The film in question was “The Haunted House” and while I find it charming (maybe not in this weird 4k 60 frame remaster), but 1922’s silent horror Nosferatu also comes to mind.
I do wonder how an audience at the time of its release would react to such a film. I’m aware of the debunked myth that 1896’s “Arrival of a Train” scared audiences into running out of the theater, but when exactly did movies become scary? How would horror and scary things have been effectively conveyed to the audience in the silent and early sound eras of Hollywood and filmmaking?
At the time (1907), movies had been transitioning from being "scientific" attractions ("come to see images that move") to being primarily carnival attractions, exhibited in funfairs by travelling showmen. In France, they were slowly getting into their own and dedicated theatres (Le Marchand, 2015). Movies made before 1910 still retained much of their fairground origins: rather than theatre plays projected on screen, they were "rides" that combined amusing or titillating scenes of magic, fantasy, comedy, eroticism, and the occasional drama and documentary. Georges Méliès said the following in an interview in 1932 (cited by Gunning, 2006):
As for the scenario, the "fable", the "tale", I was the last to worry about it. I can affirm that the scenario thus made was of no importance, since I had no other purpose than to use it as a "pretext" for "mise en scène", "tricks", or "pretty paintings".
While "horror" had been a recognized and popular literary genre for a century (if not centuries), and well established on stage (the Grand-Guignol theatre in France mixed gore and comedy), it was not yet a movie genre, perhaps because horror requires a narrative, and narratives were not yet fully central to movies, who borrowed stories from books, plays, and news, but could not really develop them beyond simple situations. Of course, early filmmakers knew about horror tropes a such ghosts, monsters, demons, and gothic settings, and featured them in their movies: Méliès' Le Manoir du Diable (1896) and La Caverne maudite (1898, lost) are considered as the earliest examples of horror movies. Segundo de Chomón, the Spanish director of La maison ensorcelée, also directed the same year the gothic movie Le spectre rouge. But those early horror movies were basically demo reels for special effects that had people going WOW A DANCING SKELETON rather than hiding under their seats or fainting. And indeed, advertising for the The maison ensorcelée presented it as an hilarious comedy.
Le Journal, 23 December 1907:
It was on a burst of laughter, with the Maison ensorcelée, that this evening ended, which promises a considerable success, and a well-deserved one thanks to laughter, at the Cirque d'Hiver, so luxuriously transformed.
La Dépêche du Berry, 6 January 1908
Everyone will come to see the magnificent program which was given on Saturday and Sunday at the Cinéma Pathé; it is truly wonderful. Just one vue [show], the Maison ensorcelée, is worth the bother! What could be funnier, more hilarious than this spectacle of the highest comedy? The magic table where all the objects move as if by magic. It cannot be told, you have to go see it.
As for the Spectre rouge, the only "red specter" that seems to have been scary in 1907 (according to French newspapers) was that of Communism... One of the few mentions of this movie in the press goes as follows (Le Phare de la Loire, 5 October 1907):
Large vues in colour, with transformations and tricks, in 20 acts.
Moviegoers from the 1900s did not find this more horrifying than we do: they just marvelled at the special effects (I wonder if some people grumbled about them just like today some complain about the excessive use of CGI).
In the 1910s, as movies moved away from their carnival roots, they started including actual (and long) narratives, and there were tentative adaptations of horror classics such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Thomas Edison, 1910; Life without soul, Joseph Smiley, 1915) and Edgar Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum (Alice Guy, 1913). The latter was presented in the advertising as somehow horrific:
Oakland Tribune, 13 September 1913.
The Navajo theater takes pleasure in presenting, Sunday, September 14, Darwin Kerr, the idol of the picture world, in the blood curling classic, "The Pit and the Pendulum," a screen adaptation in three acts containing all the virility and gruesome forcefulless of the great Edgar Allen [sic] Poes's most wonderful descriptive narration. [short bio of Poe]. We positively do no recommend "The Pit and the Pendulum" to nervous people.
Life without soul, on the other hand, had so-so reviews. The Chicago Tribune of 20 December 1915 called it "interesting and not very unpleasing, in spite of its grewsomeness [sic]", quite a backhanded compliment for an horror movie...
Horror movies in the modern sense would indeed not be produced until the 1920s, with Nosferatu (as you said) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
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