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.
