For a certain generation that grew up in Chicago, the sight of any representation of silent film star Lon Chaney dressed as the Vampire (also known as "The Man in the Beaver Hat") from the Tod Browning-directed 1927 movie London After Midnight is enough to make fear finger their ribs and squeeze none too gently.
The reason is simple, if somewhat ironic: TV station WGN (then local, now a cable powerhouse) used a line drawing of Chaney's Vampire as the "host" for horror-movie show, "Creature Features," even though the film was never shown on their weekly monster showcase because it was--and, sadly, still is--lost. (No print is known to exist, and the hopes of finding one diminish with each passing year.)
Still, the image of Chaney with bat-wing cloak spread and mouth filled of razor-edged fangs was potent enough to employ, divorced of relevant context, to do what the Chaney/Browning film no doubt did: Scare the daylights out of little kids, even though Chaney wasn't playing a "real" vampire, but a detective pretending to be a vampire in order to capture a murderer. (Roughly the same ploy was used in Browning's Mark of the Vampire (1935), with the part split in two--Lionel Barrymore played the detective, while Bela Lugosi played the fake vampire, a role he was not unfamiliar with.)
Perhaps it's a sign of my age, though, that no one at work recognized the figure on my desk as The Man in the Beaver Hat. One co-worker thought he was Mr. Hyde; another assumed him to be The Penguin from Batman Returns (a movie that makes multiple references, both overt and subtle, to silent horror cinema). No one knew him for what he was: an eight-year old's worst nightmare.
2 comments:
Pissed my pants.
That image always scares the hell out of me. I remember seeing that face glaring at me from our top-of-the-line 70s TV set, just before my mom would shoo me off to bed so that my older siblings could watch "Creature Features". Oddly, my banishment from being allowed to watch the spooky show lasted no more than a year. After that, I became a horror/sc-fi film fiend. Still, many years later, when I got my "London After Midnight" action figure, I was actually spooked by the damn thing for a while. Childhood fears die hard, if they ever die.
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