The House of the Devil 1896

What is on screen

A giant bat flies into a medieval castle and circles the room. It becomes Mephistopheles, played by Méliès himself. The Devil sets up a cauldron and, with an assistant, conjures things out of it: skeletons, ghosts, witches, a woman who turns into an old crone and then into six of them. Two cavaliers wander in and have a bad time. Furniture moves about, and a skeleton becomes a bat and the bat becomes the Devil again. One cavalier escapes by leaping from a balcony. The other holds up a crucifix, and the Devil vanishes in a puff of smoke.

That is the whole film, in about three minutes. The woman from the cauldron is Jehanne d'Alcy. Who played the Devil is less certain. The New Zealand archive that keeps the film names Méliès, but the historian Georges Sadoul thought the part went to the magician Jules-Eugène Legris, who turns up again in A Trip to the Moon (1902).

A magician at the camera

Méliès was not a film-maker by training. In 1888 he took over the Théâtre Robert-Houdin on the Boulevard des Italiens, the Paris home of stage magic, and over the next decade devised about twenty-five major illusions for it. After a Lumière show he tried to buy one of their machines and was refused. Instead he bought a projector from the English maker Robert Paul and, with an engineer, turned it into a camera. By April 1896 the theatre was showing films as part of its daily bill. He began shooting his own that May, and by the end of the year he had made about eighty.

His great trick was the substitution splice, also called the stop trick: stop the camera, change what is in front of it, start again, and the join does not show. Méliès later told the story that his camera jammed in a Paris street and an omnibus seemed to change into a hearse. Edison's company had used the same device earlier, in a film about the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Bat into demon, skeleton into bat and one crone into six are the changes the trick suits, though no account says where each cut falls in this film. The scenery was painted, and by most accounts the film was shot outdoors, in the garden of Méliès's property at Montreuil, where he was soon to build his studio.

Dates and numbers

The date in the reference books is 24 December 1896, a Christmas Eve premiere at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. Guinness World Records and the New Zealand archive both give it. Not every account is so sure: one says it is unknown whether the film came out at the end of 1896 or at the start of 1897, and a silent-film list gives an American release on 25 December. In America the film went out as The Haunted Castle.

Méliès founded Star Film with Lucien Reulos at the end of 1896, and by one account the Star trade mark dates from 2 December that year, three weeks before this film. The film carries Star Film catalogue numbers 78 to 80. The company's customers were largely what one historian calls a fairground clientele, along with music hall owners, so a film like this was made to be bought and run in a showman's booth as well as shown at Méliès's own theatre. The film is listed as black and white, and no source mentions a tinted or coloured copy.

Its length is given as 60 metres, which at the speeds of the day is about three minutes. The New Zealand copy runs for 3 minutes 37 seconds, and the version on the Internet Archive for 3 minutes 18. Silent film speeds varied, and so do the figures.

Lost, and found in New Zealand

The film was long thought lost. The only known copy is held by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, the New Zealand archive. Its catalogue says the print was bought in a junk shop in Christchurch in the 1930s or 1940s and was not identified by a film archivist until 1985. The year most often given for the film's reappearance is 1988, when it was reported found in the New Zealand Film Archive, and Guinness World Records says a single print turned up in Christchurch that year. The two accounts differ by three years, and the archive's page does not say who recognised the film.

The survivor is described in one silent-film list as a small-gauge reduction positive, not a print of the 35mm original. Do not confuse it with Le Château hanté, a different Méliès film of 1897.

Why it matters

It is called the first horror film, and the wording matters. Guinness World Records lists it as the first horror movie, and many writers repeat the claim. The archive that holds it describes a trick film that mixes comedy and horror, built from pantomime and made to amuse rather than to frighten. It is horror in its materials: a castle, a devil, skeletons, ghosts, a crucifix. It is hardly horror in intent.

It is not really a vampire film. A bat that becomes a man has made some writers call it the first vampire film. One catalogue of silent films calls that a stretch. What it did give film was a creature that changes shape on screen.

It shows what a magician brought to the cinema. Méliès treated the camera as a stage with one seat in the stalls and filled it with traps, smoke and sudden appearances. Six years later the same habits built A Trip to the Moon. The haunted house on film starts with a conjuror, a painted set and a puff of smoke.

It survived by luck. Of Méliès's more than 500 films, only about 200 are thought to survive, and this one reached us through a junk shop in a New Zealand city. Méliès died on 21 January 1938, and the New Zealand archive describes the film as public domain.