This was one of the first classic horror movies that I saw a child.  From this movie came my love of all things horror, terror, and black and white.  It is really a true classic.

    


Many may not know that Bela Lugosi was not the first choice for the role of Dracula, which is based on the book by Bram Stoker and the stage play by Hamilton Dean and John Bolderstone.  The original role was meant for the famous actor Lon Chaney, from such movies as The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Lon Chaney had to turn the role down due to terminal throat cancer.  Also, the Great Depression made it difficult to pay the higher earning stars and many of the more elaborate scenes from this movie had to be thrown out due to major budget cuts.    At the time that the movie was to be made, Dracula was a major hit on Broadway, starring a fairly unknown actor from Hungry, Bela Lugosi.  Even still he was not the choice for Carl Leammle Jr.
the producer of the movie along with Tod Browning.  Lugosi had to fight hard for the part that won him his fame.
Lugosi at the time spoke very limited English, which made way for the creepy way that Dracula spoke throughout the whole film.  The movie was made in the silent movie style, for one major reason, it was the first movie to have spoken words.  Another lesser known fact, the movie was released on Valentine's Day 1931 and had a Spanish version filmed at the same time as the English version.  There have been many sequels to this movie along with many remakes, but in my book, this movie will always be the bar that all other vampire movies must meet.





The original was followed by Dracula's Daughter (1936) and The Son of Dracula (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr.
Even though Dracula was killed in the original he some how came back to life in House of Frankenstein (1944),
House of Dracula (1945) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).  Oddly, Universal would only cast Lugosi in his famous role as Dracula in the original and the Abbott and Costello comedy.  All other roles of Dracula were given to John Carradine 1931- 1948.   Although Lugosi played the part of a vampire many times in his life, it was only twice for Universal Studios.  I think Universal made a major blunder in that.


(Message edited by AnyaRamone On 08/12/2009 19:28:29)

Do you happen to know what was the very first horror movie ever made for the screen?  Well, I do.  Le Manoir Du Diable (The Devil's Castle) was recorded in 1896 by Georges Melies, who is also the star of the movie that is an over whelming 3 minutes long.  He plays the part of the Devil.  But why tell you about only one of these films, when there were many.  Here is a little more information on the films of Georges Melies taken from http://www.weirdwildrealm.com/f-melies.html







Melies Part I:
Demons in the Films of Georges Melies



Demons, imps, or the Lord of Darkness Himself were recurring characters & even stars in the films of Georges Melies. Though approaching dark subjects, he had a light-hearted view of diabolism.

His earliest films were two or three minute jests with magical incidents, though occasionally he would achieve something "epic" exceeding ten minutes length. Given the brevity of the films it's surprising how complete & rich many of them are.

Melies was clearly a genius at many aspects of filmmaking, but his genius as a short-short storyteller is sometimes forgotten amidst the cleverness & invention of his pioneering work in special FX. Really, as a master of the short-short fiction vignette, his brilliance cannot be overestimated.

It's possible that if he took his own art more seriously he wouldn't've gone down paths of Satanic comedy. He regarded himself lightly & seemed to have no egoistic sentiment nor merely self-aware realization of the importance of his work. There were on the order of 500 films in his library when the French Army took most of his films to melt them down & recycle them as the heels of boots for soldiers of the first world war.

Still other of his films were wiped clean, re-chemicalized, & new films made on the same stock, while others simply caught fire in the primitive projection equipment, or were otherwise lost to attrition during circulation to the earliest exhibitors. For these reasons a great many of Melies films simply do not survive. But copies had been dispersed widely in Europe & North America, & we have enough of them today that a veritable study could be made of his films, & frequently has been made.





The Devil's Manor (Le Manoir du diable, 1896) has gone by several English titles, known also as The Haunted Castle, The Devil's Castle, or The House of the Devil.

It's a two-minute film that premiered on Christmas Eve, 1896, at the Theatre Robert Houdin in Paris, shown between live magic acts. That night marks the beginning of fantasy & horror cinema.

A poster for a later showing at the Robert Houdin Theatre is reproduced here, advertising something of a double bill, the revived The Devil's Manor togehter with a newly released supernatural morality piece, Murder Will Out (Le Spectre, 1899)

It is worth noting that such films were kept short because shown mostly on the carnival circuit & fairgrounds, the exhibitors wanting a constant turn over of customers in their tents. Melies sold his short-shorts to fairgrounds by the foot, & even if he made a longer film, they would be sold in chapter-lengths averaging two minutes & might not all be shown together.

