Watch Legend of a Ghost For Free
Legend of a Ghost
A young woman passing through a cemetery at night is suddenly startled by a voice coming from one of the graves. She wishes to rush away, but the ghost appearing compels her to remain. He explains to the terrified girl that she must go to the kingdom of Satan and get a bottle of the Water of Life, which she must bring back to him. The girl consents to do as he desires and starts forth on her expedition after the precious fluid. She summons a lot of soldiers and friends to her aid, and we follow the whole army down into the bowels of the earth. (Moving Picture World)
Watch Trailer
Cast List
Related Movies
The Gas Man
Boniato
The Phantom of the Opera
Zippo
Reviews
The Worst Film Ever
Just perfect...
Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
It's a shame that when "Legend of a Ghost" came out that the film industry wasn't yet using intertitle cards to explain what was happening in the movie. Many times, early filmmakers worked past this by having super-simple plots or exaggerated acting. However, in the case of this movie, it's disastrous not having them because you'll have no idea what's happening throughout the film! It is an indescribable film and I am not sure I could do it justice by trying.Director Segundo de Chomón had what seems like a huge budget for the time in this film. He uses many fanciful sets, has tons of actors in a variety of costumes and even created weird floats for the characters to use*. It all screamed 'big budget', that's for sure. And that is the reason why I STILL recommend you see the film as it was very much ahead of its time--just not when it came to the intertitle cards.*If you look carefully, sometimes you'll get a quick glimpse of the automobile tires under the floats as well as the drivers using a steering wheel!
La legende du fantome (1908) *** (out of 4) This French film from the now forgotten de Chomon certainly has a visual style all its own and is clearly one of the earliest examples of a pure horror film. I'm really not sure what the story is about as there aren't any title cards and I'm going to guess that original this movie played with some sort of narration like many of the Georges Melies films from this era. What we basically have is 13-minutes of a Demonmobile driving around to various locations where other demonic forces are seen. These images include a large frog, various grim reapers, other sea creatures and of course ghosts. It's hard to judge the film without knowing what type of story it's trying to tell but at the same time there's no question that the visuals alone are great enough to keep you entertained from start to finish. The sight of this Demonmobile is rather fun throughout even though it's obviously fake. There are several special effects in the film and most of them are handled quite nicely, although none of them ever reach the greatness of what you'd see in a Melies film. Like many films from this period the "animals" are played by humans in costumes but I must admit that the frogs were terrific as were the other creatures that show up in a scene towards the end of the movie. The one area where this goes beyond a Melies production is in its visual style because every frame of this film has the image full of terrific visuals. The opening with the girls running around with the fireworks was terrific and it's clear that the director wanted something going on at all times. LEGEND OF A GHOST was just recently rediscovered and it deserves the recognition it's gotten.
