The House of Hate (1918)

Directed by

George B. Seitz

Genre

drama film, action film, silent film, serial film

Country

United States

Runtime

6h 50m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.6 of 10 from 5 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A masked villain terrorizes a family in a murder mystery serial. The heroine faces danger and cliffhanger chases across locations in New Jersey. Originally a straight mystery, later episodes added German spy subplots.

fast-pacedmysteriousmelodramaticsuspensefuldatedaction-filledpropagandisticepisodic

What happens

The House of Hate is a 1918 American film serial directed by George B. Seitz, produced when many early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The serial was originally announced at fifteen episodes but due to its box office success was extended to twenty, at which time content involving German spies was interpolated into the murder mystery plot. A print of a condensed featurized version of The House of Hate from the collection of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein is held in the Gosfilmofond film archive in Russia. Most of the propagandistic spy content is excised in the condensation, which does not include chapter divisions but does apparently include most of the content of episodes 1-4 as originally released, highlights from the middle chapters of the serial, and the complete finale including the extended flashback in which the masked villain's identity is revealed. On April 12, 2015 the Fort Lee Film Commission held a screening of a video transfer of existing footage from this film lasting three hours, including shots of Pearl White atop Cliffhanger Point on the Hudson Palisades. A restored version of the serial with reconstructed opening titles, dialogue, chapter summaries, and chapter divisions was released on DVD by The Serial Squadron on May 25, 2015. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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