When the day came that sufficient stationary theaters existed that weren't just one side-show event in a row of side-show events, films would creep upward in length, though the first inclination would be to show clutches of the short-short films that originated in nikelodians & fairgrounds.

In The Devil's Manor figures covered in white cloth manifest from a cauldron, vanish & reappear, including a woman played by Jeanne D'Arcy who also performed live at the Robert Houdin Theatre.

Because a bat turn into an imp, some few fantasy film historians would like to identify as the first vampire in the cinema.

Melies as a sword-bedecked member of the gentry does battle with the black-clad devil, using a cross as his weapon. Although The Devil's Manor seems to be straining to tell a story, it fails to do so. It is just trick photography & weird characters with no more context than the manor itself.






Demons of hell keep putting women in a cauldron, burning them up, in The Infernal Cauldron (Le Chaudron infernal, 1903). At a scant minute & six seconds, way too little happens, but that little is wildly action-oriented.

The set & costumes are quite amazing, with some pyrotechnics thrown in.

It seems very elaborate to have been kept so short, but being in full color caused greater limitations for length, even in the "two minute movie" era, for to make a color film required every frame to be hand-painted.





What appears to be another chapter of the same story is The Infernal Cake-Walk (Le Cake-Walk Infernal, 1903), which features Melies as the coolest knock-kneed dancing devil of all time.

Dancing girls & acrobatic fire-manipulating demons put on a show on a stagy cavern in hell, which looks like quite a fun place.

The centerpiece is the dance called "the cake-walk." This dance originated in the United States among southern black folk who were making fun of the self-important marching-manner of how white folks walked.

The dance occurs in several kinetoscope films including Cake Walk 1903) in which three black men & two black women perform the popular dance of the day, Cake Walk (1903), everyone dressed to the nines.

The same well dressed group of African American dancers perform a slightly sillier version of this dance in Comedy Cake Walk (1903) obviously filmed the same day. It's funnier still when one realizes what caucasians never realized, this dance arose as a parody of the way white folks walk.

White folks not getting the joke began to do the satiric walk as a new dance step. And the dance step spread world-wide. Melies has two of the dancers-in-hell in blackface, acknowledging the dance's origins in black America.

Eventually a knock-kneed goat-legged horned Satan arrives in a puff of smoke & cakewalks on a cake-shaped pedestal, adding the cute trick of letting his legs & arms fly off to dance on their own. The devil's cake-walk is wonderfully antic.






The Black Imp; aka, The Black Devil (Le Diable noir, 1905) is a four-minute film showing an imp (or a chap in black leotards, cat-ears, & tail) leaping about a bedroom.

He jumps from bed to table & whatnot, leaving the film-set before three other characters arrive, two women leading a man. The women, apparently landladies, leave the gentleman alone in the rented room.

Furniture begins stacking & rearranging itself & multiplying & vanishing, to the shock & injury of the horrified lodger.

At length the Imp causing it reappears & the renter chases him about. Amusingly slapstick despite minor injuries, it ends with the poor guy being kicked out by the landladies, & the Imp has the bed to himself.






A similar story was filmed by Melies as The Infernal Tenent; aka The Devilish Tenent (Le Locataire Diabolique, 1909), in hand-tinted color.

A traveller rents a room from a rather Turkish looking landlord. The room is unfurnished, but the new tenent removes everything he requires from a small suitcase, including even a fireplace, & arranges the room to his liking, having the ability to simply toss things into their positions.

The large trunk he took from the small suitcase contains everything required for a dinner for six -- table, chairs, food -- including even the guests. At a later time the furniture attacks the landlord, who now realizes he has a diabolical tenant, & flees to tell his wife.

The tenent, having been found out, begins to repack all his posessions including the piano & fireplace in the trunk, puts the trunk in the small suitcase, & departs the residence by the window, leaving behind only a watercloset with a bomb in it.


The demon-haunted room was also used in The Inn Where No Man Rests (L'Auberge du bon repos, 1903)

An inebriated gentleman arrives at the Inn & requires help with his hat, coat, & boots. He's staggering drunk & almost as soon as he's left alone in his room, the portrait on the wall momentarily comes to life.

He's not sure it really happened, but will soon have further evidence of strangeness. It seems the portrait doesn't want him to smoke in the room, & so keeps blowing out the candle with which the drunkard hoped to light his pipe.

The portrait changes to a huge laughing face & the drunk leaps on his bed in surprise, then attacks the coat & hat tree as though worried it too might come alive. His own boots kick him & dance about the room.

