Main Cast: Jean Aymé, Marcel Lévesque, Musidora, Stacia Napierkowska
Release Year: 1915
Country: FR
Run Time: 420 minutes
Plot
Louis Feuillade's pioneering silent serial -- whose ten episodes weigh in at nearly eight hours -- concerns Guèrande (Edouard Mathé), a journalist who is trying to uncover the truth about a mysterious society of anarchist gangsters who call themselves Les Vampires. While they don't drink the blood of the living, Les Vampires are the uncrowned monarchs of the criminal underworld, and as Guèrande struggles to learn the full extent of their lawless activities and the true identity of leaders the Grand Vampire (Jean Aymé) and Irma Vep (Juliet Musidora), he learns a tremendous amount about their intelligence, their cunning, and their treachery. A runaway hit in its initial release, which proved to be a major influence on the work of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, Les Vampires also inspired Olivier Assayas' revisionist look at the film's leading lady, Irma Vep. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
A seminal mood piece, this ten-part, seven-hour serial took the relatively innocent Perils of Pauline-style film popularized by Hollywood and gave it a grim, dark twist. Though the title may seem strange -- the protagonists aren't literally vampires and the film is not an exercise in horror -- it actually fits writer/director Louis Feuillade's themes very well. The criminal underclass controlling the story's action is metaphorically sucking the lifeblood out of the Parisian bourgeoisie, and the creative and bizarre methods they use to commit their crimes make for great fun, combining lurid pulp-fiction melodrama, exciting action sequences, and high camp. Rediscovered by French New Wave directors, surrealists, and theorists such as Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, Luis Buñuel, and André Breton, Les Vampires has enjoyed a steadily improving reputation among film buffs thanks to its irrepressible energy, erotic subtext (Musidora has a remarkable, arresting physical presence as the mysterious Grand Vampire Irma Vep), and irredeemably evil protagonists. Feuillade creates a world where logic seems suspended (apparently dead characters pop back up in the story, for example, and time passes at an irregular pace), and his use of colored gels (blue for outdoor scenes, yellow for lamplight, purple for nighttime) heightens the film's sense of "otherness." This atmosphere reflects the sense of dread and uncertainty that permeated Europe at the time of the film's creation, when the continent headed off into a war of massive proportions and unbelievable devastation. ~ Dan Jardine, All Movie Guide
Les Vampires (1915) is a 10-part silent filmserial. It was written and directed by Louis Feuillade and stars Musidora as "Irma Vep" a femme fatale whose name is a suspicious anagram of "vampire." The serial is set in Paris, France and follows the exploits of a gang of master criminals who call themselves "Les Vampires."
There are 10 episodes, averaging around 40 minutes each, totalling about 6 and a half hours.
Olivier Assayas 1996 movie Irma Vep, with a story line of a director's attempt to remake Les Vampires, is both an homage to the innovative nature of the original film and a critique of the then current state of French cinema.
La tête coupée (The Severed Head) 33 min. Released on 13 November 1915.
La bague qui tue (The Killer Ring) 15 min. Released on 13 November 1915.
Le cryptogramme rouge (The Red Cypher) 42 min. Released on 4 December 1915.
Le spectre (The Ghost) 32 min. Released on 7 January 1916.
L'évassion du mort (The Escaping Dead Man) 37 min. Released on 28 January 1916.
Les yeux qui fascinent (The Hypnotic Gaze) 58 min. Released on 24 March 1916.
Satanas (Satanas) 46 min. Released on 15 April 1916.
Le maître de la foundre (The Thunder Lord) 55 min. Released on 12 May 1916.
L'homme des poisons (The Poisoner) 53 min. Released on 2 June 1916.
Les noces sanglantes (Bloody Wedding) 60 min. Released on 30 June 1916
Release
In November 1915, the walls of Paris were plastered with street posters that depicted three masked faces with a question mark as a noose, and the questions "who, what, when, where?". The morning newspapers printed the following poem:
Of the moonless nights they are kings,
darkness is their kingdom.
Carrying death and sowing terror
the dark Vampires fly,
with great suede wings,
ready not only to do evil... but to do even worse[1]
The film is distributed in the United States in the DVD format by Image Entertainment on two disks. In France, Gaumont has released a special restored edition in 4 disks. Artificial Eye in the UK has used this restoration for their release on three disks, which includes several Feuillade shorts.
