His nightmare is our entertainment

A Nightmare (1896)
Starring: Georges Melies and Jehanna d'Alcy
Director: Georges Melies
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

A man (Melies) has a dream that starts out pleasant enough, but quickly turns frightening and bizarre.

At just a little more than one minute in length, "A Nightmare" still manages to deliver a ton of entertainment. Like most of special effects pioneer Georges Melies' early efforts, it moves at such a breakneck pace that if you blink you'll miss some of the magic and jokes. (And even if you're paying close attention--like some guy watching it with a mind toward perhaps writing a review--there's so much non-stop activity that you're likely to miss something. I, for example, didn't notice that the room changes more than once as the dream/nightmare unfolds until I captured an image for use with this piece.

If you're interested in film history, "A Nightmare" is not only a good time, but it's also a must-see. If you're familiar with Melies' work, either through posts here or from more reputable sources, you know that he commonly tells fantastic short stories where he uses his trick photography techniques to either transport his protagonist onto other words or into dreamscapes, or to cause supernatural forces to haunt them in mundane surroundings. As far as I can tell, this film was the first time he used dreams as a narrative device and it's also the basic template for many of the fantasy-oriented short films he made over the decade or so that followed.

You should take a (literal) minute to check out this great little film. It's quite well done, considering Melies was still developing his techniques. The only thing that could have made it better was a slightly different ending--I was hoping for one of the dream characters to show up and give a little twist... but I know that's not the approach they took back then: Normalcy was almost always restored by the end of any fantasy or horror film, (One VERY amusing detail is that when the version I watched was digitized, someone felt obligated to "protect" viewers from seeing Melies' shlong in his onesie, so they pixilated his crotch area. Hilariously, the eye is now drawn to his crotch now than it probably was before.)