The Haunted Hotel

Some pretty cool stop motion effects in the animated tea party, transparent ghosts dancing maniacally, and other visual tricks from director J. Stuart Blackton. That giant demon at the end is a nice touch too.

It's unclear whether this film was originally intended as horror, comedy, or perhaps a mix of both. Maybe horror comedy? I'm not sure. By modern standards, the story isn't frightening at all, but back when camera tricks were still new to audiences, it might have caused a few chills-or at least genuine surprise.

The film uses strings and stop-motion to make objects move on their own, double exposure to create ghostly figures, camera swinging to depict a paranormal storm inside a house, and miniature models alongside a full-size actor to portray a giant, among other clever tricks.

In fact, it serves as a kind of showcase of early cinematic effects. Simple but effective for their time-even if they no longer dazzle today. What's truly impressive now is the creativity and inventiveness filmmakers showed over a century ago to bring these illusions to life.

In the tradition of the trick films of Georges Melies, 'The Haunted Hotel' is an awesome display of clever special effects and entertaining playfulness. It is very comic and cartoonish, and, while the style of humour is pretty dated, it has a certain charm that I couldn't help but adore. It mixes so many different techniques and creates one of the most purely fun movies to be made during this time period. Its employment of animation is particularly enjoyable, ESPECIALLY when it comes to the stop motion sequence somewhere around the middle of the film. The stop motion is of genuine high quality to this very day, and adds even more to this film's wonderful world of visual trickery and movie and magic.

The Haunted Hotel (1907)

**** (out of 4)

This film from Vitagraph is obviously one of the dozens (if not hundreds) of Georges Melies rip-offs but this one here is actually a mini-masterpiece. There appear to be many films with this title that were released around this time so this leads to some confusion about what people are actually seeing. The film (subtitled The Strange Adventures of a Traveler) here starts with a close up shot of a table with items like a loaf of bread, coffee and a few other things. Out of nowhere these items come to life. Melies was a master at the trick film but I must admit that this thing here is a masterpiece and it really is a complete joy to watch. Clocking in at just over a minute, the film manages to be quite thrilling through every second of that. I think the greatest moment in the film is the sequence where a knife comes up and starts cutting the break into pieces. It's just amazing to see this scene play out because it's very hard and nearly impossible to see how the effect was done. Director J. Stuart Blackton does a remarkable job at keeping everything flowing and there's no question that you really do get a haunted feeling while watching everything that happens.

This sort of trick film, in which a traveler goes some place where things mysteriously happen, was not new when J. Stuart Blackton made it in 1907. Melies was making stuff like it in 1896, and the vim and verve of his performances was a lot better than the actor's here.

Nonetheless, there was a change and advance in the decade and it was in the evolution of a film grammar. In the earlier films, the point of the transformations, appearances, disappearances and things moving on their own was that they were happening. They were the point of the movie and any actor on the screen stood in for the goggling audience. It was a magic act.

This film, however, is more than that. It is a story about a traveler who checks into a hotel and the weird and terrifying things that happen to him. The things that happen -- knives that cut sausage without anyone holding them -- are not the point of the movie, they are means of achieving the point. They have moved from simple shots to film vocabulary.

The vocabulary would remain the same, even though the grammar they exist in -- a cobbled-together pidgin of stage, magic lantern and ad hoc film usage -- would be swept away within half a decade. However, the next time you look at a horror movie, take a look. They're still using the same tricks.