by Francis Friel

Your boy GM burst onto the scene a year earlier with his first film, a remake of a Lumiere jawn about a bunch of old nerds playing cards. So stop complaining about all these remakes. It's nothing new.

Pretty soon Melies figured out how to translate what he was already doing on stage into cinema and quickly established his style of wild sets and wacky special effects.

The Haunted Castle is a three-minute hellride about a dude being chased around a hallway by a bunch of ghosts and demons that a sorcerer is fucking brewing in a big pot (I think?).

Eventually they win and dude jumps out the freakin window.

It's got giant flying bats turning into vampires, people turning into skeletons, witches appearing and disappearing, and ghosts ALL OVER THE PLACE.

This guy made over 500 movies in his lifetime and is so influential that Scorsese (your favorite) just made a movie about him all the way up here in the 21st century.

Melies was The Master.