The auteur theory was made for movies like Mark of the Vampire. Taken as itself, it’s a mediocre horror movie with a few effective moments. But seen as entry into its director’s larger body of work, it gets really interesting.
The movie is a sound remake of Browning’s 1927 hit London After Midnight, perhaps the most famous of all lost films. It’s considered by most to be the first American vampire film and featured a brilliant makeup job by Lon Chaney, Sr., which can still be seen in stills. It’s obviously impossible to make any real comparison as the quality between the two films, but the basic plot of the original maintained.
Another Browning film we do have left to compare is his 1931 masterpiece Dracula, which also stars Bela Lugosi as a vampire (here he’s called Count Mora and has a vampire daughter named Luna, played by Carroll Borland). David J. Skal and others have argued that Browning was disinterested in the Dracula project, and some have speculated by the real auteur may have been cinematographer Karl Fruend, who would go on to direct another masterpiece with a similar style and tone, The Mummy. I found this theory plausible but after watching Mark of the Vampire I am not so sure that Browning had as little to as Skal claimed, as there many elements of the movie that are taken directly from Dracula, right down the appearance of the female lead, Elizabeth Allen, who not only bears a striking resemblance to Helen Chandler, but has her costumes and hairstyle duplicated exactly. There is also a Van Helsing like vampire hunter named Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore), a sequence where Count Mora rises from his coffin that’s very, very similar to Dracula’s entrance, and film’s comic relief has the exact same brand of humor, as all of Browning’s other films.
Where Mark of the Vampire and Dracula differ is in tone and quality- the former film is essentially a mystery with a heavy emphasis on plot on rationality, the latter simulates the feeling of a dream more than any film I ever seen. One is literal, the other is mythic. Frankly, one is shallow, the other deep.
Most viewers will probably feel that the London After Midnight elements (except perhaps for the amazing surprise ending) are the movie’s weakest. Set in Czechoslovakia (what was wrong with Prauge After Midnight?), the movie follows Zelen and Inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill) as they investigate the murder of Sir Karell Borotyn (Holmes Herbert), who was found with two bite marks on his throat. Neumann believes vampires are ridiculous, but Zelen argues that he sure they are to blame, and that Count Mora and Luna are stalking Karrell’s daughter Irene (Allen).
The machinations of the mystery are pretty boring, but the film lights up whenever Mora and Luna are on screen, there are some real scenes of great gothic atmosphere. But then the movie gets too caught up in endless discussions of clues, motives, and other plot points, and after those elements take over, the movie gets boring. But if you do see this picture, be sure you stay to the end, where’s you’re going to be amazed.
Mark of the Vampire (1935)