Une nuit terrible

A man prepares to go to sleep in his room only to find a large bug crawling up the bed sheets

This is another very early film from French director Georges Melies which lasts over one minute so there's not a lot here for people who watch a film for narrative structure . That said because it's an early surviving film from Melies - who I'm reliably informed at least by the Wikipedia plays the man - it's worth seeking out if only because it shows the first stirrings of the imagination of the auteur

You can laugh at the film instead of with it featuring as it does a very obvious trick of getting a giant model beetle ( I'm sure it's a beetle and not a spider ) tying a thin thread to it and get someone to pull the model along while being out of shot . This helps to illustrate the imagination and humour of Melies who would go on to hypnotise audiences a few short years later with his special effect extravaganzas

The one-minute-long "A Terrible Night" is one of Georges Méliès's earliest films, and it doesn't contain the filmic trick effects, such as stop substitutions (or substitution splicing) and multiple-exposure photography (or superimpositions), that he became famous for shortly thereafter. The earliest known and existing such trick film is "The Vanishing Lady" (Escamotage d'une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin), which he made later the same year. Yet, "A Terrible Night" is a precursor to the filmmaker's later films in a couple respects.

Some have claimed "A Terrible Night" to be a precursor of the cheap creature-on-the-loose horror films of several decades later, but that's an exaggeration, unless you consider the sight of a large spider horrific in itself. The authors of the Flicker Alley DVD-set of Méliès's films list "A Terrible Night" as a "dream film", but that seems inaccurate, too. Many early films deal with dreams, and they usually indicate that a character is dreaming though some character action or filmic device. Besides him lying in a bed, there is no such sign here--no indication that the character is dreaming what's happening or that he was ever asleep.

What's clear is that this film was meant to amuse audiences with its scenario of a spider interrupting a man's rest. The large size of the pasteboard insect is likely both a comedic exaggeration and a necessity for audiences to notice it on the screen. Additionally, this is one of the first of many Star films to feature a man's attempts to sleep undermined by strange happenings. The same year, he used substitution splicing within a dream framework in "A Nightmare" (Le cauchemar), and, the following year, introduced the weary traveler tormented by movement, appearances and disappearances of furniture and otherwise inanimate objects via both cinematic and theatrical tricks in "The Bewitched Inn" (L'auberge ensorcelée)--two genres he returned to numerous times for trick films throughout his oeuvre.

Eerily reminiscent of that time I was woken up in the middle of the night by a spider crawling on my face, Georges Méliès' 1-minute-long, 127-year-old short film only diverges from my own terrifying real-life experience in that its protagonist decides to go ape on his arachnid intruder whereas I opted for a more gentle catch-and-release approach (and maybe, just maybe, cured my fear in the process). Although 'A Terrible Night (1896)' is old enough to be impressive almost by default, its simple story and workmanlike execution is far from the most inspired effort from its pioneering filmmaker. There's nothing necessarily wrong with it, per se, but it just isn't all that enjoyable and it genuinely feels as though it's lacking some sort of final twist. Still, it's a solid effort from one of cinema's most important auteurs. I'd say it's worth a watch just to see if it connects with you more than it connects with me; after all, it'll only cost you a minute of your life.

A gentleman's sleep is interrupted by a giant bedbug (?), resulting in a comic battle. Unusual for the auteur, there is no 'trick photography', just an early mechanical effect featuring an over-sized insect. There's not much to the film beyond a brief laugh and its historical place in the canon (as an antecedent to 'Them' (1954) etc.). Remade by Méliès as 'Un Bon Lit' in 1900.

It was all very amusing and didn't wear out its welcome. I hate spiders, too.