7./8. Georges Melies brought terror to the hearts of sedate Parisian audiences in 1896 during what they were led to believe would be a magical stage performance. Instead he shocked them with the Magic Shadow. So called, because it was a moving phantasmagoria of images producing an astonishing sequence of seemingly magical movement.

It was an invention of the Lumiere Brothers called Cinematographe. Melies, magician by what he believed divine vocation, adapted the Lumiere's trick to his own trade and produced the first commercially successful production of a narrative using moving pictures as the principal medium. It was brimming with every scary trick Melies could devise and was entitled The Devil's Castle. In it Melies caused a horrific panic among audience members by transforming a beautiful girl into a rotting skeleton.

Of course, the audience had no way of knowing that he simply placed a black cloth over the girl, stopped rolling the camera long enough to substitute the skeleton and then resumed shooting. Had he learned the trick a few years earlier he may well have been burned at the stake. Nevertheless, the great grandsire of motion pictures, as we know them today, was a good old fashioned horror movie.