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Georges Méliès’ Le Manoir Du Diable signified the dawn of the horror film. A lost film, Esmeralda (1905), the first adaptation of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, is the offical second installment in the genre. It was created by founding French director Alice Guy-Blaché at the dawn of the 20th Century, who would aid in revolutionizing the art as Gaumont's leading director, and one of the first experimenters with color and special effects in the medium. Her work was succeeded by another adaptation of Hugo's novel in 1911, with an ambitious version by Albert Capellani, another lost film. Though such powerful filmmakers were behind the first explorations into the horror genre on screen (followed by J. Searle Dawley's Frankenstein), it would not be until the early 1920s that horror would even...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

The film industry has been around for well over 100 years. Today, Cinelinx looks at some of the famous firsts that set the foundation for the movie industry and made cinema what it is today.

As a bit of trivia to begin with, the first known piece of moving film footage was the The Horse in Motion (1878), a 3-second experiment consisting of 24 photographs shot in rapid succession. It’s just a scene of a jockey riding a horse, but it ultimately led to the development of modern film.

Most early films were short, silent bits of daily life, showing such exciting events as boarding a train, which was captured in The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895). This film footage supposedly scared the bejesus out of the viewing audience, who thought a real train was coming at them and ran for cover. Early films began to include documentary footage and newsreels,...

 

World War Z, directed by Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Stranger Than Fiction, Quantum Of Solace) may be the most talked-about non-comedy zombie flick to come along in over a decade.  When it hits theaters on June 21st, horror fans will decide whether or not World War Z is an inventive game-changer in the trajectory of the zombie sub-genre.  While we count down the days, let's spotlight the zombie movies that are already infamous as game-changers... the most influential zombie films in cinema history.  Presented here in order of release, these were the movies that re-set the rules, re-defined the motion picture zombie, and re-routed the evolution of the living dead on film. 

White Zombie (1932)

Director: Victor Halperin

The Thomas Edison / J. Searle Dawley short film Frankenstein put the undead on film in 1910.  Robert Wiene's The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari was groundbreaking and influential on multiple levels in 1920.  This masterpiece...

Exactly 100 years ago today on March 18, 1910, the first film version of Frankenstein premiered to the public. Directed by J. Searle Dawley and starring Augustus Phillips as Dr. Frankenstein and Charles Ogle as the monster, the film was produced at Thomas Edison’s film studios in New Jersey. And I have no doubt that the film terrified audiences back then during a more simpler age. (And the shots of the monster being created in the oven must have freaked out people back then). So here’s the film in all it’s glory, all 13 minutes of it…...