The First Horror Film...

I was thinking about the "classics" again and I was wondering what was the first horror film ever made. To my surprise it is a short silent film from 1896 called Le Manoir du Diable. This was a French film with ghosts and demons. I have a clip of it at the bottom of this post. I watched the clip and thought it was quite funny. However, if you were to put yourself in the 1896 audience, you might have a different view of it. Imagine how fascinated you would be to see this "moving pictures" show when you had never seen anything like this before. It gives you a respect for the vision it took to create movies and the "technology" they had to work with back then. There's a small part of an article from Movie Classics below that gives a brief description of the movie...

Taken from an article on the web site "Movie Classics"...
"The genre is almost as old as cinema itself -- the silent short film Le Manoir du Diable directed by Georges Mèliès in 1896 was the first horror movie and the first vampire flick. The movie only lasted two minutes, but audiences loved it, and Mèliès took pleasure in giving them even more devils and skeletons."
written by Astrid Bullen, a freelance writer and movie buff living in St. George´s, Grenada.



Another classic movie that I watched about a month ago was Nosferatu. This was a 1922 German film made by F.W. Murnau. It was the first full length vampire feature film. I watched this film as I said a month or so ago and thought it was interesting. I fully understand that to watch a film like that today is nothing like watching it in 1922. We are so "spoiled" by our technology today that watching a truly groundbreaking work of art from the 20's looks silly to us now. You really have to have an appreciation for what these early filmmakers had to go through to make a movie. Everything they did was new. There was really nothing that limited them because they did not have history clouding their minds. To be honest, it would have been exciting to live in that time and be able to create something that has never been done before. I guess that is why I respect those filmmakers from the past so much. So many of today's movies are just rehashing all the movies of the past without one lick of original thought. What a shame. OK, enough rambling... enjoy the clip of the very first horror film ever made. It is narrated in French...





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