The first vampire films in America

Gary D Rhodes

doi:10.1057/s41599-017-0043-y

Abstract

Horror film scholarship has generally suggested that the supernatural vampire either did not appear onscreen during the early cinema period, or that it appeared only once, in Georges Méliès’ Le manoir du diable/The Devil’s Castle (1896). By making rigorous use of archival materials, this essay tests those assumptions and determines them to be incorrect, while at the same time acknowledging the ambiguity of vampires and early cinema, both being prone to misreadings and misunderstandings. Between 1895 and 1915, moving pictures underwent major evolutions that transformed their narrative codes of intelligibility. During the same years, the subject of vampirism also experienced great change, with the supernatural characters of folklore largely dislocated by the non-supernatural “vamps” of popular culture. In an effort to reconcile the onscreen ambiguities, this paper adopts a New Film History methodology to examine four early films distributed in America, showing how characters in two of them—Le manoir du diable and La légende du fantôme/Legend of a Ghost (Pathé Frères, 1908) have in different eras been mistakenly read as supernatural vampires, as well as how a third—The Vampire, a little-known chapter of the serial The Exploits of Elaine (Pathé, 1915)—invoked supernatural vampirism, but only as a metaphor. The paper concludes by analyzing Loïe Fuller (Pathé Frères, 1905), the only film of the era that seems to have depicted a supernatural vampire. Revising the early history of vampires onscreen brings renewed focus to the intrinsic similarities between the supernatural creatures and the cinema.

Highlights

Horror film scholarship has generally suggested that the supernatural vampire either did not appear onscreen during the early cinema period, or that it appeared only once, in Georges Méliès’ Le manoir du diable/The Devil’s Castle (1896)
A stark and phantom-like train appears onscreen behind the Count; Coppola created these images for his film, inspired by such films as L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat/Arrival of a Train at the Station (Lumière, 1895) and The Ghost Train (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1901) (Cordell, 2013, p 1)
Consider Stacey Abbott’s monograph Celluloid Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern World (2007), in which she writes the “vampire was absent from the early days of cinema” (p 44), after having already announced, “French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès brought forth the first celluloid vampire in his [1896] film Le manoir du diable” (1), but prior to describing the character in that same film as a “satanic figure” (p 50). It is not the apparent contradiction in these comments that is important, but instead the reasons for the confusion that exist in the archive and in the scholarship. Nowhere are these issues more pronounced than in four moving pictures produced between 1896 and 1915, all of them screened in the United States: Le manoir du diable/The Devil’s Castle (Georges Méliès, 1896), which modern critics have sometimes mistaken as a supernatural vampire film; La légende du fantôme/Legend of a Ghost (Pathé Frères, 1908, aka The Black Pearl), which one American critic in 1908 mistook as featuring a supernatural vampire; The Vampire, episode six of the serial The Exploits of Elaine (Pathé, 1915), which invoked supernatural vampirism, but only to deploy it as a metaphor; and Loïe Fuller (Pathé Frères, 1905), which featured what might well have been intended to be a supernatural vampire

Summary

Introduction

Horror film scholarship has generally suggested that the supernatural vampire either did not appear onscreen during the early cinema period, or that it appeared only once, in Georges Méliès’ Le manoir du diable/The Devil’s Castle (1896). Coppola links vampirism and the cinema, in part because Stoker’s novel was published in 1897, at roughly the same time that public film projections became common.

Results

Conclusion