La maison ensorcelée

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.

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...

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).

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.

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