The demon's joke, or Delage's demon
I ran into one of those wonderfully suspicious YouTube titles: CURSED FILMS. Of course I clicked.
On the other side of the screen, a middle-aged presenter called Getro was telling a completely deranged story about Georges Méliès, occultism and a little film so wicked that Méliès, with the help of some famous occultist of the time, may have made something capable of disturbing even the calmest soul.
Well, damn it, Getro was convincing. So I started digging, and I kept digging.
The cursed object of my obsession had a name: La Rage du Démon, or Fury of the Demon in English. Everything I found pointed to a 2016 film by Fabien Delage, described as an investigation into one of the rarest and most controversial works of early French cinema: a lost short, sometimes attributed to Méliès, that supposedly drove anyone unlucky enough to see it into violent fits.
Great. There was only one small, irritating problem. Where the hell was the film?
For three exhausting months I hunted that thing through the less respectable neighborhoods of the internet. A few streaming services showed up on Google as if they had it, and every time I followed the trail the same sad truth was waiting: removed from the catalog ages ago, gone, swallowed by the void. I came very close to emailing Delage himself, like a desperate cinephile detective who had lost both his dignity and his sleep.
Then I got an invite to a very strange Chinese torrent site, the kind of place that looks like it was coded during a blackout and translated by a ghost. And there it was, the mysterious documentary, right in front of me. I clicked, downloaded and watched.
Now I have to explain Delage's little trick.
La Rage du Démon is a mockumentary, or, as the French put it so nicely, a documenteur: a fake documentary that takes real history and wraps it in fiction until the lie is wearing a very convincing suit.
Delage doesn't simply invent a cursed film. He builds a trap shaped like one. He borrows the authority of talking heads, film critics, archive-looking footage and well-known names from French horror to make the absurd feel almost respectable. Among the people interviewed are the directors Christophe Gans and Alexandre Aja, the critic Philippe Rouyer, Jean-Jacques Bernard, Dave Alexander and even Pauline Méliès, a descendant of Georges Méliès himself.
That last detail is evil in the best possible way. Once a Méliès shows up on screen, your brain lowers the drawbridge. You think: well, if the family is involved, maybe there's something to it. Delage knows that. The best lie isn't the one shouted in your face. It's the one that walks in wearing a museum badge.
The legend in the film is simple and perfect. A short film from 1897, long lost, that throws its audience into a frenzy every time it's shown. The most recent incident happens in 2012, when a collector invites filmmakers and journalists to a private screening and the room collapses into violent hysteria. Then the film vanishes again. Maybe Méliès made it. Maybe it was the work of someone close to him who dabbled in darker things.
A cursed film that shows up once in a while, leaves blood on the floor and disappears? That's premium-grade cinematic nonsense. The expensive kind.
And tying it to Méliès makes it even better. He was the perfect target for this kind of mythmaking: a stage magician who ran the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris, became a filmmaker and pioneered tricks like stop substitution, multiple exposures and dissolves. He understood early that cinema could do more than record life; it could fool you. In 1896 he even made Le Manoir du Diable, a three-minute film with a devil, a castle and a bat that turns into Mephistopheles, often called the first horror film ever made.
So when someone whispers "maybe Méliès made a film too dangerous to survive," a small, stupid, wonderful part of your brain wants to believe it.
The punchline is that none of it is real. The cursed film, the demonic screenings, the mysterious figure behind it: all invented. Smoke and mirrors. A séance with the lights on.
I like the film more because of that. Delage's hoax isn't some cheap creepypasta wearing a beret. It's a love letter to early cinema, to lost films, to the madness of collectors and to the scary idea that images can have consequences. It works because it understands people like me, the ones who hear "lost cursed Méliès film" and immediately start digging like raccoons in an occult dumpster.
A few details about the production, for the curious: it runs about an hour and was produced by Hippocampe Productions. The premise also reminded me of The King in Yellow, the fictional play in Robert W. Chambers' stories that drives its readers mad, the same poisonous idea that later fed the mythology of the first season of True Detective.
So no, I didn't uncover a forbidden Méliès film capable of turning respectable people into theater-wrecking lunatics. I found something sneakier: a film pretending to be a documentary about a film pretending to be a curse. And for one embarrassing moment, I let the trick work on me.
I think Méliès would have approved. Cinema was always a haunted machine. Delage just had the nerve to put the ghost back inside.