La maison morcelée

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.

In this 1906 horror film, three unsuspecting characters enter the titular abode, intending to spend the night. Unbeknownst to them, they're not alone, and are in for a very long evening.

Director Segundo de Chomon's THE HOUSE OF GHOSTS is more than just a quaint, cinematic artifact. It's a short cavalcade of inventive, even ingenious, camera work and special effects.

For its era, this is astonishing stuff! Especially the tabletop stop-motion sequence, featuring a delightful display of supernatural shenanigans. The various specters and fireballs are also impressive. The house-tilting finale is quite a feat for this time period.

Highly recommended for fans of spooky fare, as well as those who love vintage films...

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.

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 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).