Calming himself, as soon as he lies down to sleep, the bed starts hopping about & dumps him on the floor. Imps appear & disappear in the room & the drunk makes a ruckus trying to fight them.

A group of people respond to the noise by flooding into the room, & there's a wild chase in & out of the walls. It's quite a silly comedy all in all.






In a busy kitchen we're introduced to The Cook in Trouble (Sorcellerie culinaire, 1903) & his assistants. It's difficult to coordinate all the cookpots at once, & the cook is in a dither.

A beggar enters stage right & the cook has no patience for him & tries to kick him out. So the beggar transforms into a sorcerer & puts a spell on the kitchen.

A salt box suddenly expands to a large size, out of which leaps a tailed monkey-imp. The salt box becomes small again &, unnoticed by the cook or his helpers, the imp empties the salt into a boiling pot of soup.

The box then gets momentarily large so the imp can get back in it & disappear. When the cook tastes the soup, he's horrified & blaming his helpers kicks them all out of the kitchen.

The salt box grows large again & three tailed imps climb out. This time the cook sees what's going on & is caught up in a series of unpleasant experiences with the accursed beings.

The imps climb into the boiling soup pot & evade capture by the cook by sundry methods. Essentially they just keep running about & climbing in the soup pots & exiting from the stove door.

The lack of at least one additional gag, apart from all the running about, makes this one a bit monotonous without a climax, so that it's four minute running time feels rather longer.

For an additional imp tales from Melies, see reviews of Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue, 1901) & An Astronomer's Dream (La Lune a un metre, 1899). There are quite few others, not even counting lost devil-films known from catalog discriptions.

The earliest of early films were only one to three minutes long each & made every effort to make their entire point in the shortest amount of time possible.

Probably the greatest of the early pioneers was the masterful Georges Melies in France, inventing camera equipment, & testing the extreme edges of what this equipment was capable of achieving in terms of cinematic wonder.

He loved the macabre & the science fictional, which gave him every opportunity to convey on film what could never be seen on a live stage.

Less than two minutes long, in Un homme de te

tes (1898) Georges Melies removes his head, puts it on a table, sprouts a new head, removes it, puts that on the table beside the other, sprouts another head to remove & place on a second table, then sits down & plays the banjo.

This tiny movie is so dark & funny, with the first "split screen" shot ever on film. It's a masterpiece of the short-short silent film in the first primitive era of cinematic art.





The head-removal trick also came in handy for The Terrible Turkish Executioner (Le Bourreau turc, 1904). All filmographies date this one 1904, though the date on the film itself is 1903.

Staged with pseudo-turkish decor, four turbaned men are placed in a long stocks, while a group of women watch. A long-bearded swordsman with enormous scimitar dances center stage with his sword whirling, & beheads all four men in a single sweep.

He then gathers up the heads & puts them in a rain barrel as the four headless men sit perfectly still shoulder to shoulder. The executioner seats himself at an outdoor table, perhaps taking care of the paperwork, & has his back to the beheaded men.

One of the heads peaks out of the rain barrel, then floats upward & reattaches itself to one of the headless men. He in turn fetches the other three heads & passes them down the line until all are restored.

The four men leap upon the executioner, take his sword, & cut his torso from his hips & legs. His legs run about the stage while the top half of his body thrashes separately. The two halves manage to get themselves put back together, with a final chase scene for closure.

Although no more macabre than many of Melies' films, there's a partially serious tone to this one that makes it ever so slightly horrific.






The Man with the Rubber Head (L'Homme a la tete en caoutchouc, 1901) at nearly three minutes is one of Melies' triumphs of set design, a remarkable work even before the special FX begin.

A beautifuly framed & elegant tiny film, it shows what appears to be an apothocary shopkeeper (Melies) opening his shop. He may be an alchemist, given the nature of his work.

Setting up a table, he removes from a tiny box a living head that looks exactly like his own. This he displays on the table. It's important that we can see under the table.

While the head writhes a bit, he attaches a bellows & blows it up larger & larger, then lets the air out of it. A customer comes in & wants to try the bellows, pumping up the head until it explodes.

Macabre jests dominate Melies' shortest short films & it's rather amazing that the jokes are still good ones over a century later. And the pioneer techniques to achieve the fantastic are still capable of impressing me.





The Mysterious Retort (Alchimiste Parafaragamus ou La cornue infernale,1906) involves an alchemist working from a giant book of spells & a very large retort heated over a stove.

