Ep. 3: Sunday in the Dark with Georges – Melies’ The House of the Devil
Release Date: 02/13/2026
Ep. 8: Photographing a Ghost: G. A. Smith at St. Ann’s Well Gardens
Rhapsody in 35MM
In 1896, George Albert Smith experienced a pivotal turning point after seeing one of the first projected film programs in Britain by the Lumière Brothers at the Empire Theatre. Inspired, he purchased a camera from engineer Alfred Darling and soon converted part of his amusement grounds at St. Ann’s Well Gardens into a film studio, producing dozens of short films while experimenting with the new medium’s possibilities. Drawing on his background in magic lantern shows and stage entertainment, Smith pioneered several early cinematic techniques—such as close-ups, point-of-view shots,...
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Ep. 7: A New World Dawning
Rhapsody in 35MM
Episode 7 explains how the Victorian-era fascination with Spiritualism, science, and the supernatural influenced entertainment, early psychology, and the horror genre. Social conditions such as the American Civil War, high infant mortality, and popular Gothic literature—especially works by Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu—helped fuel widespread interest in communicating with the dead, inspiring phenomena like spirit photography and stage illusions. One of the most famous technological spectacles was Pepper’s Ghost, popularized by John Henry Pepper from an invention by Henry Dircks,...
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Ep. 6: Murder Mystery: G. A. Smith and the Society for Psychical Research
Rhapsody in 35MM
This episode examines the late-19th-century Society for Psychical Research through its key figures—Henry Sidgwick, Frank Podmore, Frederic W.H. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and future filmmaker G.A. Smith—focusing on the intersection of psychical research, early psychology, personal ambition, and scandal. It revisits Smith’s early career as a mesmerist and telepath whose performances with journalist Douglas Blackburn led to paid work and prestige within the Society, before Blackburn’s flawed 1911 confession cast doubt on their experiments and the Society’s credibility. Central to this...
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Ep. 5: Mesmerizing! Spiritualism and the Beginnings of Director G.A. Smith
Rhapsody in 35MM
The episode traces how Victorian-era beliefs in mesmerism, spiritualism, and psychical research—emerging from a period when science, medicine, religion, and spectacle were not yet clearly separated—profoundly shaped popular culture and early horror cinema. Beginning with Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism and its highly theatrical, trance-inducing treatments, the episode shows how mesmerism blurred the line between scientific inquiry, performance, and charlatanism, influencing the development of hypnotism and modern psychology while captivating the public imagination....
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Ep. 4: From Magic Tricks to Trick Films: The Transition of Georges Meliese
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Although horror may seem easy to identify, early cinema complicates genre classification because it lacked many formal tools—such as sound, editing techniques, close-ups, and artificial lighting—while emerging alongside an already well-established literary and theatrical tradition of horror and the supernatural. Using Georges Méliès’ work as a case study, the episode argues that many early “magical,” “phantasmagoric,” or “trick” films are often misidentified as horror simply because they feature dark imagery like skeletons, bugs, decapitation, or death, when in fact their...
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Ep. 3: Sunday in the Dark with Georges – Melies’ The House of the Devil
Rhapsody in 35MM
Ep. 3 traces humanity’s long fascination with horror and spectacle—from ancient theatre, folklore, and public executions to phantasmagoria and magic lantern shows—and argues that these pre-cinematic forms directly shaped early horror film, culminating in Georges Méliès’ 1896 short Le Manoir du Diable (The House of the Devil), often cited as the first horror film. Rooted in Méliès’ background as a stage magician and illusionist, the film draws on Faustian literature and theatrical trickery, using bats, demons, witches, skeletons, transformations, and magical effects to frighten...
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Ep. 2: A New Dimension in Terror: Tropes and Techniques
Rhapsody in 35MM
This episode explores what distinguishes horror from adjacent genres like the thriller by examining the specific cinematic techniques and thematic elements that define it, focusing on how film uniquely manipulates image, sound, perspective, and narrative to create sustained unease and fear. Horror relies on the strategic withholding of information through lighting, shadow, framing, camera angles, depth of field, editing, and point of view to heighten tension and suggest unseen threats, while sound—both diegetic and non-diegetic, including dissonant music, nonlinear noise, and low-frequency...
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Ep 1: What's in a Name? The Etymology and Science of Horror
Rhapsody in 35MM
Horror is a genre that reflects the darkest aspects of human nature, history, and imagination, mirroring societal fears born of violence, war, scientific ambition, and anxieties about the future, while also confronting the inner duality of the human soul. From revolutionary atrocities and Frankenstein’s cautionary tale of unchecked progress to atomic-age monsters shaped by nuclear terror, horror repeatedly transforms real-world anxieties into symbolic narratives. Rooted etymologically in physical reactions like shuddering, bristling, and fear—captured in the Greek concept of phrikē and...
info_outlineEp. 3 traces humanity’s long fascination with horror and spectacle—from ancient theatre, folklore, and public executions to phantasmagoria and magic lantern shows—and argues that these pre-cinematic forms directly shaped early horror film, culminating in Georges Méliès’ 1896 short Le Manoir du Diable (The House of the Devil), often cited as the first horror film. Rooted in Méliès’ background as a stage magician and illusionist, the film draws on Faustian literature and theatrical trickery, using bats, demons, witches, skeletons, transformations, and magical effects to frighten audiences in a safe, entertaining context, much like earlier spectacles. While some scholars have interpreted the character of Mephistopheles as the first cinematic vampire due to bat imagery, hypnotic power, and defeat by a crucifix, the episode contends that the character is clearly a demon—an agent of the devil—consistent with Goethe and Marlowe’s Faust and with the film’s title, which explicitly references the devil. Nevertheless, because associations between bats and vampires already existed in popular culture before Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and because Méliès’ film was screened in London while Stoker was active in theatre there, the episode suggests that The House of the Devil may have influenced Stoker’s vampire mythology, even if it is not itself a vampire film, illustrating how early cinematic horror helped solidify tropes that later became central to the genre.
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