FAQ for
Mark of the Vampire (1935) More at IMDbPro »

The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. Spoiler tags have been used sparingly in order to make the page more readable.

Although London After Midnight (1927) is lost to time, the script and production stills still exist. These surviving artifacts allowed Rick Schmidlin to film a recreation of what the original silent movie may have looked like. (This 2002 production, also called London After Midnight, is available on DVD.) The two plots are nearly identical. The main difference is that Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) and Professor Zelin (Lionel Barrymore) in the remake are, in the original, a single character, Professor Edward Burke (Lon Chaney). The happiest difference is that the murdered nobleman is shot by his assailant, who makes no attempt to blame vampires. The vampire idea is all the Inspector's. In Mark of the Vampire the killer implausibly drains out his victim's blood and uses local superstition to divert suspicion from himself. It's unclear if London shares its remake's habit for creating false red herrings, such as the supernatural occurrences that can't be explained away, or the performances made by the hoaxers when no one is around to be hoaxed.

The author and critic Kim Newman thinks so; and he says as much on his DVD commentary track. We may imagine that an introductory scene was cut in post-production tampering; but no one knows.

It's rumored that the mark was a bullet wound Count Mora inflicted upon himself after strangling his daughter Luna (Carroll Borland), with whom he supposedly had an incestuous relationship. In truth, we don't know where the mark came from, and we don't know the exact nature of Luna's relationship with her father.

By a method known as fire cupping (or simply cupping). First, the rim of a drinking glass is heated with a candle. Then he was stabbed in the neck, and the rim of the glass was placed over the wound. According to Prof. Zelin, this created a powerful suction albeit certainly not enough to drain a whole body of blood this way.

No. We never learn why these actors playing vampires stalk around in character when no one is looking. We never learn how they are able to pull off seemingly supernatural tricks. We never learn why the hoaxers play out some of their phony scenes, even when the person they're trying to fool is nowhere around. We never learn why the whole vampire scheme--which the police inspector hilariously thought would be "simple"--was necessary when it seems that Prof. Zelin could have just hypnotized Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt), as he eventually does.