A cloth snake crawls out of the stove & turns into a sommersaulting fellow in an unusual suit, probably Mephistopheles or similar tempting imp figure. Demons & imps recur over & over again in Melies' wee films, as they give considerable leeway for magical events.

The big retort turns into a giant retort with a head then a complete human figure inside. If you compare the FX with those in The Man with the Rubber Head you'll see a striking similarity of method, mixing actual stage magic with the film tricks.

A ghostly spirit arises from a nearby wooden bucket, then the retort vanishes in a puff of smoke & knocks the alchemist unconscious (or dead) & Mephistopheles reappears victorious.






Magic acts provided perhaps Melies' most obvious theme. He provides one more minute of entertainment with An Up-to-Date Conjurer (L'Impressionniste fin de siecle, 1899).

He makes a girl vanish under a blanket, & reappear inside a tube set up on a table. He then lifts her up & she explodes into confetti.

A few more transformations & disappearances are given in rapid succession & voila, it's done.

In The One-Man Band (L'Homme ochestre, 1900) Melies again stars himself. He clones himself until he has an entire orechstra & chairs in which to seat himselves.





He/they give a quick performance, then he folds the extra selves back into the original, & dematerializes the chairs, adding a few vaudevilliean stunts for grand finale, all in under two minutes.

It's a marvel of multiple exposures, wonderfully designed, & awfully amusing.

The Melomaniac (Le Melomane, 1903) at two & a half minutes features Melies as a band leader leading his women's marching band onto a stage.

He then begins removing his head, growing a new one, & removing that one, over & over again, placing the heads on a set of telegraph wires arranged to look like sheet music, his multiplying heads forming the notes. A couple other quick stunts, & then everyone marches off the stage. An insane very funny performance!






For The Magic Lantern (Le Lanterne magique, 1903), two clowns looking rather like dolls construct a huge magic-lantern (or a normal-sized one, if they are dolls) & begin to project moving pictures on the wall.

They then take the magic lantern apart & lo & behjold out pops a sexy chorus line who dance about the room. Opening & closing the lantern box, more & more dancers appear, the last manifestation being a rather creepy giant puppet.

The Magic Lantern I'm betting was the first film to make what would become a common assumption in films to come, that once the lights go out at night, toys come to life.






The Monster (Le Monstre, 1903) is set on the desert near the Sphinx. Two Egyptians arrive & one of them dresses up a skeleton & brings it to life.

The skeleton dances about wildly, then collapses into a heap, then rises up to dance to its master's tune again.

It is impossible to know if it is the resurged life, or the magician who made it dance, is the monster of the title.

However, according to the 1903 Lubin catalog, a different story that is obvious from the pictured event is being told, & one wonders how much the audiences of the day were told in advance to shape their viewing experience.

According to the catalog the magician is actually a mystical dervish hired by a prince to bring his beloved wife back to life. Knowing this doesn't make the monstrousness of the event less horrific; if anything, it makes it creepier, unusual for Melies whose macabre films tend to be much more whimsical than this.






For Untamable Whiskers (Le Roi du maquillage, 1904), Melies draws a picture of himself on a chalkboard with a different hairstyle than his own, then stands waiting for his actual hair to change into the style he drew.

He draws himself again as a scary old man with a long beard (actually it's supposed to be Shakespeare but what a lousy representation, & then transforms into just that image. Next he draws himself with an enormous mustache (perhaps audiences of the day would've recognized this as representing Admiral Nelson & again transforms before us.

Doing away with the drawings, he builds to a crescendo of excitement with rapid transformations from the bard into a clown, an admiral, a devil, then wraps himself in a blanket & disappears, all in about two minutes & a quarter.





In The Magic Book (Le Libre magique, 1900), a large book is mounted on an aesel so that the audience can see it as the open pages.

As the scholar turns the pages, there emerges in turn an old man, a clown, & a beautiful maiden. When the scholar attempts to woo the maiden, all the characters return to the book.

Although only a trick-film with no story to speak of, in the history of animation, Le Livre Magique is regarded one of the pivotol films in the development of stop-motion replacement of objects.

Melies Part III:
More Magicians in the Films of Georges Melies





The very first film by Georges Melies recorded A Card Game (Une Paritic de cartes, 1896) which he & his family played at a table in their own back yard garden. Melies himself sits at the center of the composition enjoying with others mild merriment, drinking, smoking, dealing cards, reading a paper.

