Les Vampires 1915

Les Vampires is a silent crime serial written and directed by Louis Feuillade for Gaumont, released in ten episodes between November 1915 and the summer of 1916. Despite the title, there are no supernatural creatures in it. The Vampires are a gang of Paris criminals with secret passwords, poisoned rings, hidden doors and a talent for disguise, and the hero is a journalist, Philippe Guérande, who tries to expose them with the help of a comic sidekick. The serial made a star of Musidora, who plays Irma Vep, the gang's chief agent, in a skin-tight black bodysuit. Critics disliked it at the time; wartime audiences loved it. Today it is regarded as Feuillade's masterpiece and an ancestor of the thriller, admired by the surrealists, by Fritz Lang and by Alfred Hitchcock.

The story

The serial opens with Philippe Guérande, a reporter for the newspaper Le Mondial, investigating the Vampires. A police inspector working on the case is found beheaded, and Guérande is drawn into a war with the gang that lasts ten episodes, with kidnappings, poisonings, robberies and murders. Each episode has its own title, from The Severed Head to The Bloody Wedding.

The gang's leader changes several times as one Grand Vampire is killed and another takes his place, including a rival master criminal and a sinister poisoner. Irma Vep is the constant. Her name is an anagram of "vampire", and she slips across the rooftops of Paris, changes identities and seduces or kills as needed.

Guérande's helper is Oscar Mazamette, played by Marcel Lévesque, a former member of the gang turned informer, who provides the comedy and often winks at the camera.

Made in a hurry

Feuillade had just had a huge success with the serial Fantômas (1913-1914), and Gaumont was competing with Pathé, which was releasing popular American serials in France. Les Vampires was made quickly and cheaply during the First World War, with many of Gaumont's men away at the front, and with very little written script. Feuillade often improvised from day to day.

That haste shows in the plotting, which is wildly inconsistent. It also gives the serial its strange energy. Feuillade shot in the real streets, rooftops and suburbs of wartime Paris, and the ordinary city becomes a place where anything can happen behind a door or under a floor.

Musidora

Musidora, whose real name was Jeanne Roques, became an icon overnight. Irma Vep's black costume and her movements made her the first great screen femme fatale in France, and the surrealists, who adored the serial, treated her as a muse. Her image still appears on posters and in fashion today.

Olivier Assayas paid tribute to her in his film Irma Vep (1996), about a remake of Les Vampires, with Maggie Cheung in the bodysuit. He later turned it into a television series.

How to watch it

The full serial runs to about seven hours, and episodes vary from about half an hour to almost an hour. Watching one or two at a time, as audiences did in 1915, works best. Restored versions with modern scores are available, and the serial is in the public domain in many countries.

Feuillade is one of the founders of popular cinema. For another early landmark, see Abel Gance's Napoléon; for the period, the best French films of the 1910s. Fans of crime should continue with the best French thrillers.