Traveling circus and carnival performer, vaudevillian, and movie actor turned filmmaker Tod Browning has been a fixture on this site. I've written about several of his classic horror and horror-adjacent films, including The Unholy Three, The Show, The Unknown (his masterpiece), West of Zanzibar, Where East Is East, Dracula, and Freaks (his other masterpiece), and touched on his wild life traveling the country on the lower rungs of showbiz before breaking into the movies. I love his work, and even his weaker films have a handful of amazing scenes. (Crew members did not love Browning so much, complaining of the ridiculously long hours and intense pressure Browning put on the people working for him, and his dissatisfaction with most of their efforts.)
A Browning film most of us Tod-heads have been hoping (without much hope) to see is his 1927 follow-up to The Unknown, London After Midnight. The Lon Chaney-starring silent film was heralded as one of Browning's best, but, as is the case with the majority of silent films, prints eventually went missing or were damaged or destroyed, and the last-known print went up in flames in an MGM vault fire in the 1960s. Since then, the search for an existing print of London After Midnight has turned up nothing, but the production stills survive, giving us a glimpse of what we lost.
We don't have London After Midnight, but we do have Mark of the Vampire. Browning remade his then-extant silent film as a talkie in 1935, swapping Lon Chaney for Bela Lugosi. It's a relatively minor Browning film, with its one hour running time a hint that it was probably the second film in a double feature, but it has some knockout moments that reward viewers willing to put up with the silliness of the narrative.
Mark of the Vampire moves the silent film's action from the big city of London to a village near Prague. The villagers have a serious vampire superstition, which amuses travelers from the city and irritates the hell out of the police inspector, Neumann (Lionel Atwill). That inspector is in town because Sir Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) has been murdered, his body drained of blood, puncture wounds in his neck, the whole nine vampire yards, and the doctor, Doskil (Donald Meek), has pronounced the death the work of vampires. Neumann, pissed as hell at this professional tomfoolery, calls in his own expert, Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore, hamming it up to a delightfully absurd degree). Neumann loses his damn mind when Zelen agrees with the vampire theory. This is a man who feels he has been surrounded by fools.
An aside about Tod Browning's vampire castles in this film and Dracula. He tried to start a trend that didn't really take off, but I salute his oddball efforts. Browning goes classic vamp and fills the otherwise empty castles with coffins and creaky doors and cobwebs and bats and rats and even roaches (as a resident of the Southwest, I hate roaches to hell and back and am currently enduring giant roach season in my 1960s-built house), but both films populate their vampire dwellings with an opossum. You don't really see too many vampires with pet opossums after Tod Browning stopped making movies, and I think it's time we bring this back.
Mark of the Vampire is a relatively generic but enjoyable vampire story for most of its running time until MILD SPOILER a silly twist ending that nevertheless returns Browning to one of his favorite subjects, the small-time showbiz life of struggling actors, carnies, and/or circus people. What really makes Mark of the Vampire worth seeing is Carroll Borland. Her performance as Luna should have been iconic. She's creepy, she's funny, she's scary, she works well with Lugosi, and all of her scenes are by far the best part of the movie.
Until someone turns up a print of London After Midnight in an attic or studio vault or buried under an ice rink or floating in the ocean, Mark of the Vampire will have to do. It's not one of Browning's strongest films, but it's fun, it's only an hour long, and Carroll Borland is fantastic.
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