After the enormous success of Dracula (1931), director Tod Browning was inclined to return to the vampire film. But making another vampire picture was no simple matter. Universal Studios owned the rights to the Dracula franchise and Browning had since left Universal for MGM. He maneuvered around this obstacle by remaking a vampire chiller he had shot in 1927: London After Midnight. Rather than depict the ghoul as he had in the silent movie (as a wide-eyed, razor-toothed hunched-over fiend in a tall beaver hat), he recruited Bela Lugosi and had him play the role in full Dracula regalia.

More whodunit than horror film, Mark of the Vampire (1935) belongs to the "Old Dark House" genre, in which a dilapidated manor hosts an array of seemingly supernatural threats. In keeping with the ODH formula, a beautiful maiden (Elizabeth Allan) is the target of the unnatural goings-on, and a clever detective (Lionel Barrymore) must root out the criminal culprit behind the hauntings. Intending to one-up his own definitive vampire film, Browning loaded Mark of the Vampire with horror movie iconography: hypnotic trances, flapping bats, spooky graveyards, moaning organs, cobwebs thick as curtains -- and bound it all together with bits of obscure Eastern European folklore about the proper care and destruction of the undead. But the film's crowning achievement is the elaborately twisted ending that Browning springs on the viewer like a diabolical jack-in-the-box.

Producer: E.J. Mannix
Director: Tod Browning
Screenplay: Guy Endore, Bernard Schubert
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons
Cinematography: James Wong Howe
Costume Design: Adrian
Film Editing: Ben Lewis
Original Music: Herbert Stothart, Edward Ward
Cast: Lionel Barrymore (Prof. Zelen), Bela Lugosi (Count Mora), Elizabeth Allan (Irena Borotyn), Lionel Atwill (Inspector Neumann), Carroll Borland (Luna Mora), Jean Hersholt (Baron Otto von Zinden), Donald Meek (Dr. Doskil), Henry Wadsworth (Fedor Vincente).
BW-61m. Closed captioning.

by Bret Wood