The Haunted Hotel

The Haunted Hotel (1907)

A traveler stays the night at a rural inn, but gets no rest as he is tormented by various spectres and mysterious happenings.

Date of release
1907-02-23
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (35)
Runtime
7m
Genres
Comedy, Animation, Horror
Director
J. Stuart Blackton

Casting

Interesting facts

The Haunted Hotel is a 1907 American silent comic trick film written, produced, and directed by J. Stuart Blackton. One of the oldest surviving films featuring animation, it combines live action and stop motion to animate objects.

Production and reception

For the production of The Haunted Hotel, Blackton combined various tricks such as double exposure or objects hanging from wires with the stop-motion process. Vitagraph advertised the film as "Impressive, indefinable, insoluble, positively the most marvelous film ever invented."

The film became such a hit in Europe and in the United States that it gained "a reputation as the first animated picture (...) and the most popular up to that point". The film became the best-selling American film in France and in all of Europe over 150 prints were delivered.

Blackton would continue the use of stop motion in The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1908) and several other short films.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended