CINEMA MADE THE undead immortal. You hope they appreciate the irony: sunlight reduces vampires to dust but projector light has kept them alive for generations of moviegoers. While John Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyre popularised the idea of the blood-thirsting revenant, it’s film rather than literature that has fed our fascination with these creatures. And it’s film that has evolved and embellished their myth for over a century now. In fact 1922’s Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie Des Grauens (A Symphony Of Horror) marks the first time a vampire is destroyed by the power of light, a wrinkle entirely absent from traditional folklore.
is a landmark but it’s not the first vampire film. So what is? Hard to say. The dawn of filmmaking is notoriously tricky to map. No prints survive of 1916’s (), a German movie believed to depict a “vampire-like” antagonist – though others claim it was a killer in an ape-suit. Nothing remains of the Russian from 1920, not even production stills, leading some to wonder if it ever existed in the first place. Hungary’s () is also lost. An unauthorised take on Bram Stoker’s book, it reportedly abandoned the original plot to focus on the inmate of an insane asylum who claims to be the
