Vampire Films: Changing the Map
In 2022, a US study revealed that almost two-thirds of adults aged 30 to 44 said they either liked or loved the horror film genre and in the same year, an article for Empire magazine claimed not only that the influence of the silent version of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) on horror was so large as to be incalculable but also that it was the first and best vampire movie. Robert Egger’s Nosferatu (2024), a lavish and respectful tribute to and re-envisioning of Murnau’s classic received glowing reviews and grossed $180.9 million on a $50 million budget, becoming this director’s highest-grossing movie. Cinematically speaking, vampires – even ones stemming from early film -are still culturally and globally big. 1922 is still the year where most journalists are content to start the notional stop-watch on vampire cinema. Yet, increasingly, for recent historians of cinema, there is a persistent, nagging unease that, somewhere even further back, there in the primal darkness of early film, other screen blood-suckers lurk, a feeling reinforced by the title of Karoly Lathjay’s Drakula halála / Dracula's Death which had appeared the year before the first Nosferatu.
Though, in fact Drakula halála involved nothing more spooky than a mental patient who thought he was Dracula and an hallucinating woman, there were actual and fascinating vampire figures in cinema’s first phase, and to identify them is to change the map of horror cinema. To be clear: the vampires which I mention below are not simply the kind of mortal vamp, an amoral seductress, or thief or murderer which were sometimes given the title ‘vampire’ in early film. Neither are they ‘vampires’ as in the Hammer aristocratic Byronic or Stoker-eque masculine template of the monster which have so dominated recent productions. Silent film vampires come in many forms and from many cultures but those types I describe here are supernatural, sometimes revenants or demons and they absorb the blood and vitality of their human victims.
Between 1901 and 1912 there were at least six cinematic versions of Charles Perrault’s fairytale Le Petit Poucet / Hop o’ My Thumb. As cinema audiences brought up on these stories all over the West would know, Perrault reveals the supernatural ogre’s daughters (killed unwittingly by their monstrous father) as having sharp teeth involved in the sucking of the blood of other children. Since this vampiric feasting is never seen in these films, (two of which are fully extant) we might call these works only ‘implicit’ vampire productions. (This lack of obvious fangs is more than made up for in more recent ‘Petit Poucet’ films.)
In their study The Vampire Film, Alain Silver and James Ursini mention that the Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol published a story called The Viy, a tale of a philosophy student who keeps vigil by a coffin of a vampiric witch. In fact, Gogol’s story repeatedly emphasises the witch’s vampiric identity as an undead revenant: a Ved'ma or Pannochka who shifts shape between a younger and older woman and changes into a dog to consume the blood of children. As an energy vampire, she also ‘hag-rides’ her victims physically by mounting their bodies and extracting their vitality She can both levitate herself and the coffin which contains her. What Ursini and Silver forget to tell us (and is absent from their book) is that the tale was first filmed by Vasili Goncharov in 1909, in a work starring Vera Dalskaya as the vampire-witch and featuring onscreen transformations into a bat and multiple women. Goncharov’s film is now lost yet we can re-assemble these details from Russian records and from the structure of the tale itself. This fact alone – that a verifiable vampire-witch film existed 13 years before the first Nosferatu - turns the present and widely accepted chronology of vampire films on its head. Many subsequent films of Viy also exist, including Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachvov’s ’s wonderful 1967 version which affirm these vampiric themes. The female Viy vampire is as dominant a figure in Russian culture as Dracula is in the West and she also crosses over into Western cinema in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960).
In 1911 in Aristide Demetriade and Grigore Brezeanu’s Romanian hybrid film-theatrical production, Spread Yourselves, Daisies / Înșirăte mărgărite, a hero sets out to battle with the notorious dragoness-vampire called a Zmeu. We still have a clutch of rare stills from this film.
