The Impossibility of Reconstructing a Lost Film
(originally posted on IMDb 29 November 2017)

Spoilers Warning Elaborated: This review may contain spoilers for the films "Dracula" (1931), "Mark of the Vampire" (1935) and, if possible for a lost film, "London After Midnight" (1927).

This, Rick Schmidlin's reconstruction of the lost silent film "London After Midnight" (1927) is interesting. It demonstrates the impossibility of reconstructing a lost film in the sense of restoring it; instead, it is an entirely different thing that barely even resembles a motion picture. Yet, presented as a film, with title cards, intertitles and a musical score and otherwise using still photographs in place of the lost celluloid, it's the closest approximation in lieu of a rediscovered print.

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the limited number of stills and this reconstruction's presentation as a film approximation, the plot of "London After Midnight" is a bit confusing, which isn't helped by the reconstruction, overall, being dull due to its reliance on stills. It's like reading a reconstruction of the film in book format, which exists. Philip J. Riley, author of a reconstruction of the film as a book, however, seems to have a bad reputation for dishonesty on website forums such as NitrateVille and the Classic Horror Film Board.

Anyways, although the 1927 film may be the most desired lost film, there seems to be the common sense among the most devoted silent and horror film fans (as in the aforementioned forums and some other IMDb reviews) that it probably wasn't a great movie. Maybe so, and there are likely other lost films I'd rather see—being that most silent films are lost (e.g. the loss of another Lon Chaney photoplay, his star- turning role in "The Miracle Man" (1919), seems especially lamentable). Nevertheless, 1927's "London After Midnight" is a conceptually intriguing narrative. In a way, it was director Tod Browning's first of three attempts at adapting Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula," with the 1931 film being the only official adaptation. The third film and an unacknowledged remake of "London After Midnight" is "Mark of the Vampire" (1935), which like the 1931 "Dracula" stars Bela Lugosi.

Unlike "Dracula," the other two films are not of the supernatural horror genre, but rather are murder mysteries—the supernatural being explained away in the end by it having been a ruse to catch the crook. The 1931 "Dracula" largely invented the Hollywood genre of horror; before it, mystery pictures tended to be the closest thing, but these would explain away supernatural shocks in the end. Horror mysteries, let's call them, were also common in theatrical productions and, indeed, Stoker's Gothic horror novel was turned into a mystery on the stage. "London After Midnight" was released to capitalize on the popularity of such a contemporary play. It even keeps the names of Arthur and Lucy/Lucille from Stoker. Moreover, all three of the films are relatively stagy in their confinements for large portions of their runtimes to versions of Seward's home and Dracula's Carfax Abbey—demonstrating the influence the play had on all of them.

As this reconstruction makes clear, "London After Midnight," interestingly, features a vampire book. Seeming to reference its source in Stoker's novel, as well as the epistolary structure of it, by having a vampire book within the adaptation is a device that has been used in a few vampire films. The first was probably "Nosferatu" (1922). "Vampyr" (1932), "Son of Dracula" (1943) and "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary" (2002) also make good use of it.

The main thing "London After Midnight" has going for it that the other two films don't, however, is Lon Chaney, and this is where the film may've been especially clever. Renowned for using makeup and other effects for dramatic and shocking transformations, Chaney played dual roles here: one without makeup (the Van Helsing type) and one with (the Dracula type). This may've been a clever self- reference when Chaney's character's makeup-enhanced acting was revealed. "Mark of the Vampire" has a similar self-referential aspect altered for the persona of its star Lugosi.

The duality of the Dracula and Van Helsing types is also interesting. It seems to get at something of the parallelisms between the two Stoker characters. Although fighting on opposite sides, both men have hypnotic powers, both apply blood transfusions of a sort to women (the proto-scientific sort and, from Drac, feeding breast blood) and both are foreigners who convert the Anglican English to their cults (vampirism for Drac and Catholicism for Van Helsing). And, reading the end of the novel, I suspected there was some deviant trickery about the old Dutchman insisting on traveling with Mina alone while he frequently puts her under his spell.

(Included on my list of 60--and counting--Dracula movies.)