by Jason Adams
1935's Mark of the Vampire reunited director Tod Browning with Bela Lugosi four years after they had you know some success with a little film called Dracula. In those four in-between years Browning made the infamously disturbing Freaks (still disturbing to this day!), which was censored and banned everywhere, totally derailing his career. Nobody wanted to work with him after Freaks. But he did eventually manage to round up financing for a remake of one of his most successful silent films...
Mark is a remake of Browning's London After Midnight from 1927 which starred Lon Chaney, which is now one of the most sought after of the "lost films" that there are. The remake isn't as remarked-upon as the original version, but then it doesn't have the fortune of forever being just out of reach -- I actually found Mark fairly successful if you take it as a satire and a deconstruction of the vampire genre and myths that Browning had just chiseled into place three years earlier, including a rug-pulling last act.
The story involves a murderer exploiting the superstitions of a rural community in order to misdirect suspicion -- he makes everybody think that vampires did the killing. Some of the detectives buy the story and some don't, and an elaborate plot is engineered (it involves hypnotism) in order to see where the truth lays. Caught in the middle of all this nonsense is the victim's daughter Irena, played by Elizabeth Allan.
Allan only started film-acting in 1931 but was having a big year around 1935, co-starring in George Cukor's films David Copperfield and Camille, as well as a second Dickens adaptation, of A Tale of Two Cities. She supposedly hated making Mark of the Vampire, calling it "slumming," but she's really very lovely in the film -- the most disturbing scene in the film comes at its midpoint, and involves all of the men involved in solving her father's murder coming together to coerce the deeply in-mourning Irena to reenact the night of her father's murder, against her will.
The film has moments of too broad comedy and one truly unsettling image of horror but this scene here really is something else, especially looking back at it from 2019 -- a pack of well-meaning men methodically cutting off a weeping woman's every defense, ignoring her pleas, and forcing her into her literal worst nightmare. And when her part to play in the charade comes it's cruelly brief -- you see they could probably have done this without her -- and immensely heart-breaking. The next time we see Irena she is barely able to support herself, a total wreck. She gets their answers, but at what cost to herself?