A Book Review by Dávid Szőke.
A carefully detailed account of the vampire archetype’s journey from literary and folkloric origins to the silent screen….”
“Schreck’s peculiarities are like lovemaking games,” so says the fictional F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich) in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a vampire film about the making of a vampire film. Merhige’s fictional account of the production of Nosferatu (1922, see top image) admirably captures the spirit of the Weimar Republic, including its sexual and artistic freedom, the flapper style, and the hyperrealism of German expressionist filmmaking. It also playfully explores the intertextual possibilities of Murnau’s Dracula adaptation, exemplified by shots like the train and the sunset, and presents some comic takes on Max Schreck’s “method acting.” However, its most striking attribute lies in its ability to evoke the power of the silent images, when audiences of the 1920s were simultaneously shocked and captivated by the heightened visual depictions of pure sensuality and eerie violence on the silver screen, with the vampire embodying the seductive and dangerous “other” in these haunting romantic tales.
Gary D. Rhodes’s Vampires in Silent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) pays tribute to the genesis of filmic vampire stories. The book begins by echoing Maxim Gorky’s sentiment from 1895 that films represent not life itself, but its shadow, portraying figures forever trapped in an eternal state, carrying an unsettling yet ambiguous significance that can unsettle the viewer. As Rhodes claims, it is noteworthy that Edvard Munch’s painting Love and Pain, later known as Vampire, appeared around the same period, illustrating a scarlet-haired young woman provocatively biting a man’s neck, set against a backdrop of tumultuous imagery. These observations are intriguing as they highlight how vampire portrayals, deeply entrenched in the Western patriarchal tradition, reveal a heterosexist and orientalist fascination with and simultaneous fear of the dangerous, polluting, and infectious “other.” While the book does not fully explore this, an intersectional analysis could provide new insights into how these early depictions shaped and validated cultural prejudices and discrimination.
Chapter One revisits the first filmic depictions of the vampires, setting the stage for a detailed exploration of two distinct types, the supernatural vampires and the vamps. The author observes that during this period of evolving cinema, visual storytelling was becoming increasingly intricate. Early vampire depictions on film signify this transformational process, whereby some vampire characters appeared as supernatural, while others did not, making them exceedingly challenging to comprehend and interpret. As the author suggests, several narratives like Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du diable/The Devil’s Castle (1896) or Segundo de Chomón’s La Légende du fantôme/Legend of a Ghost (1908, aka The Black Pearl), both incorrectly described as horror pictures with prominent vampire characters, or Pathé Frères’ Loïe Fuller (1905), featuring a supernatural vampire dancer, illustrate the general ambiguity surrounding the identity of vampires. Nonetheless, the popularity of the vampire in fiction, poetry, stage adaptations, and art exhibitions, with the bloodsucking woman being central to Philip Burne-Jones’s painting The Vampire (1897), and Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same name, shows that the figure became deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination.
Through previously unexplored press material about several vampire films, now considered to be lost, Rhodes paints a vivid picture of how audiences and critics of the early 20th century responded to these visual representations.”
The gendered aspect of the vamp character is examined in Chapter Two. Rhodes draws a convincing picture of the patriarchal morals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with their meticulous portrayal of the dangerous seductress, an antithesis to the ideal Victorian womanhood, who lures several men to their demise. Rhodes’ main sources of departure are Burne-Jones and Kipling, with a fascinating overview of the literary scene, including Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), John Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819), and, perhaps more interestingly, George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894), that might have inspired them. Filmically, Rhodes catalogs Selig Polyscope’s The Vampire (1910), the German film Der Vampyr (1911), A Woman’s Slave (1911), The Clemenceau Case (1915), or Paramount’s The Vamp (1918), alongside male-centric “he-vamp” films, including Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919), The Forbidden Path (1918), as well as The Butterfly Man (1920) and Occasionally Yours (1920), both films featuring Lew Cody, the most prominent “he-vamp” actor of the era. In doing so, Rhodes highlights the fluidity and ambiguity of the vamp archetype in the early cinema, indicating societal curiosity and anxiety regarding nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality, particularly within a heterosexist framework. This general attitude towards the vampire as the epitome of the social pariah is further discussed in Chapter Three. Here, Rhodes discusses how cultural depictions of the character frequently linked him to criminal behavior such as burglary, sexual assault, and murder, preying upon individuals perceived as morally upright and law-abiding in films like Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915–16) and Roland West’s The Bat (1926).
