Imagine cranking up an old projector in a smoky Paris hall back in 1903 and watching horned devils burst from a bubbling cauldron to strut the cakewalk like they owned the underworld. That is the spark behind Georges Méliès’ short film The Infernal Cakewalk, a three-minute burst of trick photography that mixed popular dance with pure fantasy. This article looks at how the movie was made, why its effects still feel clever today, and how it fits into the bigger story of early cinema and Méliès’ own life as a magician turned filmmaker.
Cauldron of Chaos: Summoning the Cakewalk Crew
A massive cauldron sits dead centre, steam curling upward as if something alive is about to escape. One by one, horned imps spring out, tails snapping and claws tapping in time with the cakewalk rhythm. The dance itself had crossed the Atlantic from African American communities where it started as a playful contest on plantations, then travelled through vaudeville stages until it hit Paris ballrooms hard by the turn of the century. Méliès grabbed that lively strut and gave it an infernal twist, turning everyday high kicks into a parade of the damned.
The timing mattered. Vernon and Irene Castle were already teaching the cakewalk to eager crowds across Europe, so audiences recognised the steps even when devils performed them. Méliès dressed his performers in bright red leotards, handed them pitchforks, and let the camera catch every exaggerated move. Stop-motion and substitution splices made dancers multiply or disappear mid-step, leaving only smoke and glitter behind. Hand-tinted frames brought flashes of crimson and sulphur yellow to the print, a touch Méliès used often to heighten the otherworldly mood.
Everything was shot inside his Star Films studio in Montreuil, a former theatre where painted backdrops and wooden props created entire worlds on a modest budget. Family members and regular performers filled the cast. The finished reel ran roughly two hundred seconds at silent speed, yet it travelled far thanks to Pathé Frères distribution, popping up in fairgrounds and early nickelodeons from London to New York.
Trickery’s Tango: Dissecting Méliès’ Mechanical Magic
The real engine behind the spectacle was Méliès’ substitution splice, a technique he stumbled upon years earlier when his camera jammed during a street shoot. By stopping the film, swapping performers, and starting again, he could make two dancers become three or make someone vanish in a blink. Here the cuts land right on the beat, giving the dance an extra jolt of surprise. Live piano players filled the silence in theatres, encouraging audiences to tap along even while the scene looked like pure chaos.
Costumes added to the fun. Papier-mâché horns wobbled, wire tails flicked on cue, and greasepaint grins turned the dancers into comic fiends straight out of old commedia dell’arte. The cauldron itself was a simple practical prop, probably using heated wires or dry ice to create convincing fog. That single object grounded the whole fantasy, reminding viewers that cinema could turn ordinary objects into gateways for the impossible.
Contemporary reviews noticed the skill. Le Monde Illustré wrote that Méliès made the impossible look ordinary. What often gets missed is how the film gently poked fun at the dance craze itself, suggesting that Paris ballrooms were already a little hellish. Influences from magic lantern shows and shadow theatre are easy to spot, especially in the way the action stays framed like a stage proscenium. The ending, with dancers tumbling back into the pot and erupting as confetti, gives the whole thing a playful close that feels like cinema winking at its own tricks.
Hellfire in Historical Context: From Faust to Flickers
The devilish theme reached back to stories like Goethe’s Faust, where Mephistopheles leads the revels. Méliès had already played with similar ideas in The Devil in a Convent from 1900, but this film tied the old motif to a brand-new dance fad. While the Lumière brothers focused on everyday scenes like trains pulling into stations, Méliès championed fantasy and showed audiences what the camera could invent rather than merely record.
Other trick films soon followed, including Edison’s The Haunted Hotel in 1907, yet Méliès turned out far more titles and reached wider audiences. France dominated the early export market through Pathé, and collectors still hunt surviving hand-coloured prints that can fetch serious money at auction. Modern restorations by Lobster Films keep the original tints intact, and festivals such as Il Cinema Ritrovato continue to screen them with live accompaniment.
Video game designers have pointed to the rhythmic timing as an early hint of what rhythm-action titles like Space Channel 5 would later explore. The handmade quality also appeals to steampunk fans who recreate the props for conventions, proving the film’s visual language still travels well more than a century later.
Devilish Designs: Packaging Pandemonium for the Masses
Posters billed the short as comic fantasy, and Méliès printed around a thousand copies for worldwide shipment. In Britain it ran under the title Le Cake Walk Infernal, riding the same wave of dance excitement. American exhibitors paired it with live strongman acts and called it the dance of Satan himself. For today’s collectors, Pathé stencil marks help separate genuine prints from later copies.
Blu-ray sets such as Flicker Alley’s Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema include the film alongside contemporaries, often with split-screen comparisons that highlight the editing tricks. Scholars have linked the uncanny shift from familiar dance to grotesque spectacle with ideas Freud would later explore, and some see the film as an early step toward surrealist cinema. Its short length works in its favour, delivering invention without ever wearing out its welcome.
Director/Creator in the Spotlight
Georges Méliès was born Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès on 8 May 1861 in Paris. He trained as a clockmaker before taking over the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in 1885, where he perfected stage illusions that later fed directly into his film work. When the Lumière brothers demonstrated projected film in 1895 and refused to sell him equipment, he built his own camera and founded Star Film the following year. Over the next seventeen years he completed more than five hundred shorts, drawing inspiration from Jules Verne adventures and Edgar Allan Poe tales alike.
World War I hit hard. Studios were taken over, and nitrate stock was melted down for other uses. By 1925 Méliès was bankrupt and selling toys at a Paris station until Henri Langlois rediscovered him in the 1930s. He received the Légion d’honneur in 1932 and passed away on 21 January 1938. His best-known works include A Trip to the Moon from 1902, The Kingdom of the Fairies in 1903, and The Impossible Voyage the year after. At Dyerbolical we often return to these early experiments because they show how one person’s stage background could reshape an entire medium.
Actor/Character in the Spotlight
Méliès himself plays the Chief Devil, baton raised as he directs the others with theatrical sweeps and exaggerated bows. The role suited his wiry build and expressive face, the same qualities that made him the first real auteur-star. He appeared in nearly every film he directed, moving from magician to devil to king with equal ease. Earlier roles include the conjurer in The Devil’s Castle from 1897 and the title figure in Bluebeard from 1901. His characters always carry a sense of playful control, turning disorder into spectacle before the final fade-out.
Bibliography
Solomon, M. (2018) Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema. University of Illinois Press.
Ezra, E. (2007) Georges Méliès. Manchester University Press.
Neale, S. (2012) ‘Méliès’ Magic’, in Film History, 24(2), pp. 45-62. Indiana University Press. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/480123 (Accessed 15 October 2023).
Abel, R. (1994) The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914. University of California Press.
Lobster Films (2008) Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema [DVD]. Flicker Alley.
Bibliothèque nationale de France (2022) Georges Méliès Collection. Available at: https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb11951166v (Accessed 15 October 2023).
Campanella, M. (2003) ‘The Cakewalk in Paris’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 1(1), pp. 89-104. Routledge.
Méliès, G. (1930) Interview in Pour Vous magazine, no. 120. Paris.
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