The First Feature-Length Vampire Film
It’s back, the original screen bloodsucker, out of its cinematic grave.
The first feature-length vampire film was not F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). A newly-unearthed discovery makes clear that it was The Afterlife Wanderer, produced in Russia in 1915 and starring Olga Baclanova, who would go on to appear in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932).
Silent vampire films continue to excite modern horror buffs. Nosferatu recently celebrated its hundredth birthday, and it continues to sharpen its teeth. Robert Eggers’ remake is coming soon to a movie theater near us in 2024.
There were other silent vampire films, of course. Though no print is known to exist, London After Midnight (1927) with Lon Chaney fascinates many a horror buff. NECA will soon release a new action figure of that movie’s vampire, coming on the heels of the same company’s Nosferatu action figure.
London After Midnight didn’t feature a real vampire, but instead a detective disguised as the undead, hardly competition for Nosferatu’s Count Orlok, as portrayed by Max Schreck in 1922, and then by Willem Dafoe in Elias Merhige’s unforgettable Shadow of the Vampire in 2000.
In Murnau’s film, Orlok has no relatives. But what about the film Nosferatu? Does it have any relatives in the silent film era besides a masquerading detective? Which vampires flickered onscreen before 1922?
Not many. George Melies’ The Devil’s Castle (1896) is sometimes cited as the first vampire movie, but that’s a modern misreading of it. The title character undergoes a bat-to-man transformation and shrinks from the cross, but neither action makes him a vampire.
He is a devil, (im)pure and simple. The ability to fly and the inability to face the cross had factored into numerous earlier devil stories and legends. Even his costume, with its feather horn, make clear he is a devil, drawing on nineteenth-century stage and opera adaptations of Faust.
A few other films more likely qualify as early vampire flicks, from Pathe’s Loie Fuller (1905), produced in France, and Nordisk’s The Vampire Dancer (1912), produced in Denmark, to Lilith and Ly (1919), produced in Austria with a script written by no less than Fritz Lang, director of Metropolis (1927).
More fascinating was Dracula’s Death (1921), a Hungarian feature that brought Bram Stoker’s character to the screen for the first time. But that lost film is akin to London After Midnight, at least in that it doesn’t feature a real vampire, just a madman who thinks he’s Dracula.
All of which brings us to The Afterlife Wanderer, released in Russia in 1915 as Zagrobnaia skitalitsa. Directed by Viacheslav Turzhanskii, the film’s publicity touted it as Russia’s “first occult drama.”
One review described The Afterlife Wanderer’s title character as a “vampire who sucks the blood of the living people at night.” Another called her a “vampire woman sucking blood from loved ones.” No doubt about it: she was a real vampire and a reel vampire.
In the film, Olga Baclanova plays Vera, a young lady who commits suicide. Her spirit “merges” with the soul and body of another woman, allowing Vera to remain on earth.
A critic in 1915 struggled to explain the paradox that is being undead: “she is a vampire because … the girl died, that is, she did not die, but she was born once again.”
Alas, the new Vera suffers from a blood disease. Doctors fail to cure her. As a plot synopsis indicated, “She can only restore her strength by sucking the blood of people who surround her.”
Vera’s husband discovers the truth after a spiritualist summons forth a ghost. He reveals all. Another synopsis added, “A vampire who drank human blood must die.” Vera is destroyed not by a stake or garlic or cruficix, but instead by an “Afterlife Judge.”
How scary was The Afterlife Wanderer? After watching it, a noted Russian film publication wrote, “The audience does not understand much, shrugs their shoulders in bewilderment and does not experience the slightest horror, despite the appearance of the coffin, ghosts, and other fearful things.”
Yet another complained, “Whoever wrote a screenplay like The Afterlife Wanderer should burn with shame all his life.”
The same article described Baclanova, claiming, “We must do justice to the actress who played the vampire woman. She undoubtedly studied her bloodthirsty expressions and voluptuous gestures at the zoo, watching tigers and leopards while they were eating raw meat.” Rather than praising Baclanova, that critic was probably being sarcastic.
All that said, the mayor of Petrograd banned The Afterlife Wanderer. As so often happens with horror in the cinema, some viewers might have disdain for stories that others appreciate. Some laugh; others shudder.
After 1915, The Afterlife Wanderer wandered into the land of the lost, where it has languished unknown for over a century.
Undertaking research for my forthcoming book Vampires in Silent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, January 2024), I rediscovered this landmark film for English-speaking audiences in 2022 thanks to Anna Kovalova, a tremendous scholar of Russian silent cinema. Full details appear in my book.
Regrettably, no print of The Afterlife Wanderer seems to exist. But five tantalizing images do. The most fascinating shows Baclanova in her coffin, its lid apparently lifting (or closing, as the case may be) thanks to an unseen supernatural force, not unlike Orlok’s seven years later in Nosferatu.
While it would be coincidence rather than direct influence, other elements of The Afterlife Wanderer have reincarnated in subsequent films, from Vera’s apparent sadness that she is a vampire (something seen in Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter in 1936) to Vera’s soul merging into another body (like the ending of Michael Almereyda’s Nadja in 1994).
Most importantly, The Afterlife Wanderer marks the first vampire feature in global film history. And, depending on how we view a few earlier shorts, it may well mark the first time a supernatural vampire appeared on any silver screen.
In Shadow of the Vampire, Albin Grau (Udo Kier) suggests that the lonely Count Orlok should make more vampires. Turns out, someone else already had.
For that, we should now raise our glasses and make a toast, quaffing a cup to the dead already. Whatever you’re drinking, though, be sure and save the blood for Baclanova.
