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.

Georges Méliès does it again in the same fashion as Le Manoir du Diable. Albeit shorter than his prior voyage into horror film. This is at least a different story. Instead of this being a period piece, it appears to be a modern one.

The film shows George Melies, himself, having One Terrible Night with a creepy, crawly, spider. The film is one of dozens of shorts released during the era that focused more on drawing crowds biased on technology rather than the plot of a film. It is still going to be a few years before Horror is fully shaped and functioning.

If you are curious to see what film looked like in the 1800's then check out below where I have included the short.

Georges Méliès stars as himself in this one man performance. The Film is called One Terrible Night

A man in turn of the century bed clothes is trying to sleep. Unfortunately, a giant insect crawls up the side of his bed (it's about the size of a cat). He engages the thing and loses any hope of sleeping, even though he neutralizes the beast. There is some decent comedic stuff and it is fairly satisfying and silly.

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.