Length: 440 minutes
Director: Louis Feuillade
Cast: Musidora, Edouard Mathe, Marcel Levesque, Jean Ayme, Fernand Hermann, Stacia Napierkowska
Eric's Impressions: When I first saw the length of this movie I wanted to have my blood sucked out by a vampire. When I found out it was broken down into episodes in a serial format I was glad I didn't put a stake into my heart. If you like vampire movies, there are plenty of them all over this list, including my favorite, "Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror," which we'll talk about soon. As for "Les Vampires" - it was at times hilarious, at times surreal and at other times a little scary. Though the "good guys" have their moments, especially the Chaplinesque sidekick Mazamette, you will most remember head vampire Irma Vep (played by Musidora) as she lights up the screen. The final massacre of the vampires definitely influenced the Robert Rodriguez-directed and Quentin Tarantino-produced, "From Dusk Till Dawn." In a series of firsts at the beginning of this blog, "Les Vampires" is the most influential of the thriller genre.
Natalie's Impressions: I was surprised by this film. I expected it to be like a lot of other silent films where, without dialogue, the story doesn't move fast enough to hold my interest. But with a film like this, where the melodramatic story is being told in 15 or 30 minutes, the pace moves along and there isn't much reel time that occurs without the development of some major plot point. I found some of the individual stories so dramatic to the point of being funny. For the time period, this was a pretty innovative film, however I don't think it was necessary to take seven hours to complete the story.
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Hmm, strange... It says this film is 440 minutes long here, but the back of my DVD set says it's 339 minutes long. Am I really missing out on more than an hour of this film?
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