Haunted Spooks (1920)

A classic Harold Lloyd spoof from 1920, but with spooks!  This is considered to be the very first horror comedy even made (though I think that some of Méliés might actually qualify as earlier).  Still this is Harold Lloyd!!  Some even contend that not even Charlie Chaplin could touch his comedic genius.  Happy Halloween Eve!

A Theda Bara Tribute

I ran across this on the web and thought it would make a fitting Halloween post.  It is well done, and Bara has been a favorite of mine since childhood as well!

The Girl And His Trust (1912)

Doing a day of crime films over on my Scare Me site today for the Countdown, which is almost over (saaadd....), thought I'd post a crime melodrama from the king of melodrama himself:  D. W. Griffith.

The Student Of Prague (1913)

Regarded by many to be the very first full length horror film.  It is certainly one of the very earliest that has actually survived (for example, the original Der Golem, has not) 

Waxworks (1924)

Directed by Paul Leni, the other influential German Horror/Expressionist director.

Silly Symphonies; Egyptian Melodies (1931)

Disney animation from the early 30's directed by Wilfred Jackson, who is responsible for two segments of Fantasia (1949), one of which is my favorite, Night On Bald Mountain.

Wolf Blood (1925)

Spooks, Flip The Frog (1932)

Ub Iwerks cartoon from the early 30's after leaving Disney.  He was the original creator of the Skeleton Symphony for Disney, for which he got scant credit.  This is his personal furtherance of that project.  This is for my kid, who is having a whole day of Halloween stuff at his whim today....including going to see Frankenweenie in the theater!  So Happy Halloween to all the little ones out there, and happy animation!!

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

This is perhaps German director Paul Len's masterpiece!!

Stratos-Fear (1933)

An Ub Iwerks cartoon from the early 30's for the Halloween season!!  Happy Spooks!

Midnight Faces (1926)

This is an early silent old dark house affair from the mid-twenties.

Dreams Of A Rarebit Fiend: The Pet (1921)

If anyone has been on Google today, then you know that today celebrates the 107th anniversary of cartoonist Winsor McCay's famous Little Nemo In Slumberland; well here is another McCay gem for the Halloween season!

The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1928)

The Talion Punishment (1906)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1905)--Stills

Stills of The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1905

The Lost World (1925)

The Bat (1926)

The Sealed Room (1909)

This has been described as the only horror short that D.W. Griffith made, or at least the only one that survives (I you take a look at his IMDb page, you see that he is credited with 535 titles as director and owed to some early Biograph Co. archives being lost, that number may well be light).  The fact that it is called a horror film at all is owed to the fact that the story comes from Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado," there are those, like those over at IMDb for example, that keep removing and then replacing the "horror" genre (yeah, I know that it's "user driven").  Whether you consider it a horror film or not, it certainly has a building creepiness to it.  To my knowledge, it is the only time Griffith directed a Poe project.  It is certainly among the very earliest films every based on Poe's work.  Please excuse the outsized embed. it is from the good folks over at Internet Archive, please check them out this pumpkin season, they have a lot of creepy stuff.  Happy Halloween!

The Patchwork Girl Of Oz (1914)

This is a very early multi-reel movie.  Up until 1910 the one reeler ruled the movie world as 15 minutes or less.  At first this was simply the limit of the manufacturers and producers; later on multi-reel (mostly 2 reels) films were being produced by not widely marketed, largely because early film producers like Edison thought there was not market for longer film (this lack of insight was decried by many prominent employees, is the major reason Edison exited the film industry in 1918).  In less than five years, however, 5-reel films became the accepted and expected norm.  This is a very early, rather obscure Fantasy picture.  It owes a great deal to the early trick films, and doesn't represent any rear advances in editing for the time--it is pure whimsy.  Though this is not the first film depiction of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book by L. Frank Baum, it is to my knowledge the first feature length film to do so, at a running time of 48 to near 70 minutes.  The really important fact here is that Baum himself adapted his book for the screenplay!  There are two surviving films produced by the Oz Manufacturing Company, which went out of business in 1915, under this title at the Library of Congress, this is the truncated version.  

The Edison Sioux Ghost Dance Film (1894)

Today is "Columbus Day"--a day or mourning for Natives.