The world’s first horror movie doesn’t seem particularly scary these days, but in 1896, Le Manoir du Diable (released in the U.S. as The Haunted Castle) had the most cutting-edge special effects of its day. Made by famed French filmmaker Georges Méliès, whose films include the influential A Trip to the Moon, the short revolves around a bat that turns into the titular devil Mephistopheles.
The soundtrack (at least on the YouTube version above) sounds like a weird little lullaby, somewhat taking away from the horror of it all. But there are some fun 19th-century special effects, a few of which may be first ever to appear on film. Mephistopheles summons a fair maiden out of a large cauldron to kick off the story, people appear and disappear in clouds of smoke, bats suddenly take human forms, and our protagonist dons a cloak of invisibility and vanishes. On the less frightening side, there are quite a few men in funny hats.
Méliès was the first filmmaker to create narrative movies, opting to experiment with storylines and special effects within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His contemporaries, like the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison, developed documentary-style films. The Lumières’ La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (1895), showed workers leaving their movie equipment factory in a chaotic crowd of men and women, horse-drawn carts, bicycles, and a large dog, while Edison produced numerous short films in his New Jersey studio, usually of a person playing to the camera (you couldn’t really call it acting). His subjects included a dancer named Carmencita, Annie Oakley demonstrating her sharp-shooting skill, Eugen Sandow flexing his muscles, and an anonymous couple sharing the first screen kiss.
Méliès’s films are less famous than Edison’s these days, but one could argue that they’re much more entertaining. Mephistopheles’s demon friend pokes people in the butt, which is what really makes the film come together. (After all, nothing says “Happy Halloween!” like a pitchfork to the rear end.)
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A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2024.