The Haunted Hotel

In the tradition of the trick films of Georges Melies, 'The Haunted Hotel' is an awesome display of clever special effects and entertaining playfulness. It is very comic and cartoonish, and, while the style of humour is pretty dated, it has a certain charm that I couldn't help but adore. It mixes so many different techniques and creates one of the most purely fun movies to be made during this time period. Its employment of animation is particularly enjoyable, ESPECIALLY when it comes to the stop motion sequence somewhere around the middle of the film. The stop motion is of genuine high quality to this very day, and adds even more to this film's wonderful world of visual trickery and movie and magic.

The Haunted Hotel (1907)

**** (out of 4)

This film from Vitagraph is obviously one of the dozens (if not hundreds) of Georges Melies rip-offs but this one here is actually a mini-masterpiece. There appear to be many films with this title that were released around this time so this leads to some confusion about what people are actually seeing. The film (subtitled The Strange Adventures of a Traveler) here starts with a close up shot of a table with items like a loaf of bread, coffee and a few other things. Out of nowhere these items come to life. Melies was a master at the trick film but I must admit that this thing here is a masterpiece and it really is a complete joy to watch. Clocking in at just over a minute, the film manages to be quite thrilling through every second of that. I think the greatest moment in the film is the sequence where a knife comes up and starts cutting the break into pieces. It's just amazing to see this scene play out because it's very hard and nearly impossible to see how the effect was done. Director J. Stuart Blackton does a remarkable job at keeping everything flowing and there's no question that you really do get a haunted feeling while watching everything that happens.

J. Stuart Blackton, the pioneering animator, upped his game in 1907's "The Haunted Hotel." With each new project, Blackton continued to invent innovative ways to manipulate objects. In this film he used several George Melies' tricks--double exposures, stop camera substitutions-- and added several of his newer inventions to stop-motion and invisible wire special effects. Later animators would study this movie to see how Blackton achieved such mind-blowing visuals. As someone else on this board said, the teapot scene had been copied by Disney in the 1991 "Beauty And The Beast." The ending of Haunted House is not to be missed.

It's unclear whether this film was originally intended as horror, comedy, or perhaps a mix of both. Maybe horror comedy? I'm not sure. By modern standards, the story isn't frightening at all, but back when camera tricks were still new to audiences, it might have caused a few chills-or at least genuine surprise.

The film uses strings and stop-motion to make objects move on their own, double exposure to create ghostly figures, camera swinging to depict a paranormal storm inside a house, and miniature models alongside a full-size actor to portray a giant, among other clever tricks.

In fact, it serves as a kind of showcase of early cinematic effects. Simple but effective for their time-even if they no longer dazzle today. What's truly impressive now is the creativity and inventiveness filmmakers showed over a century ago to bring these illusions to life.

An house comes alive and the windows rotate. Inside, a man notes that objects move by themselves. A coffee pot serves coffee itself. A handkerchief twirls in the air. This is a movie with stop motion and image of the coffe pot animated is taken in the "Beauty and the beast" of Disney of 1991 and in 2017, too.