The Haunted Hotel
“Impressive, indefinable, insoluble, positively the most marvelous film ever invented.”
About The Haunted Hotel
A traveler takes a room at a country inn and gets no sleep. Objects on the table move by themselves, a knife cuts bread with no hand on it, and figures appear in the room. The short mixes a live actor with stop-motion, double exposure, and objects hung on wires.
Cast & crew
More about The Haunted Hotel
J. Stuart Blackton wrote, produced, and directed the trick film. Vitagraph used that advertising line. The picture sold more prints in France than any other American film then on the market, and more than 150 prints went out across Europe.
Themes
Look
Albert E. Smith is credited as cinematographer. The tricks are stop-motion, double exposure, and wires.
Technique
Live action is combined with stop-motion so that tableware, bread, and a coffee pot move on their own.
Preservation
The film survives and is one of the oldest extant pictures to use stop-motion animation.
Notes
- Paul Panzer and William V. Ranous are the credited players.
- An alternate title is The Haunted Hotel; or, The Strange Adventures of a Traveler.
- Blackton used stop-motion again in The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1908).
- Some later listings time the short at six or seven minutes. Wikipedia gives five.
Scenes
- A knife saws a loaf with nobody holding it.
- A coffee pot rises and pours.
Influenced
- The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1908)
