The First 10 Christmas Movies Ever Made (Part 1)

_Elsa_ · December 2021

Santa Claus (1898)

The first time Santa Claus appeared in film, it was in a silent British short directed by George Albert Smith, who pioneered the practice of film editing and the usage of close-ups. He also worked as a stage hypnotist and psychic, which influenced his use of special effects.

In the film, two children eagerly wait for Santa Claus by the fireplace, but are ordered to go to bed. While they sleep, Santa comes down the chimney and leaves presents for them. In the end, the children wake up and discover their presents. Transitions between these scenes are done with jump cuts, superimposition, and double exposure, which were new at the time.

Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline describes Santa Claus (1898) as “a film of considerable technical ambition and accomplishment for the period.” The film shows the children sleeping on one side of the screen while Santa lands on the roof on the other, which Brooke says is “believed to be the cinema's earliest known example of parallel action… [The] result is one of the most visually and conceptually sophisticated British films made up to then.”

The Christmas Dream (1900)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie1jfG9LzQo

French director Georges Méliès directed The Christmas Dream (1900), a film inspired by the French theatrical genre known as féerie. The genre was known for supernatural elements, lavish scenery, elaborate special effects, and clearly defined morality.

The film shifts its focus to several different settings: a home where two children hang up their stockings before going to bed; the nighttime sky where angels drop gifts into chimneys; and an old church where a bell tolls and a choir sings Christmas hymns. The film then goes back to the home of the children, who wake up and marvel at their presents. The ending scene shows people sitting at a table in a dining hall, welcoming a beggar into the house to join them.

Méliès, who was known for coming up with new filming techniques, used substitution splices and dissolving effects to transition between scenes. He also used stage machinery to ring the church bells and to mount a Christmas tree.

Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost (1901)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9Mk-B7MKP8

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) is one of the most adapted books of all time, having been made into films, stage plays, TV specials, and parodies. The first film version was Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), which was adapted from a stage play written by J.C. Buckstone.

The director, Walter R. Booth, was a magician before he began making films. He specialized in “trick films,” which were designed to showcase special effects that were innovative at the time. In one scene, a ghost’s face is superimposed over the door to Scrooge’s house. In another, Scrooge closes the black curtains over his bedroom window, and flashbacks to his childhood are superimposed over the dark space.

Though the original film’s running time was six minutes, only three minutes have survived. This was the first film to ever contain intertitles, though Booth believed that the audience would already be familiar enough with the story that the use of intertitles could be minimal.

The Night Before Christmas (1905)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VENFnejClbA

The Night Before Christmas—also known as ’Twas the Night Before Christmas and A Visit from St. Nicholas—was a poem first published anonymously in 1823, and later attributed to writer Clement Clarke Moore. The first film adaptation of the poem, The Night Before Christmas (1905), was directed by Edwin S. Porter and distributed by the Edison Company.

Lines from the poem appear in intertitles throughout the nine-minute film, which alternates between scenes of Santa Claus at the North Pole and a family putting their children to bed. When Santa takes off in his sleigh, a panoramic shot is done over a painted backdrop, with a model sleigh and reindeer miniatures being pulled on a string.

Interestingly, the film contains a scene where the children engage in a pillow fight, which was not part of the original poem. Pillow-fight scenes were common in Edison Company films, as they added some crowd-pleasing slapstick humor.

A Little Girl Who Did Not Believe in Santa Claus (1907)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD2Y5YVu-zE

While the children are playing together, the boy discovers that the girl doesn't believe in Santa Claus, because he's never visited her. So later that night, the boy waits up for Santa, armed with a pistol and some rope. When Santa comes down the chimney, the boy ties him up, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to visit the little girl's house.

These extreme measures are successful, as the girl wakes up to a beautiful Christmas tree and several presents. In the end the boy returns home and Santa tucks him into bed, clearly having no hard feelings about being kidnapped and held hostage. (Source)

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