Rhapsody in 35MM

This episode traces a turbulent period in early cinema beginning around 1903, when the successes of filmmakers like Georges Méliès and George Albert Smith were threatened by widespread film piracy, weak copyright protections, and shifting industry power. Méliès' films—distributed internationally through businessman Charles Urban—were frequently exploited or pirated by companies such as Lubin Manuf...

This episode examines the early development of cinema through the work of Brighton-based filmmakers George Albert Smith and James Williamson—members of what later historians called the "Brighton School"—and explores how many early filmmakers, including Georges Méliès and Dadasaheb Phalke, came from backgrounds in magic, stage entertainment, and magic-lantern shows. The discussion highlights Smith'...

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 me...

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, inspirin...

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 Doug...

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 mes...

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 "magica...

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...

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,...

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 r...