The Ghost of Slumber Mountain

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.

We take for granted the technology today that allows us to watch movies of humans interacting with dinosaurs, a la "Jurassic Park." But these works of cinema wouldn't be possible without the team of Willis O'Brien and Herbert Dawley introducing the very first movie that merged live action with stop-motion effects to create, back in its day, breathtaking, chilling sequences of dinosaurs and homo sapiens on the same screen. November 1918's "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain" gave viewers a sense of how earth's giant creatures millions of years ago looked liked, acted and the manner they fought one another.

The film's two creators appear in the movie that has Dawley and another companion stumbling upon Mad Dick, the hermit, played by O'Brien. Mad Dick tells Dawley to take his strange-looking telescope, climb the mountain, and use it to see some amazing sites in the valley. He does, and he spots some dinosaurs as well as other creatures from the way distant past. This makes "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain" the first movie to show time travel.

The film became a box office hit, collecting over $100,000 on a $3,000 investment. But the two creators didn't get along soon after its completion. Dawley, a former car designer for Pierce-Arrow automobiles, was the producer of "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain." He had approached O'Brien, the genius behind 1915's "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link" and who had just got laid off from Edison Company after making several Conquest Pictures geared towards little kids. O'Brien wrote the script and directed the stop-motion effects for the 40-minute movie, while Dawley designed and sculptured the creatures.

After some complaints from a theater owner, the producer cut the movie in half. Conflicting accounts of who burnt whom first, but when wealthy movie executive, Watterson Rothacker, owner to the rights to Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 dinosaur novel, "The Lost World," hired O'Brien to oversee the project, the lawsuits from Dawley started flying. "The Lost World" was tied up in the courts for years until the case was settled out of courts, allowing an even greater technological marvel than "The Ghost at Slumber Mountain" to be shown by O'Brien and Rothacker.

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.

This short hasn't aged well-and I don't simply mean film stock aging either. The plot, the script and the idea are now creaky. Given that Willis O'Brien was part of the technical crew on King Kong some 15 years later, the stop-motion work in the last fourth or so of the film is really training for what he did on that film. It has a certain historic significance, but little else. Not even as a charming, if dusty curio. For ardent film buffs only, with the above caveats.

Only portions of this film exist, but the version I watched opens with "Unk" (producer Herbert M. Dawley) telling a story about how he found an optical device that allowed him to see prehistoric animals. After witnessing a battle between a tyrannosaur and a triceratops, he is pursued by the victorious predator only to wake up. Even in this crude, early production, the animators manage to breathe life into their models. To some extent, the dinosaur work in this short film was a 'practice run' for O'Brien's first special-effects masterpiece 1925's "The Lost World" Unfortunately, Dawley and director O'Brien had a falling out and never worked together again although both would continue to animate dinosaurs (Dawley made "Along the Moonbeam Trail' (1920)).