First horror movie

The first horror movie is Le Manoir du diable (often given the English title "The Haunted Castle"), a short silent film produced by pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès. The film premiered at the Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris on 24 December 1896. The film, which is a little more than 3 minutes long, depicts a young man being terrorized by the demon Mephistopheles (played by Méliès himself), who summons skeletons, ghosts and monsters to scare him. The film was thought to have been lost for almost a century until a single print turned up in a collection in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1988.

It's difficult to come up with a universally applicable definition of a horror movie, but a film that includes devils, witches, ghosts and skeletons in a haunted castle seems like a fairly cut-and-dried example of the genre, even if the shaky and simplistic presentation would have been unlikely to have scared anyone. At the time, the film was regarded as an impressive technological achievement, with special effects that include characters popping into and out of existence in a puff of smoke, merging into other characters and cloning themselves. These were all achieved using an editing technique called a substitution splice.

With a three minute runtime and no dialogue, it doesn't have much of a story, but it does feature many tropes that would be familiar to modern horror fans, including a devilish figure that can transform into a bat, white-shrouded ghosts and a finale where the hero drives off the forces of darkness with a crucifix.

The following year Méliès remade the film as Le Château Hanté ("The Haunted Castle"), editing the original 3-minute film (thought of as a lengthy and ambitious production by the standards of the time) down to a more condensed 45 second short. This 1897 film (which is generally regarded as the first film remake) focuses on the most technically impressive of the original film's editing tricks, repeating them with the edits more smoothly disguised. This film was also hand-coloured by Elisabeth Thuillier, who used bright colours to more clearly distinguish the action from the painted backdrop.