THE HAUNTED CASTLE (1897)
aka Le Chateau hante
Article 2556 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-4-2008
Posting Date: 8-11-2008
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies

Country: France

A visitor to a castle is frightened by moving furniture and strange visitations.

By all rights, I should have covered this one with the Melies-a-thon. However, since I’m a little too dependent on listings from IMDB to organize my watching, I missed this one because there is no listing for it on IMDB. Usually, if a movie is not listed on IMDB, I rightfully suspect that my chances of finding and seeing the movie are next to impossible. However, I suspect that the reason this one isn’t listed is that someone at IMDB believes this is the same movie as LE MANOIR DU DIABLE, and, given that both movies use THE HAUNTED CASTLE as alternate titles and are only a year apart, I can understand the confusion.

At any rate, the movie is like THE BEWITCHED INN, except that in place of vanishing furniture, we have appearing and disappearing characters, including a ghost, a knight, and a skeleton. Plotwise, there’s little here; it’s just one character (who looks like it’s Melies himself) reacting to the various apparitions. It’s extremely short (probably around thirty seconds) and has some hand-coloring as well. Fun, but it’ll be over before you know it.

Postscript: In the interim since I first wrote this review, IMDB has indeed added a separate entry for this one