Long presumed lost, A Card Game turned up in in the 1990s in an archive in London. It's obviously an experiment & not an original work, for it closely copies A Game of Cards (Partie d'ecarte, 1896) which the Lumiere brothers made a few months earlier. And while Melies' pilot effort has the look of recording a natural event, it's actually fully staged.

At the time it was still regarded as "magic" merely that the pictures could be shown to move, & it was in great part Melies' lifelong interest in stage illusion that attracted him to the new medium of moving pictures. As the novelty of "mere" motion wore out, most of the pioneer filmmakers would turn to farce. But Melies had a wilder imagination.

As he owned & directed the Robert Houdin Theatre, which specialized in magic shows, it was a natural progression for Melies to leave the world of banal subjects such as reading the paper & playing cards, to recreating magic acts for film projection.






The Vanishing Lady; aka, The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin (Escamotage d'une dame chez Robert-Houdin, 1896) is Georges Melies' earliest surviving pioneering film of trick photography, & his third earliest surviving film overall. The theme of the conjuror was one he would revisit throughout his film career.

Basically The Vanishing Lady recreates a stage act by the Victorian magician Buatier de Kolta. A woman vanishes from a chair, remateriales as a skeleton, then is restored to life. This is the very first use of the stop-camera trick, which makes it historically a film of considerable consequence, though not in itself all that interesting.

All too similar in nature is A Turn of the Century Illusionist (L'Impressioniste fin de siecle (1899). A magic act is again performed with Melies as the magician.

A disappearing trick uses a woman (Jehanne D'alcy, as in The Vanishing Lady) who is covered with a blanket & caused to vanish from her seat, & reappear in a barrel on a table. The magician then makes himself vanish & reappear in the barrel.

The reason the barrel is set up on a table is to make it clear the teleportation was not done with holes through the floor. This would be impressive with a live stage act, but is beside the point with trick photography. So there's not much to sustain wonder once the initial novelty of pictures moving wears thing.

Melies eventually learned his lesson, afterward striving for each film with magician or sorcerer, he would include events that a good stage magician couldn't do. To be sure, his best abjectly wonderful films would go well beyond faking a magic act with trick photography, but he loved magic acts so much personally he would never tire of using the theme of the conjurer from time to time.






Many of Melies' films were based on actual stage or carnival magic, which he pushed to further extremes with camera tricks.

When I was a tot, my mom & step-dad owned a big-top, & I lived an itinerant life with the circus. One of my family's exhibits, done with mirrors, was "the lady in the fishbowl."

You could look in the glass aquarium & see plain as day a tiny woman sitting on a rock in the water, waving at the audience that tramped by in front of the bowl for a close-up look.

Melies with camera tricks instead of mirrors reduplicates the old carnival act in The Mermaid (La Sirene, 1904). We see Melies himself getting comfortable in a room with a window view, a hammock, & an aquarium. He tinkers with the aquarium for a while then takes up a cane, stands on a stool to use his walking cane as a fishing-rod, catches fish from his tophat, which he places in the aquarium.

He then turns himself into a white-whiskered gent in completely different costume, continuing to materialize live fish for the aquarium. He then turns back into the dark-suited gentleman & moves the aquarium exhibit to center stage, where it appears to grow to a much larger size, revealing a beautiful mermaid relaxing on her side as fish swim about her.

She then dematerializes & reappears outside the aquarium with legs, while the gentleman in dark suit turns into Neptune & seats himself in the giant aquarium with two more women materializing as his servants. It's certainly an imaginative little film at under four minutes.





One of the most unusual & visually beautiful magic acts to be encountered in the cinema at any point in its history is The Brahmin & the Butterfly (La Chrysalide et le papillon d'or; aka, Brahmane et le papillon, 1901).

It was inspired by a trick performed in 1885 by French stage magician Buatier de Kolta (1845-1903). Kolta was a friend of Robert Houdin, whose theater & automata collection Melies owned & managed, & from whom Melies also took borrowed for his little film The Vanishing Lady.

The hand-tinted color is a feast for the eye, & the event seen is a feast for the imagination. Where conjuration ends & fairy tales begin is sometimes blurred in Melies' imagination.

The turbaned brahmin (Melies) plays a flute to beguile a giant caterpillar which seems even to fall in love with him. The caterpillar is an appealing puppet figure which the brahmin leaps upon & captures, putting it in a huge golden silk cocoon, from which a beautiful butterfly maiden arises, flying. At the close, the brahmin himself is transformed into a butterfly.





Melies again appears as a magician on stage in The Living Playing Cards (Les Cartes vivants, 1904) at about two & a half minutes length.

