I’ve recently been watching a number of films by the great Georges Franju (best known for 1960s ‘Yeux Sans Visage’ / ‘Eyes Without a Face’). Reviews coming soon, hopefully.
On several occasions in his career, Franju teamed up with the writer Jacques Champroux, grandson of famed silent era director Louis Feuillade, to make films loosely inspired by the spirit of Fantomas, the diabolical criminal mastermind who hopefully needs no introduction as one of the most popular and influential characters in French popular culture.
Although Fantomas was the creation of writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Louis Feuillade can arguably take just as much credit for cementing him in the popular imagination via his series of silent adventure serials, produced during 1913-14, at the same time as Allain & Souvestre were publishing their stories.
So, as useful background to Franju’s films, just out of general interest, and also as a primer to the as-yet-unread volume of Fantomas stories on my bookshelf, I thought I’d check some of Feuillade’s films out.
Sadly, very little footage from the Fantomas serials is available on Youtube (perhaps as a result of the same copyright issues that prevented Franju & Champroux from using the character directly in their films), but this brief clip can at least serve to reassure us that they were pretty bad-ass:
An unexpected delight that my Youtube searches did show up though is some significant chunks of Feuillide’s subsequent serial, Les Vampires (1915-16). Need I say more?
Actually, I probably had best say more. From what I can gather, Les Vampires does not actually feature any vampires, but, confusingly, it does prominently feature the eerie, expressionistic beauty of its heroine Irma Vep (portrayed by one Musidora, who sounds like a pretty fascinating woman in her own right), who plays a vampire at the theatre, and who becomes the main antagonist of a gang of Fantomas-like masked criminals called ‘Les Vampires’.
Filmed in the overly theatrical manner common to their period, with a stationary camera and few close-ups, Fuillade’s serials are clearly not in the same order of formal innovation as other early vampiric classics such as Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ or Carl Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’, but nonentheless, they are hugely enjoyable, relatively fast-paced little capers for their era, and their exquisite production design and solemn, gothic beauty is remarkable.
Whilst these films might not have had quite the same impact on the world as Fantomas, it seems inconceivable that many subsequent champions of the fantastique in France, my man Jean Rollin foremost amongst them, didn’t take at least SOME inspiration from ‘Les Vampires’.
Episode 2: “The Ring That Kills”:
According to Wikipedia, the publicity campaign for ‘Les Vampires’ saw this mysterious poster pasted around Paris…
…whilst the next day’s newspapers carried the following verse:
Of the moonless nights they are kings,
darkness is their kingdom.
Carrying death and sowing terror
the dark Vampires fly,
with great suede wings,
ready not only to do evil... but to do even worse
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: God bless the French.
The entirety of “Les Vampires” first episode (entitled “The Severed Head”) can be seen split across four youtube videos, beginning here. Sadly, sound & picture quality is pretty low:
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