Dracula and the Mark of the Vampire

There is an interesting relationship between these two movies, Dracula (1931) and the Mark of the Vampire (1935). At first glance, I thought Mark of the Vampire was a direct sequel of Dracula, done only a few years before, because it has the same director Tod Browning, and the same actor playing a vampire, Bela Lugosi. But it’s not.

Dracula is a product from Universal Pictures and Mark of the Vampire is from MGM Studios. With the success of Dracula and the other Universal Monsters films, the other studios were trying to crack into that magic, and so MGM hired the director and star of that movie in what appears to be another vampire movie. The director was being sneaky though and decided to give them a remake of one of his previous films, called London After Midnight.

London After Midnight is a famous “Lost Film”- actually THE most famous “Lost Film” probably. It was a silent horror film starring Lon Chaney, the Man With a Thousand Faces in one of his most incredible transformations as a vampire-like character Man in the Beaver Hat. In the remake, Mark of the Vampire, Tod Browning recruited Bela Lugosi to replace the Man in the Beaver Hat. Replacing one of the most famous horror characters with a more famous one. And I’m sure that MGM loved the vampire angle and renamed the movie with Vampire in the title.

So, the studio took the route of marketing the film as a straight horror film to give people the impression that Dracula was back. If you watch the film, you’ll notice it is much more of a mystery than a horror film, but you really can’t tell looking at all the posters and stills for the film. I was shocked to find out it wasn’t a Universal Monster movie as that’s exactly what it looks like. The marketing seemed to work, at least on the onset as the film did well, but not quite a blockbuster. It ended up earning a profit of $54,000 at the time.

It’s interesting to add, Universal seemed to have taken notice, as the very next year they came out with the official sequel to Dracula called Dracula’s Daughter. It also did OK at the box office but was not a breakout hit, as it didn’t have the original director Tod Browning or the original Dracula, Bela Lugosi, although they did show a brief shot of Dracula’s body in his coffin and they used a dummy that looked a lot like him.

Now the really interesting part of all this is that Mark of the Vampire, wasn’t a real vampire movie. It was a murder mystery where the detective hires a bunch of actors to pretend to be real vampires in order to root out the real murderer in the house. So, Bela Lugosi wasn’t playing a vampire like he wanted to, he was playing an actor, playing a vampire. By all accounts, Ted Browning didn’t even tell the cast of the final twist until the end of the film shoot, because he wanted them to have convincing characters. Bela was upset and begged Ted to change the ending but he refused.

Bela Lugosi did however get to play a vampire again 7 years later in The Return of the Vampire and Dracula again after that in a wonderful comedy called Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Bela Lugosi performed along with Lon Chaney Jr as the Wolf Man, his most famous horror character. He is, of course, the son of Lon Chaney, who Bela replaced in the London After Midnight remake. It all comes full circle.