Director: Louis Feuillade Year: 1915-1916 Runtime: 10 films with a total of 6:57:00 Source: Kanopy Feuillade immediately capitalized on the success of his first crime serial with a more ambitious follow-up. Les Vampires bears a lot of hallmarks of its rushed production. It's nearly identical to Fantomas in its broad outline - criminals with devious disguises (no actual vampires, I'm afraid), a plucky journalist hero, plenty of curtains - but this time, Feuillade was making it up as he went along, apparently letting his actors workshop much of the basic plot. Contemporary critics considered it a classless genre flick at the time, but the public ate it up, and Les Vampires is now considered his finest and most influential work, the origin of the modern thriller. While Fantomas comprised a sequence of mostly self-contained detective stories (like the newspaper serial it was adapted from), Les Vampires is more of a true serial, with a serpentine plot, and...
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