Le Château hanté, released in the United States as The Devil's Castle and in Britain as The Haunted Castle, is an 1897 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès. It is a remake of a previous film by Méliès, The House of the Devil (Le Manoir du diable, 1896). The 1896 original, which was released in the United States as The Haunted Castle and in Britain as The Devil's Castle, is sometimes confused for the 1897 version.
Le Château hanté is about a man who enters a haunted castle and is constantly taunted by spirits within.
Plot[]
The Haunted Castle is a short silent film directed by Georges Méliès in 1897. The film is a horror-comedy and is considered one of the earliest examples of the horror genre in cinema.
The film begins with a bat flying into a castle and transforming into the devil. The devil then conjures a cauldron and begins to create a woman out of smoke and fire.
As the devil continues his magic, two travelers enter the castle, and they soon find themselves the targets of the devil's mischief. The devil conjures up various supernatural beings to scare and torment the travelers, including ghosts, skeletons, and a giant spider.
The travelers try to escape, but they find themselves trapped in the castle, unable to leave. They eventually come face to face with the devil, who reveals that it was all just a trick and disappears in a puff of smoke.
The travelers leave the castle, relieved to be free of the supernatural beings and the devil's mischief.
The Haunted Castle is notable for its innovative use of special effects and camera tricks, which were used to create the illusion of the supernatural beings and the devil's magic. The film's mix of horror and comedy also helped establish Méliès as a master of visual storytelling and helped pave the way for the horror genre in cinema.
Production and release[]
The film marks the second appearance of Satan as a character in a Méliès film (the first was Le Manoir du diable the previous year). The special effects in the film were created using the editing technique known as the substitution splice. One moment in the film, the transformation of the ghostly figure into a knight in armor, prefigures numerous sight gags involving armor that became popular during the silent era in comedy films.
Le Château hanté was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 96 in its catalogues. The English film pioneer George Albert Smith, a corresponding friend and colleague of Méliès, was among the buyers of the film; Smith himself experimented extensively with similarly ghostly topics in his own films made around the same time. Smith is sometimes credited with a lost 1897 film of his own on the same subject, and also called The Haunted Castle, but this title may simply be the Méliès film, mistakenly attributed to Smith by later film scholars.
The film was the first Méliès work to be hand-colored at the coloring lab run by Elisabeth Thuillier. A hand-colored print of Le Château hanté survives; its straightforward color scheme uses a red tone to help the characters stand out from the painted backdrop (although the tones also help distract the eye from the editing tricks used). Méliès went on to have Thuillier and her lab workers hand-color many of his films; later collaborations between Méliès and Thuillier were much more elaborate in their use of color.