What was the first movie to use special effects?
In 1857, Oscar Gustave Rejlander created the world’s first “trick photograph” by combining different regions of 32 other photographs into a single image. In 1895, Alfred Clark created what is commonly accepted as the first-ever special effect on film. While filming a reenactment of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, Clarke instructed an actor to step up to the block in Mary’s costume. As the executioner brought the axe above his head, Clarke stopped the camera, had all of the actors freeze, and had the person playing Mary step off the set. He placed a Mary dummy in the actor’s place, restarted filming, and allowed the executioner to bring the axe down, severing the dummy’s head. “Such… techniques would remain at the heart of special effects production for the next century” (Rickitt, 10). This was not only the first use of trickery in the cinema, it was the first type of photographic trickery that could only be done in a motion picture, i.e. the “stop trick”.
