🎃 31 Days of Halloween – Day 17🎃
Le Manoir du Diable (1896)
★★★½ Watched 17 Oct 2025
Directed by Georges Méliès, The House of the Devil (original French title: Le Manoir du diable) is often cited as the first horror film ever shot, and it’s fascinating that it was made by the same man who directed A Trip to the Moon (1902), the first science fiction film. Méliès was a magician before he was a filmmaker, and that shows here. This is less a narrative film and more a cinematic magic trick.
Released in 1896, a year before Dracula was published, it’s remarkable how much The House of the Devil already resembles Stoker's titular antagonist. It opens with a giant bat flying into a medieval hall before transforming into the Devil himself. The transformation sequence and cape flourish are oddly Bela Lugosi-like, decades before Lugosi ever donned the cape.
From there, Méliès unleashes a flurry of surreal imagery: skeletons appear and vanish in puffs of smoke, cauldrons bubble, and the Devil transforms a woman into a crow just for the hell of it. Two men eventually enter the haunted house, where they’re toyed with by the Devil’s illusions before one of them finally banishes him with a crucifix.
It’s delightfully strange and completely incomprehensible without reading a plot summary, which wasn’t unusual for early cinema. This is precisely why intertitles were introduced a few years later: audiences needed some sense of what they saw.
Still, The House of the Devil holds up as spooky fun. It’s got that same weird, dreamy energy you’d later see in Fleischer Brothers cartoons. It makes absolutely no sense, but it doesn’t really need to. Like the best magic tricks, it’s about the spectacle, not the story.
