Year: 1896 (yes, your eyes are not decieving you!)
Country: France
Notables: First Horror Film!
Subgenre: Haunted House
Runtime: 3+ minutes
Director: Georges Méliès
This is an honest recommendation. It is the very first horror film (unless you count, and many people do, the unintended horror of 1895's The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots); and it is essential horror viewing. It is not quite 3 and a half minutes long and prints vary in terms of condition. But, even the grainiest of the prints out there suffices to give the viewer what Méliès was up to. This is a haunted house (or haunted manor) film, but the spirits that are contained in the film included ghosts, skeleton and even the first vampire like creature that changes from bat form into human form. That's a LOT for 3 minutes! The frame story is that Mephistopheles, complete with cauldron, conjures up these horrors (or tricksters--more like!), after he, as the above mentioned bat, flies into an old castle and takes human form. It is intended to be a farce and funny. So the very first horror film, is actually a horror comedy. For those of us that LOVE horror comedies, this is deeply satisfying!*. Méliès followed with a similar film, Le Château hanté (or The Haunted Castle) the following year. [Be aware that the vast majority of copies to view online are incomplete--and edited from a larger documentary on Méliès, most of the original film is available via a couple of DVD collections of his work, putting the film rightfully on it's own, bits are still missing from the end and it is a miracle that we have the film at all! It was thought lost until 1985.]
*I am aware that many, if not most, silent film scholars would rather die than categorize this film as "horror". But in so much as one can categorize early narrative films: this is most definitely a comedy, a fantasy and, yes, a horror film. Horror genres as they sprung from gothic tales do not need to scare or horrify to be "horror." It is a distinction WITH a difference as far I am concerned. Early films that dealt with the macabre, which Méliès certainly trafficked in theatrically, deserve the horror moniker as much as early films that recreated past events deserve for be called "historical."
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