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The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema pp 135–172Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Méliès’s Skeleton: Gender, Cinema’s Danse Macabre and the Erotics of Bone

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the prominence of the figure of the skeleton in entertainment in the 1890s. Skeletons are a particularly common sight in early cinema, especially in the trick films of Georges Méliès, beginning with The Vanishing Lady (1896). This visibility can be explained on the one hand as a vestige of danse macabre traditions stretching back to the Middle Ages, and on the other as an offshoot of the X-ray’s contemporaneous popularity. The chapter explains how both of these causes factored into the eroticization of the female skeleton in early cinema and the late Victorian cult of dead and dying women, and explores its latter-day echoes.

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    Murray Leeder

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Leeder, M. (2017). Méliès’s Skeleton: Gender, Cinema’s Danse Macabre and the Erotics of Bone. In: The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58371-0_6

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