 70's.

I was a bit concerned when the film started that it would be really corny, and when the boys uncle tries to get his best friend to pose for a risqué portrait, I began wondering exactly what kind of film this would be. But my fears were unfounded, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The canoing scenes are reminiscent of a lot of early travel films, and the telling of scary stories around the campfire brings back fond memories of my own grandfather.

As a grandfather now myself, who loves to relate scary stories to my young grandchildren, I absolutely love the ending scenes, and the reaction that the boys have to hearing this story from their 'Unca' ... well worth the watch - still as enjoyable as it was almost a hundred years ago.

This film by stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien, the same guy behind the effects of "King Kong" (1933), "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain," reportedly, was originally a three-reel feature, but was subsequently cut to a reel by the producer and with only about half the original picture surviving today. What remains isn't only interesting technically for the stop-motion animation of dinosaurs, but also for the separate live-action bits, which anticipate the structure of "King Kong" in another way with a reflexive narrative that incorporates within the film a surrogate for the filmmaker outside it. The dinosaur stuff is framed as seen through some kind of telescope or visual medium--like a camera. This is further framed by a painting within a dream, which in turn is a story told by the protagonist to children, who've interrupted him from his work of writing--perhaps doubly authoring the very story that is the film. Quite elaborate for under twenty minutes from 1918 and for a film that was already meticulously piece of construction in its modeling and stop-motion animation. It makes me wonder, along with similarities in "The Lost World" (1925), if O'Brien didn't have more to do with the shaping of "King Kong" beyond action scenes such as a giant gorilla fighting a T-Rex--not that that's not incredibly impressive on its own.

Also, I joked about the double entendres of his prior "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link" (1915), but now I'm even more suspicious that O'Brien is pulling our legs here with such title cards full of homoerotic suggestions as, "I tried to persuade Joe to remove his clothes and pose as a faun," and all the talk about the hermit "Mad Dick" and his having "gazed through a queer looking instrument." Come to think of it, it seems on odd choice to pick as your story to tell being that male camping trip where you dreamed about giant lizards.

Having previously only done clay-animated shorts depicting dinosaurs, Willis H. O'Brien would by this period in his life attempt something more ambitious of which this film is the result. It begins in live-action as a man-played by this film's producer Herbert M. Dawley-starts telling his two pre-teen male nephews a story as it segues to him and a fellow traveler on a canoe with a dog setting up camp. His friend tells of an old hermit named Mad Dick (O'Brien) who has a telescope that allows him to see prehistoric creatures. So those creatures come to life on screen as we see some dino fights. I'll stop there and just say Willis improves himself here as he attempted more realistic renderings of the dinosaurs instead of the cartoony ones previously. While this film was a mix of live-action and clay animation, they're not done together in the same scene as the split-screen method hadn't been developed yet. Still, it does the job as well as one could expect at the time. Too bad that only an 18-minute version exists, instead of the 40-minute one that was originally released. What makes this a really important work for O'Brien was the fact that it led him to be hired to work on something even more ambitious: the original filmed version of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World...

The film was a thrilling adventure, and mind boggling for the audience at the time. No thanks to "Willis. H. O'brien 1886-1962." He helped bring the dinosaurs, and the other creatures to life using "stop-motion animation." There are speculations that "Herbert. M. Dawley" the writer for the story, and Willis got into a disagreement. Causing Herbert to edit out Willis from the film entirely. This might be why some of the footage is missing, or it could have been a warehouse fire. Besides the mystery of the missing footage. It is still an excellent watch even for today's standards, especially for the stop-motion scenes.

Ghost of Slumber Mountain, The (1918)

*** (out of 4)

A man travels to Slumber Mountain where he encounters a ghost who takes him to a part of the island where dinosaurs rule. This short film by Willis H. O'Brien starts off very slow but when the stop motion starts up things pick up some. The highlight includes a T-Rex eating another dinosaur and then another scene where the T-Rex is shot in the head. O'Brien also plays the ghost in the film. If you're a fan of The Lost World or King Kong then you should enjoy this film.

The movie is now available on a few public domain releases but the quality is pretty poor. Turner Classic Movies shows a restored print from time to time.