Chapter Four delves into the supernatural vampires of the silent cinema, whom the author considers to be aesthetic offsprings of Loïe Fuller (1905) and Vampyrdanserinden (1912). Through a close analysis of films like The Afterlife Wanderer (1915), The Mysteries of Myra (1916), or Lilith und Ly (1919), the author explains how the trope of the undead supernatural vampire has become a prominent and lasting element in popular culture. As the author implies, cultural representations of vampires in general create tension between mathematical logic and narrative convenience, where the dramatic allure of vampires overrules any realistic implications of their reproduction. This discrepancy is highly present in the films discussed here, where the visual depictions of vampire characters prompt questions not only about the complex nature of the supernatural vampire but also about their potential to defeat the entire human race, thereby confronting audiences with their own mortality through the onscreen presence of the undead.
Chapter Five examines the first Dracula-adaptation, the now-lost Hungarian Drakula halála (1921). Directed by Károly Lajthay, the film incorporates elements from Robert Wiene’s Dr Caligari, featuring a character who, believing himself to be the bloodsucker from Stoker’s novel, represents the first instance of incorporating Stoker’s vampire into a narrative not directly derived from his work. Surviving press materials related to the film serve as poignant reminders of how the vampire figure has transcended cultural and linguistic borders in terms of literary appraisal and visual representation. Moreover, they underscore how the story served as an intermedial bridge between literary fiction and visual media, between Lajthay’s film and its book companion by Lajos Pánczél, testifying that Stoker’s story has been transculturally embraced and lived on in many other forms and haunted audiences for years to come. Chapter Six revisits the premiere of Murnau’s Nosferatu, discussing how the supernatural vampire was celebrated as some spectacle in Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic. Chapter Seven deals with Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927), one of the most sought-after silent films, whose numerous reconstructions have solidified its place in the collective imagination as a quintessential example of undead cinematic storytelling.
Chapter Eight discusses the earliest American supernatural vampire films, F-0332 (c. 1926) and F-0343 (c. 1928), two amateur pictures by unknown filmmakers. As Rhodes explains, the two films concurrently gained their inspiration from Nosferatu and London After Midnight, while the supernatural vampire figures in these films, enigmatic as they are, did not fade into obscurity. Rhodes highlights that amateur films as a means of diverse practices represent a form of popular memory by engaging with past cultural products, thereby remobilizing and preserving cultural history.
Chapter Nine offers a stimulating conclusion to the book, meticulously explaining how the supernatural vampires of the talkies swept away the metaphorical vampires of silent films. As Rhodes explains, fluctuating public and critical attitudes toward the vamp archetype, including the general view of them as morally harmful influences on the youth, led to their decline in popularity during the mid-1920s. Yet, although the vamp character was increasingly seen as outdated and unrealistic, its essence did not disappear but merged into the supernatural vampire archetype. The result, asserts Rhodes, has been an overwhelming hybridity of undead creatures, occupying our collective cultural consciousness, from Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and Mark of the Vampire (1935), the deliciously provocative Dracula’s Daughter (1936), to Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983).
All in all, Gary D. Rhodes’ work is a carefully detailed account of the vampire archetype’s journey from literary and folkloric origins to the silent screen, which explains how early visual narratives enriched the vampire’s complex and uncanny character. Through previously unexplored press material about several vampire films, now considered to be lost, Rhodes paints a vivid picture of how audiences and critics of the early 20th century responded to these visual representations. Reading this book, it becomes clear that vampires of the silent era, despite being succeeded by their more audibly expressive counterparts, have left an indelible mark, and speak to us much louder than they ever did.
Dávid Szőke is a senior lecturer at the University of Nyíregyháza, Hungary and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Szeged. His area of research revolves around the cultural and literary representations of ethnic, racial, and gender minorities. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Heidelberg University in Germany.