The Diabolic Tenant

The Diabolic Tenant (French: Le Locataire diabolique), originally released in English-speaking countries as The Fiendish Tenant, is a 1909 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 1495–1501 in its catalogues.

Méliès's films have no closing credits, but the following cast list can be reconstructed from recollections by Georges Méliès's son, André Méliès.

The Diabolic Tenant is an expanded treatment of plot ideas that had previously appeared in an earlier Méliès film, Satan in Prison. Méliès's concept of large things coming from a small bag returned in later films, including Walt Disney's Mary Poppins and Jerry Lewis's Hardly Working. The film's special effects were created using pyrotechnics, stage machinery, and furniture props moved by people hidden inside them, including the young André Méliès. The only cinematic effect used in the film is the editing technique known as the substitution splice.

As is typical for Méliès's work, most of the action is filmed in long shots. Unusually, a medium shot also occurs, to clarify the action—probably, in this case, to show the janitor's astonishment more clearly.