“London After Midnight” Lost, Now Found?

(via AICN) This is an interesting story and one that I hope is true. It broke, more or less, on the Horror Drunx website today, in a post by “Sid Terror” and tells the hugely-detailed and highly entertaining tale of his stumbling upon a print of this long-lost Tod Browning-Lon Chaney classic in a Hollywood vault back in the late 80’s, fully intact and in good condition.

What happens after this and why isn’t this restored film sitting on my DVD shelf right now? Well, I won’t spoil the rest of the story for you. The original post can be found here.

Basically, what Sid Terror is asking, is that the word now be gotten out that this film still exists, somewhere, and that the studio powers-that-be need to get their heads off their golf games for a few minutes and send an intern down to the vault to find it.

The 1927 film, which starred Lon Chaney, in one of his last, great roles, was directed by Tod Browning, who would later come to great acclaim with “Dracula” starring Bela Lugosi, and, of course, the notorious, “Freaks”. Browning remade “London After Midnight” as “Mark of the Vampire” (also with Lugosi) in 1935, which remains one of my favorite films. But “London After Midnight”, which was pulled from distribution shortly after “talkies” came in, has remained an elusive treasure to film buffs in the years since then. A series of stills is all that was previously thought to have remained of the classic (which, several years ago, was assembled into a 45-minute “Ken Burns version” broadcast on TCM). It’s through these stills, that many a time graced the pages for Forrest J Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland (and made the cover more than once), that rabid horror fans like myself came to know the film, and Chaney’s iconic vampire.

A great amount of suspicion has been thrown up in the wake of this story, namely due to the fact that Sid had the film in his hands, put it back on a shelf and walked away, only to mention it now, many, many years later. However, Harry, over at Ain’t It Cool News is sort of vouching for what Sid’s saying, and, I have to say, myself, reading the account, it does smack of the sincerity of both a classic film fan and a fellow Famous Monsters of Filmland addict.

I’m sure that the miniature readership of this blog won’t amount to much more than a hill of beans in the end, but, check out the story, and if there’s any way you can pass it on to someone “in the know”, please do so (and if this turns out to be yet another internet hoax, I’m gonna be soooo pissed).

Related posts:

1. Ben Chapman 1925-2008