SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)

By: Holly Interlandi
August 16, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite unfinished masterworks, legendary obscurities and cherished almost-weres.

LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT

My first encounter with London After Midnight came in the form of a goth band. I was a teenager, in high school, and not aware of their namesake at the time. I did groove tirelessly to their creepy keyboard solos. (Salute to you, Sean Brennan: I’m listening to Psycho Magnet as I write this.)

When I learned that the band was actually named after a long-lost silent movie from 1927, I was perplexed. Even in the ’90s, the concept of a “lost film” went way over my head. Surely there couldn’t be NO copy anywhere? Didn’t they back up films in the old days like we do our hard drives?

Then, as teenagers do, I thought… meh. If it was lost it couldn’t have been that great anyway. I continued to groove, unbothered.

Serendipity occurred in the form of being hired by Famous Monsters of Filmland twelve years later. Forry Ackerman, our honorary editor, worshipped Lon Chaney and every film he’d ever starred in — and FM reconnected me to my goth roots through silent films: Murnau’s Nosferatu, Leni’s Man Who Laughs, Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Watching these films was like smoking clove cigarettes in black lace and walking down a dark city street.

I’m a little embarrassed that it took me a bit to understand just why London After Midnight, a vampire picture based on director Tod Browning’s story “The Hypnotist,” was so revered. Its signature image — a sinister, smiling Chaney with a mouth full of sharpened teeth and a top hat — is so iconic it’s inspired everyone from California goth bands to film director Jennifer Kent, who referenced the look for her own Babadook.

Now I get it. This was Lon Chaney, man of a thousand faces, who did his own effects makeup for horror icons like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera. He was horror fans’ first star. And a missing masterpiece released barely three years before Chaney died from throat cancer complications at a mere 47? No wonder it’s haunted us for decades. The last print was supposedly destroyed in an MGM studio vault fire in 1965. No one’s seen it since.

Forry’s FM used to include what he called “filmbooks”: narrative plots of movies alongside set photos that were designed to let kids “see” films they weren’t able to pop into a VCR and watch. The concept seems elementary and useless in the digital age. But given that no one can see London After Midnight anymore, going back to look at that filmbook from Issues 69 and 80 by someone who actually saw it is pretty fucking magical.

Of course, even if the film resurfaced now, there’s no way it could live up to its legacy (especially because Browning basically “remade” it as a 1935 talkie called Mark of the Vampire starring Bela Lugosi). Perhaps that’s the way it should be. London After Midnight exists only in our collective imaginations as a series of black and white set photographs featuring Chaney’s horrific visage, and that shared imagined movie has had more cultural impact than any halfassed Hollywood blockbuster.

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SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)

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