‘London After Midnight’: the most sought-after lost movie in cinema history
Although a true estimate is impossible to settle upon precisely because they’ve been lost, it can’t be argued that huge swathes of cinema history have disappeared into the ether of time, with advances in technology at least ensuring that modern movies are guaranteed to survive in one form or another.
The use of highly flammable nitrate film until the 1950s was a substantial contributing factor, with several infamous fires having broken out in both the United Kingdom and the United States to erase innumerable reels from existence with no hope of retrieving or restoring them.
Sometimes, unsuccessful or unwanted prints were salvaged for parts, while remaking a production would simply cause the studio to destroy the previous version. Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation paints a stark picture of just how much history has been washed away, illuminating the sheer volume of films that will never be seen again.
The organisation’s research determined that “half of all American movies made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever”, with London After Midnight one of the most famous examples. Alongside Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle, the 1927 murder mystery with a supernatural slant ranks among the most mythical of lost films.
Directed by Tod Browning – who would go on to helm the seminal 1931 iteration of Dracula and the controversial Freaks – London After Midnight starred Lon Chaney in dual roles as both a Scotland Yard investigator and a sinister entity with sharp teeth and a very big hat. The actor was already a star at that point after headlining The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera in the years beforehand, so it’s easy to see why ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces‘ working with a filmmaker like Browning would cultivate such an intense mythology.
Adding to the legend of London After Midnight was the murder charge where the defendant claimed to have been haunted by visions of Chaney’s monstrous creature, with the additional infamy only serving to make the 1927 silent mystery thriller even more of a curiosity.
A precursor of sorts to Browning’s forays into horror, Chaney’s Burke declares the death of Roger Balfour a suicide before strange goings-on begin to unfold in the dead man’s mansion five years later. It was a success at the time of its release after earning over a million dollars at the box office, but the director wasn’t entirely satisfied with the end result.
Before London After Midnight had even been lost, Browning remade it as 1935’s Mark of the Vampire with his Dracula colleague Bela Lugosi, and it would be another three decades before it was confirmed destroyed following the MGM vault fire of 1965 that caused one fatality and reduced hundreds upon hundreds of films to nothing more than flickering embers.
Recreations have been made using the surviving still images, but London After Midnight no longer exists as a feature, even if the folklore surrounding it remains intact.
