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Tod Browning's silent movie horror film, London After Midnight (1927) starring Lon Chaney, Marceline Day, Conrad Nagel, Henry B. Walthall, and Polly Moran, has intrigued silent movie fans for decades. Now considered a lost film, surviving production stills, a Photoplay Edition novel, scripts, and other memorabilia give some feel for the actual film, but their varying plot gaps, anomalies, and inconsistencies leave viewers wondering how the actual film unfolded . . . until now.
Author Thomas Mann offers a fascinating reconstruction based on his transcription of a rediscovered 11,000-word fictionization first published in Boy's Cinema (1928) that may resolve the conflicts between previous versions. His detailed comparison of all surviving sources sheds new light on the discovery of a second murder victim, a plot element not in the final film; Lon Chaney's two different makeups in playing detective Edward C. Burke; Henry Walthall as Sir James Hamlin holding two guns rather than one in the scene in which his character, under hypnosis, re-enacts a crime.
The last known film print is believed to have been destroyed in a 1967 MGM vault fire, but you can now take a front row seat into the haunted mansion filled with vampires, cobwebs, bats, and "The Man of a Thousand Faces."
About the author: Thomas Mann is an independent scholar living in Washington, DC. He spent more than three decades as a general reference librarian at the Library of Congress. He is the author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research (Oxford University Press, 2015) and of Horror & Mystery Photoplay Editions and Magazine Fictionizations (McFarland, 2004; vol. II, BearManor Media, 2016).
About the author
German novelist, short story author, social commentator, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Paul Thomas Mann lived from 6 June 1875 to 12 August 1955. His sardonic and highly symbolic epic novels and novellas are renowned for their understanding of the minds of artists and intellectuals. He incorporated modernized versions of German and Biblical tales, as well as concepts from Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his analysis and critique of the European and German spirit. In his first book, Buddenbrooks, Mann-a member of the Hanseatic Mann family-depicted his clan and social status. Three of Heinrich Mann's six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann, and Golo Mann, all went on to become well-known German writers, as did his older brother Heinrich Mann, a radical writer. Mann escaped to Switzerland in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took office. He relocated to the United States in 1939 when World War II began, then went back to Switzerland in 1952. One of the most well-known authors of the so-called Exilliteratur, German writing produced in exile by individuals opposed to the Hitler government, is Mann.
