Every archive keeps a list of the dead it would most like back. On almost every such list, the same title sits at the top: London After Midnight, directed by Tod Browning, released by MGM on December 3, 1927, and last seen alive in 1965.
The premise was pure police procedural wearing a cape. A Scotland Yard detective, played by Lon Chaney, investigates a death in a house apparently infested with vampires, and the vampires turn out to be theater: an elaborate sting staged to shake a confession out of a murderer. Chaney also played the bait, the "Man in the Beaver Hat", grinning through a set of sharpened teeth held in place by wire, a performance assembled from hardware and spite. The vampire was a sting operation. We have always admired the honesty.
For a film about manufactured evidence, its afterlife has been fittingly cruel. The last known print burned in the MGM vault fire of 1965, and no other copy has ever surfaced. What survives is the paperwork: production stills, a novelization, Browning's own 1935 sound remake Mark of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi, and a theatrical poster that sold in 2014 to Metallica's Kirk Hammett for nearly half a million dollars. In 2002, Turner Classic Movies commissioned Rick Schmidlin to reassemble the film as a forty-five-minute reconstruction built entirely from surviving photographs: a movie reduced to its own crime-scene photography, then exhibited as such.
