I’m not supposed to like Tod Browning’s MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), much less love it, but I do.  Love it, I mean… and what’s not to love?  For the price of admission you get Bela DRACULA Lugosi, Lionel DOCTOR X Atwill, big-ass bats, poorly landscaped graveyards, moldy family crypts, lanterns glowing in the fog, superstitious gypsies, frightened villagers, comical servants, wolfsbane, an armadillo and the movie character who just might have been the inspiration for Mortitia Addams, Vampira and Elvira.  All that jazz in just 60 minutes… it’s like Instant Halloween, add yourself and mix!

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had turned its hand to some horror (Browning’s controversial FREAKS) and horror-inflected pictures (THE MASK OF FU MANCHU with Boris Karloff) in 1932 but generally speaking the studio considered itself too refined for such gutbucket fare.  Nevertheless, with Universal raking in the lucre with its sundry follow-ups to DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN (both 1931), the temptation to copycat was clearly too strong for MGM to resist.  The story of how MARK OF THE VAMPIRE came to be differs slightly from teller to teller.  In The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), biographer Arthur Lenning alleges that it was MGM head of production Irving G. Thalberg (who had got his start at Universal and oversaw production of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, starring Lon Chaney) who gave the project the green light while David J. Skal and Elias Savada maintain, in Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre (Anchor Books, 1995), that Browning pitched the idea to studio vice president Eddie Mannix after Thalberg had been sidelined by a heart attack.  Whoever made the first move, the consensus among historians is that Browning was down on his luck by this point in his career and agreed to cobble together Metro a winner from the best parts of his biggest hits – the silent LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927), also starring Lon Chaney, and DRACULA – and that he would do the job for half of his old salary… $25,000.  Whoever was at the Metro helm at this point obviously played the percentages and gave the production, then called THE VAMPIRES OF PRAGUE, the thumbs up.

With Lon Chaney dead and buried since 1930, Browning called upon Bela Lugosi, then just beginning his run of films with Boris Karloff at Universal.  THE BLACK CAT (1934) had been the first offering to showcase the rivals for the title of the King of Horror and the pair were destined to re-team later in 1935 in THE RAVEN.   Although he was criminally underpaid for his work, Lugosi was living well at this juncture, calling home a mansion in the Hollywood hills, just below the Hollywoodland sign, where he enjoyed entertaining his countrymen.  His work in MARK OF THE VAMPIRE is bracketed by stints in Poverty Row features made at Monogram and Imperial.  MARK OF THE VAMPIRE cost a tick over $300,000 while Lugosi’s next film, MURDER BY TELEVISION, would be made for only $30,000.  Billed third here and given a piddling amount of screen time (and speaking no dialogue until the final 30 seconds of the film), Lugosi supports a cast proud in Lionel Barrymore (name above the title), Jean Hersholt and Lionel Atwill but the one to talk about, especially now, is newcomer Carroll Borland.  The Berkley, California native had developed a personal friendship with Lugosi after seeing him in a stage production of Dracula in 1929.  By her own account, Borland wrote a sequel that she called Countess Dracula and managed to get it to Lugosi, who expressed interest in seeing it made as a feature film.  That never happened but Borland did get (again, by her own account) to appear with the actor in a touring company of Dracula.  When she read in the trades in 1934 that MGM was auditioning women to play vampires in THE VAMPIRES OF PRAGUE, she tested and, against Lugosi’s advice (“You’ll just be haunting houses for the rest of your life”) accepted the role of Luna, proto Goth chick daughter of Lugosi’s undead (and bullet ridden) Count Mora.

Carroll Borland would not appear in another substantial film role for nearly 50 years – the less said about her work in Fred Olen Ray’s SCALPS (1983) the better – but she brings tremendous value to MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, as the production came to be called at some point along the way.  Shot by James Wong Howe (just five years away from his first Academy Award for Cinematography) in make-up by William Tuttle (while THE TIME MACHINE‘s Morlock-maker was but a lowly assistant) and a gown designed by Adrian (who later costumed the Munchkins in THE WIZARD OF OZ and gave Joan Crawford her shoulder pads), Borland is supremely eerie as she glides across the fog shrouded sets, gazing hypnotically into the camera and preparing to put the bite on leading lady Elizabeth Allan.  Luna is the original Cool Ghoul and in a perfect world she would have hosted her own 1950s horror movie show.  The original writer on the project, Guy Endore, was a New York-born (as Samuel Goldstein), Austria-raised, Columbia University-educated intellectual/Communist who had studied the writings of Sigmund Freud and concocted a lurid backstory for Count Mora and Luna, positing that they had in life been engaged in an incestuous relationship which ended with Mora killed his daughter and took his own life.  Incest, and not the vampire’s kiss, is what made the Moras undead.  (Endore also wrote the novel The Werewolf of Paris, which Hammer adapted very liberally as CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF.)  Not surprisingly, the suits at Metro balked at this notion and all references to incest were stricken from subsequent rewrites by other scribes… yet Mora’s telltale head wound survives in the finished film, which was itself cut down from 72 minutes to a tick over an hour before its May 1935 premiere.

Lugosi and Borland punctuate MARK OF THE VAMPIRE more than dominate it but their aura is felt in every frame.  Critics have criticized star Lionel Barrymore’s central performance as (it would seem) a Van Helsing like vampire slayer trying to put paid to a series of attacks in the Czechoslovakian hinterlands but I love the zest he brings to the role and the way he trills those Rs.  It’s great to see Lionel Atwilll, too, in a non-villainous role, dragging timorous Jean Hersholt through the local bone orchard in pursuit of the Moras.  There’s a fun bit at the top of the show as an old beggar woman soldiers through the cemetery, picking weeds and whatnot for her tinctures and poultices; a leather-winged bat flaps through the frame and she freaks, tear-assing in the opposite direction.  When the hem of her skirt catches on a gravedigger’s rake, she assumes the living dead have grabbed hold of her.  This is a variation on the old Leonard Q. Ross story “The Path Through the Cemetery,” in which a timid young man tries to prove his mettle by crossing a fearful patch of cemetery after dark… and by promising to plant his sword in the middle of the burial ground as proof he’s been there.  In a panic, Ivan runs his saber through the tail of his own greatcoat and, thinking he is being pulled into the grave, dies of a heart attack.  No less than Lee Marvin danced through these steps in a western setting in the 1961 TWILIGHT ZONE episode “The Grave.”  The spin on the material provides an atmospheric goose and a good laugh at the top of THE MARK OF THE VAMPIRE but also betrays an essential facetiousness that has turned people away from the film over the course of the past 75 years.

I’ll say no more about the plot of MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, which has been dividing the room since before most of us were born.  I just think it’s perfect Halloween viewing, it’s good unclean fun… morbid, creepy, packed with great actors and so short at 60 minutes and 27 seconds that you can easily watch two other movies in the same setting. 

MARK OF THE VAMPIRE can be seen on Turner Classic Movies at 7:45 am (yeah, I know) Halloween Day.  That’s Eastern Standard Time, so if you live on the west coast just stay up all damn night on the 30th.