He places a large blank canvas on a bench. Removing a single playing card from the pack, he makes it suddenly larger, then transfers the image of the nine of clubs onto the large blank canvas.

Taking another card, & placing a small smoking brazier momentarily in front of the enormous card.

He changes the Nine of Clubs into the Queen of Hearts, whom he then brings to life. Melies takes the Queen by the hand & helps her step down from the bench.

He then helps her back into the card where she ceases to be alive. Drawing another card he turns the giant canvas into the King of Spades, who leaps out of his own image tearing through the card like tissue, the canvas repairing itself behind him.  Melies exits stage left & the King of Spades throws off his white beard & king's robe, revealing that he is Melies.








Of Melies' many images of magicians in films lasting generally a scant two minutes, few are as good as The Living Playing Cards.

One of the best of the lesser examples, because of a great central image, is The Wonderful Living Fan; aka, The Marvelous Living Fan (Le Merveilleux eventail vivant, 1904).

The king of France seats himself to be entertained by a magician who has brought forth a large box which unfolds with aesthetic charm into an enormous lacy fan.

The fan's segments become beautiful women, & the round base becomes a starry globe. The maidens' costumes dissolve into alternate costumes.






Searching for novel images to carry an idea that was wearing out, for Tchin-Chao: The Chinese Conjurer (Le Thaumaturge Chinois, 1904) assumes the same tricks would be nice to see again in an Asian context.

Against a painted Chinese backdrop, a clown made up more or less to look Chinese, wearing however a Japanese kimono, begins to perform magic tricks. He turns one table into two & materializes paper lanterns. The lanters he turns into a dog, the dog into a geisha, with further manifestations.

Bringing out a pair of human-height boxes, teleportation tricks unfold. The geisha is finally wrapped into a bundle out of which come numerous chickens.


For The Enchanted Sedan-Chair (La Chaise a porteur enchantee, 1905) a courtly magician manifests a dandy from a glass box. The magician then obtains nice clothing from the same seemingly empty glass box, using them to dress a maniken, which he subsequently brings to life.

A palanquin or sedan-chair is carried center stage & the dandy climbs therein, being teleported to where the court lady has been seated, while she appears in the palanquin.

Part IV:
George Melies is Tripping on the Moon






In 2002 a well preserved copy of A Trip to the Moon was discovered in a barn. Uniquely it is a hand-tinted copy, & it includes an additional closing sequence of a parade in honor of the moon explorers. The best restored version already widely in circulation lacks the closing scene, lost for nearly a century, & is black & white, as it was usually seen even when it was new.

A Trip to the Moon is Melies's most famous film, & one of his most elaborate. It is well in advance of its day, & a little hard to comprehend how Melies could've done it in 1902, a time when films were almost always les than three minutes long. No space voyage film equalled it or added anything particularly new until Fritz Lang's Woman on the Moon (1929), & there were plenty of candidates that had already tried.





Melies' parody of Jules Verne would be copied by many other filmmakers in the next several years, as in Gaston Velle's Voyage Around a Star (Voyage autour d'une etoile, 1906), & others even less remembered. As late as Things to Come (1936) Melies' idea of a canon as method of reaching space was being repeated.

Sometimes it would go beyond influence into remake or plagiarism, as the Edison Manufacturing Company just swiped & re-edited Melies' film.






Lubin Manufacturing Company released another take on A Trip to the Moon in 1914, written & directed by Vincent Whitman, a work of silent animation which alas does not survive.

It is thought not to have related to Melies film, though it would seem impossible for Melies' original not to have been an influence since it was one of the world's most famous films.

An anonymous author for the Italian Wikipedia asserted that Whitman's film was close enough an imitation to be co-credited to Melies in its Italian release as Viaggio nella Luna, & indeed a search of Italian websites finds the co-credit repeated in several locations, as well as the recurring assertion Whitman based his animated film on Jules Verne.

But Joe Eckhardt, author of The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer, Siegmund Lubin (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997) informed me it just isn't related to Melies' film, nor related to Verne, judging by a synopsis in an advertising bulletin which is apt to remain the most we'll ever know of that version.

Segundo de Chomon's A Trip to the Moon (La Voyage dans la Lune, 1909) however definitely was a scene-for-scene remake of Melies' film.

Chomon was a pioneering genius of early filmmaking himself (see Films of Segundo de Chomon). But his remake of Melies' moon voyage does not prove it, being in every scene inferior to the original, so that right from the begnnings of cinema, the rule of thumb that remakes tend not to be as good as the originals was already the case.

