| A Terrible Night | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Scene from the common version of the film | |
| Directed by | Georges Méliès |
| Produced by | Georges Méliès |
Release date |
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| Country | France |
| Language | Silent |
A Terrible Night (French: Une nuit terrible) is an 1896 French silent comedy film by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 26 in its catalogues,[1] where it is listed with the descriptive subtitle scène comique.[2]
A man tries to go to sleep, but is disturbed by a giant bug climbing up the bed and onto the wall. He attacks the bug with a broom and disposes of it in a chamber pot in a compartment of his bedside table.
A Terrible Night may have been inspired by a series of comic magic lantern slides, published in the 1880s by the English firm of Bamforth & Co Ltd.[3] The film predates Méliès's famous use of cinematic special effects; the first known Méliès film with camera effects is The Vanishing Lady, made later in 1896. Rather, the giant bug is a simple pasteboard prop controlled with wire.[4]
The film was made with the Méliès-Reulos portable camera in the open air, in the garden of Méliès's home in Montreuil, using natural sunlight and a cloth backdrop.[4] Méliès himself played the man attempting to sleep.[2]
A film commonly identified as A Terrible Night is known to survive[1] and has appeared on various DVD collections.[5][6] However, Méliès's great-great-granddaughter, Pauline Méliès, published findings in 2013 suggesting that the film commonly believed to be A Terrible Night is actually a later Méliès film, A Midnight Episode, numbered 190 in the Star Films catalogues, and that the original A Terrible Night—featuring simpler scenery and different camera placement, but the same plot and the same bed—survives in two print copies: a photocollage held by the Cinémathèque Française and a flipbook published by Lèon Beaulieu around the turn of the century. If this hypothesis is accurate, both A Terrible Night and A Midnight Episode survive.[7]
