The Haunted Hotel

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.

This sort of trick film, in which a traveler goes some place where things mysteriously happen, was not new when J. Stuart Blackton made it in 1907. Melies was making stuff like it in 1896, and the vim and verve of his performances was a lot better than the actor's here.

Nonetheless, there was a change and advance in the decade and it was in the evolution of a film grammar. In the earlier films, the point of the transformations, appearances, disappearances and things moving on their own was that they were happening. They were the point of the movie and any actor on the screen stood in for the goggling audience. It was a magic act.

This film, however, is more than that. It is a story about a traveler who checks into a hotel and the weird and terrifying things that happen to him. The things that happen -- knives that cut sausage without anyone holding them -- are not the point of the movie, they are means of achieving the point. They have moved from simple shots to film vocabulary.

The vocabulary would remain the same, even though the grammar they exist in -- a cobbled-together pidgin of stage, magic lantern and ad hoc film usage -- would be swept away within half a decade. However, the next time you look at a horror movie, take a look. They're still using the same tricks.

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.

At the beginning of this Vitagraph Company short film (five and one-half minutes) we see, not a hotel, but a cottage that is a small country inn. Perhaps in the early 20th century such inns were called hotels. In any case, the inn immediately mutates into a scary face. In the next scene we are inside the inn, where a traveler enters with his baggage. The traveler is very creepy looking with his craggy-looking face and Pinocchio nose. Before long, items such as baggage and cloth napkins are moving by themselves. Dinner prepares itself. A knife cuts a sausage in two, and also slices a loaf of bread. A beverage (ale?) pours itself into a mug, and then a pot of coffee pours into a cup. A tiny clown departs the pot.

At bedtime the weary traveler's problems really begin. For one thing, the furniture moves, then the house tilts. Ghosts dance around the bed. At the end, a wall disappears and an awful demon of mammoth size appears in back of the bed and snatches into his huge hand the traveler along with his blanket. The film is more terrifying than comical (especially for the young), but still enjoyable. Taking pleasure in this film certainly does not detract from the works of Georges Melies, who made "The Bewitched Inn" in 1897.

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.