Coraline, The House, & La Casa Lobo: Haunted Houses in Stop Motion

PART ONE: A HISTORY OF MOTION & THE HAUNTED HOUSE

“In the psychology of the modern, civilized human being, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the house.” — Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow

In 1907, J. Stuart Blackton produced The Haunted Hotel, a short silent film that combined live action and stop motion effects which soon gained a reputation as “the first animated picture and the most popular up to that point.” It was the popularity of this film which directly led to the animated cartoons that would dominate the 1910s, like Gertie the Dinosaur (1911), and Felix the Cat (1919).

The Haunted Hotel has a run time of about six minutes, centering on a traveler who spends a night at a hotel which — you guessed it — turns out to be haunted. At the film’s very beginning, we see the hotel’s windows and doors shift and spin to form a maniacal face, letting us know that this house isn’t simply inhabited by ghosts; the house itself is haunting. Later, when the traveler is thrown about the room by moving furniture, we get the sense that the ghosts aren’t pulling everything this way and that. Rather, it’s the house’s doing. The hotel has a mind of its own, and it doesn’t seem to want company.