(1896)
Overall: MEH
By many historian's accounts, the horror film was birthed here. French illusionist and filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the most innovative in the medium's earliest beginnings and the title character in the three and a half minute short The House of the Devil, (The Haunted Castle in the US and The Devil's Castle in England), could also be interpreted as a vampire since he does transform into a bat and cowers at the emergence of a large crucifix. Then there are some people in sheets which could logically be interpreted as ghosts, understandably qualifying this as the first movie to feature such macabre visuals. Presumed lost for almost a century yet rediscovered in the New Zealand Film Archive in 1988, it is interesting for film scholars to be sure, but rather stale otherwise as it just featuring some substitution splices and characters running around a clunky set. Have to start somewhere though.
(1899)
Overall: GOOD
An admitted critique of the Catholic church by Georges Méliès, The Devil in a Convent, (The Sign of the Cross in the UK), is a fun parody that once again has a fabulously mustached, shenanigans-causing fellow stand in as the Great Deceiver who here is played by Méliès himself. Perhaps inspired by the phantasmagoria theatre productions of an earlier French magician Étienne-Gaspard Robert, the sets are rather elaborate and it is noteworthy by possibly being the first of Méliès' works to use dissolves. Featuring an ambitious enough finale where St. Michael emerges to rid said convent of its diabolical trouble maker and thus having good triumph over evil, it is still a sly satire for its time simply by having Satan pose as a clergyman to begin with.
(1901)
Overall: GOOD
Georges Méliès' adaptation of Charles Perrault's version of the folktale of Bluebeard, (or Barbe bleue in its native French), is one of his more ambitious works, clocking in at ten minutes in length. Still presented as a stage play be it a highly embellished one, numerous hand-drawn sets and props are used, perhaps most strikingly as well as humorously a giant champagne bottle carried by some servants. Though the movie certainly goes down some dark alleyways, (a locked, forbidden chamber with seven dead wives hanging from a pole anyone?), the tone is still playful and Méliès performs the title character as more of a bloated buffoon than an intimidating menace. Plus someone accidentally falls into a giant cauldron in the kitchen and is reduced to merely his clothes, which further emphasizes the film's somewhat ghastly, amusing nature.
(1906)
Overall: MEH
Based on the Victor de Cottens stage play Les Pilules du diable, (which was a reworking of an earlier féerie from 1839), The Merry Frolics of Satan, (Les Quat'Cents Farces du diable), is a more silly, modern version of the Faust legend. This is highly difficult to decipher though being such an early silent film with no intertitles and it instead plays like a series of very busy set pieces where furniture disappears into the floor, trunks seem to fit any number of people and other trunks inside of them, lots of running about and dancing behavior, and a skeletal horse and celestial chariot ride through the cosmos. The latter sequence, (which Georges Méliès had used from a previous stage production, titled Le Voyage dans l'éspace or The Space Trip), is the most memorable, but even still, at seventeen minutes, the film grows a bit monotonous and lingers on its fantastical visuals to a fault. It still looks fantastic though as Méliès' optical eye is as imaginative as ever.
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