Female identity is also writ large in a Japanese Pathé Shôkai’s production: The Cat of Nabeshima/ Nabeshima no Neko (1912) where a vampire demon in the shape of a cat (kaibyo)murders a courtesan, takes on her appearance and then fastens itself onto the prince of Hizen to drain him of blood. In the following year, a British soldier in India is shown being bitten by a vampire woman in Searchlight Pictures’ The Vampire. The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television states that this is Britain’s first vampire film and also an example of post-colonial horror. The soldier’s companion shoots the female vampire but she transforms into a serpent and, revivified, kills the friend too. Of course, such female and animal shape-shifting in these productions hints at close connections between the feminine, nature as an all-impinging presence and the despoliation of the environment
1915 proved to be a high watermark for vampire film production. In Viacheslav Turzhanskii’s Wanderer beyond the Grave/ Zagrobnaia skitalitska a reincarnated girl, played by Olga Baclanova feeds off the blood of friends and her new family to satisfy her abnormal thirst. There is even a still of this revenant sleeping in a coffin which, in context, hints of memories of Viy more than Draculean associations. In the same year, Lloyd Ingraham’s American production set in Japan: The Fox Woman, a vampire kitsune is portrayed, a supernatural psychic vampire who steals unsuspecting people’s souls. As soon as she is killed, the victim’s soul returns to its original owner, confirming the supernatural provenance of the predation.
The prominence of folk vampires, such as the Ved'ma, kitsune and kaibyo, in these early years reveals how these horror writers and directors preferred to use native vampire tales and superstitions rather than opting for Stoker-esque Dracula figures: aristocratic males in Transylvanian castles, which became so familiar later. Such details not only alter the pre-existing critical map of vampire cinema, the predominance of female predators at this period, often involved with taking revenge for environmental transgression, also alerts us to ecological thematics at work in these films. This is even more apparent in Aleksandr Panteleev's Bloodthirsty Susanna / Derevo Smerti, ili Krovozhadnaia, (also 1915), where a female vampire-plant (in the greenhouse of a German spy) wraps itself round and sucks blood from its victims.
There has been some controversy amongst critics who could not think outside the ‘Dracula/ Nosferatu’ template and were also unused to occult ideas about vampirism whether the Fire Elemental spirit in the Wharton brother’s serial The Mysteries of Myra (1916) was a vampire or not. Yet my discovery, in 2020, of Hereward Carrington, the series advisor’s and writer’s source for this episode in Algernon Blackwood’s story ‘The Nemesis of Fire’ and close attention to existing film stills proved without doubt that as the accompanying series novelisation and newspaper series state, this blazing elemental is definitely a bloodsucking vampire. (The one critic who disagreed has since disowned his remarks on the importance of pre-1922 vampire films). As many critics and authorities have since acknowledged, this Fire Elemental is in fact, currently, America’s first extant film vampire and the first male vampire in cinema history.
In Erich Kober’s, Lilith and Ly (1919) a spell found on a papyrus in an Indian tomb brings a statue to life. The papyrus also warns the scientist who discovers it that he must not inform this walking/ talking effigy of her origin or else she will become a vampire. One day, a laboratory accident, the scientist smashes a test-tube, cutting his hand and Lilith immediately starts to feed on his blood. The still showing this moment (included here) is the first image which we currently have of a vampire consuming blood on screen. Of course, the name ‘Lilith’ links this blood-sucker to one of the earliest she-demons in Mesopotamian and Jewish folk-lore.
Up to 75% of silent films are currently missing but we know that, for example, Lilith and Myra were very successful in their day and influenced the films that followed them, so it cannot be claimed that these now missing films have not exerted their own gravitational fields. In some cases: reviews, posters, some scripts and many stills survive of these ‘lost’ films. I place lost in quotation marks because just in the last two years stills and a publicity leaflet have been found for Alexander Butler’s The Beetle (1919) and the whole first section of Charles Calvert’s The Avenging Hand (1915) has come to light so ‘lost’ as a category is always provisional.
When a critic and historian as eminent as Christopher Frayling, writes to me about my own book about silent cinema vampires and, in relation to his own magisterial volume: Vampire Cinema, The First One Hundred Years, comments ‘needless to say, I sincerely wish I’d read your book before writing mine!’, one gets a sense that the terrain is shifting. Brian Stableford and Simon Bacon have written that vampire figures still have vital things to teach us about the universe: about the consequences of environmental despoliation, about the shadow aspects of the human psyche and, in particular, about the consequences of speciesist arrogance. Christopher also called my work ‘vampire archaeology’. Every archaeologist, in the face of incomplete records, has to learn exactitude and persistence. The study of ‘lost’ early vampire films is no exception. With patience and attention, a new prospect of film history begins to emerge: Long before Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee took up their vampiric roles, the first age of vampires in cinema is overwhelmingly female and stems from multifarious cultures and their rich histories of horror