I've reproduced just the "moon pie-face" from Chomon's version among the photos on this page, for comparison to the iconic rocket-in-eye moonface from Melies original. Similar comparisons in which Chomon falls far short could be observed with any sequence.

Melies himself would copy it to some degree, more originally & in new contexts, in The Quest of the North Pole (La Conquete du pole nord, 1912) with the ice-monster sequence duplicating the monstrous head of the moon-monster.






Melies' The Voyage through the Impossible (Le Voyage a travers impossible, 1904) does for the Sun what the 1902 film did for the Moon.

And to some extent A Trip to the Moon is kind of a prequel to Melies' perverse The Eclipse: The Courtship of the Sun & the Moon (1907).


As Melies' film opens, a conference of astronomers get into a fight about the possibility of a trip to the moon. Eventually the conference is calmed & select members prepare for a moon journey led by Professor Barbenfouillis, played by Melies himself.





We then view the construction of the bullet-ship. The selected astronomers climb into the bullet which is loaded into a giant cannon. As the bullet-ship approaches the moon, a face appears, & the ship crashes into the left eye.

The astronomers climb out of the bullet & party about the landscape, watching the Earthrise, then lay down on the landscape & while they sleep. An exhibition of astronomical events occur, accompanied by celestial maidens.


The astronomers are suddenly awakened by a snowstorm, so they climb into the moon's interior to get warm.

They come to a garden of giant mushrooms. One of the astronomers has his umbrella with him, & when he opens it, it turns into an additional mushroom.





They then get in a bit of a war with the moon people, these being the Selenites from H. G. Welles' 1901 novel First Men in the Moon.

Rather than Welles, however, the larger inspiration for this fantasy is Jules Vernes' 1872 From the Earth to the Moon (De la Terra a la lune, 1872), indirectly through the Jacques Offenbach adaptation that had been a raging success on Paris's fin de siecle opera stage.

A poster for the Offenbach opera Le Voyage dans la Lune (1875) for an 1892 production is reproduced near this paragraph. It could well have been recycled in 1902 for the film so overlapping are the designs, for it was the spectacle of the opera Melies set out to capture on film, with his camera-trick approach that could never be done life on stage.

As the film's climax approaches, our captured moon explorers are taken to the throne room of the king, whom one of the astromers kills. The murderous space voyagers run back to the bullet-ship. Since they don't have a cannon to shoot themselves back to the Earth, they push their ship off the moon's ledge & plunge into the sea, to be picked up by a passing steamship.





A Trip to the Moon is repeatedly declared to be "the very first" science fiction film. Quite a few s-f films predate it in reality, but A Trip to the Moon is at least the first international megahit of science fiction. When Melies opened his New York offices he well knew this was his most commercially potent movie.

Sad to say, Thomas Edison (a very bad man in many ways in his maltreatment of many people) had already pirated it, & Melies had not the legal wherewithal to invest in years of court battles over the theft. While Edison made major profits off Melies' moon journey, Melies never made a cent in America from this great film.

Melies had made an earlier science fantasy. Not long after purchasing the Robert Houdin Theatre he was already producing science fiction for the stage, his earliest very like Les Farces de la Moon. It provided the basis of his early film The Astronomer's Dream La Lune a un metre; aka, Le Reve d'un astronome, 1899), a fragment of which can be seen excerpted in the documentary Magic of Melies.




An astronomer (in the stage version he was none other than Nostradamos) has a roof-top observatory, where he has an unexpected encounter with the devil, until the fiend is banished by a celestial fairy (more than once before all events conclude).

The beautiful moon-maiden (Jehanne D'alcy) lounges on a crescent moon. She descends to the observatory, a temptation to the eager scientist, but she reascends before he can do anything with her.

The full moon is male, & is something of a goblin which expands into the astronmer's observatory & gulps him down in one bite, chews him up, & spits out the pieces, to be restored bit by bit by the moon-maiden before he awakens over the book he had been reading, probably thinking it was all a dream, but we saw it, it happened. This miracle of events concludes in only three minutes.

Based on a stage play of the same name by Jules Verne, George Melies' The Voyage through the Impossible (Le Voyage a travers l'Impossible, 1904) served as a sequel to A Trip to the Moon (la Voyage dans la lune, 1902).






Though not the equal of the A Trip to the Moon, that's only because that degree of astounding artfulness is not easily duplicated at will, though most certainly The Voyage through the Impossible is a film with its own extraordinary merits.

