How unearthly and groundbreaking the moving pictures of Georges Méliès must have appeared to the audiences who first laid eyes on the new specters, filled with baffling tricks of the eye and unbelievable scenarios. His incorporation of dreams provided narrative license for all of the fantastical images, plots and settings he could imagine. Sometimes expressions of beauty and wonder, the dreams are also usually haunted by demons and macabre creatures of the night, with Méliès himself playing the role of the ever-lurking devil character—a choice alluding to Méliès the director, the true perpetrator of the sinister phantasms conveyed on screen. Through his sense of playfulness influenced by the occult, Méliès challenged perceived reality to achieve illusions made possible by this newly concocted mechanical, photochemical medium. His recurring character Beelzebub, with all the weight of religious and cultural significance that came with the role, serves as a dark memento within an artistic decadence that sought to both repulse and entice. Méliès’ films represent not just a form of elated fantasy, but a conflict between the rational and the irrational that only magic could explain. His unflinching dedication to the hauntingly mythical and uncanny supernatural elements of storytelling—enabled by the sense of possibility and impossibility—solidify Méliès as the originator of horror cinema.

TRT 73 min