The Electric Hotel by Segundo de Chomón

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So goes the adage that Westerners like to tell themselves, spoken by Science Fiction authors channelling the spirits of racial "scientists" of a century past who saw others only as ignorant savages. While those "savages" were well aware that the man holding the box that made images of them was simply the owner of a technology, the adage has gotten a fair bit of mileage in the Western world as a means for updating old tricks. What was once magic became alchemy became science!.

For Segundo de Chomón, science was useful in giving a gloss to his cinematic world of trick photography. Instead of a demon-infested inn, his hotel would be a supermodern marvel automated by electricity! How else to explain all the nifty stop-motion work throughout, except that sufficiently advanced technology can produce limitless marvels?