Verne did not start the craze for air, sea, & lunar journeys to places far & fantastical. The "fantastic voyage" genre dates easily to the 1700s in French literature. So Melies, imaginative as he admittedly was, nevertheless presented audiences with so
mething familiar, no matter how strange.

This was one of the longer hand-tinted color films Milies made. It begins with a meeting of the members of a geographic society gathered around a globe to discuss the funding for a journey. The presence of the globe implies it's supposed to be a "round the world" journey, but this is certainly not what unfolds.

Engineer Krisoloff (Melies) arrives as guest lecturer to lay out his plans for the trip, which will involve all methods of mobility. He unfolds a large poster depicting the journey, showing a drawing of the episode of driving a train engine into the sky which will occur later. His journey will incorporate automobiles, trains, dirigibles, & submarines, whatever it takes to circle the earth by land & sea.





We next see Krisoloff's workspace, a warehouse sized building with large machinery for designing travel devices, & a beautiful set this is. There's a large cast of workers & geographic society visitors to the experimental engineering laboratory. It has just the right balance of realism & the fantastic to set a plausible mood for the implausible journey that will follow.

He shows the visitors his submarine before repairing to another room where further equipment is being fashioned, with some pyrotechnics getting everyone over excited.

The next set is a baggage terminal where the men & women who are going on this expedition prepare to start the journey by train, with slapstick encounters as everyone dashes about in a hurryscurry getting their travel trunks & themselves on board. Throughout there's a tophat in the middle of the terminal floor, which no one ever claims -- a very small bit of drama since those hats were a mite expensive to risk crushing.

The train's journey through the alps is gorgeously designed, incorporating both miniatures & backdrop paintings. Among the train's cars are those which carry the dirigible, automobile, & submarine.





Disembarking in the alps, everyone piles into the automobile. In the first totally absurd moment, they drive through a large inn where a crowd's meal is disrupted by a the unusual automobile journeying through the dining hall.

Crashing in the mountains, their vehicle is totally destroyed. Rescuers get them to a hospital & it rather looks like their journey has ended in failure. But not so, since there's still half the film to go!

Released from the hospital, the expedition members pile onto a train which chugs to the top of a mountain where the tracks suddenly end. A pair of dirigibles attached to the train allows it to be launched into the sky. They pass a comet & other celestial bodies & there's quite a lovely sequence of fantastic sunrise, as when Melies isn't being parodic, he's going for beautifulness.

The sun's human face yawns with waking, & the dirigibles, steam locomotive, & train cars all fly into the heart of the sun, which causes the sun to flair up something awful, belching fire & smoke, & evidently vomiting the train back up so that it crashes on a harsh planet near the sun.





There's no longer dirigibles attached to the train, as it got burned up in the hollow sun. But the expedition memers have miraculously survived with neither burn nor scratch.

They all set off afoot to investigate the landscape. There's a moon above steamy clouds. As the sun rises, the landscape begins to heat up. Fires flare from the ground. Everyone takes off their jackets & fan each other.

On the train was a refrigerator car the purpose of which we may wonder about, but in the murderous heat of the nearby sun it comes in handy.

Everyone except Krisoloff climb in the refrigerator car, which unfortunately freezes them solid. The professor never got inside the refrigerator car, nor did he burn up outside. He builds a fire, as if one were needed, finding a handy bundle of grass nearby to start it with. He soon thaws out the expedition.

The submarine was unharmed when the train crashed, so everyone climbs into it. They drive the submarine over land & off the edge of the planetoid. A parachute opens, & they fall easily back to earth, into the ocean.

In a cut-away we see everyone inside the submarine under the sea. A large porthole on the back wall of the sub permits them to watch sea creatures pass. Unexpectedly the engine bursts into flame & a bucket brigade is organized.

It seems the fire caused the submarine to explode, but the nose-cone lands in the middle of a busy sea port village before a cliff, & the expedition members are perfectly all right. In the end the Society treats it as having been a great success & fetes the heroic space voyagers.





At twenty-four minutes, this is practically an epic feature film for Melies, the master of two-minute films. It's a great work of aburdist fantasy really, totally off the wall & purposely ridiculous.

Humor & impossibilities trump science or logic, but one must nevertheless admit this as being one of the first truly great science fiction movies.

A collection of random directors' works from the time around 1904 would be dull for all but the die-hard early film buff, but where Georges Melies is concerned, everybody capable of delight will surely be captivated.


copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl

These are in French, please do not ask me to translate them.  LOL

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