UPDATE: London After Midnight Finally Found?
Steve Barton
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One of the biggest shames in all of the horror genre is that Tod Browning’s 1927 film London After Midnight, starring Lon Chaney, had been lost. It was assembled once a few years back using stills, but that was far from a true representation. However… things might be changing.
UPDATE 1: 3:30 PM PT:
Parigi just updated his post with the following statement…
“This just in, via pm from Micah Carey: “No print of ‘London After Midnight’ has been found. We did find some frames from the film that may have been cut out of a vintage trailer!”
A few frames… the seeds from which a rumor grows!
Sorry this turned out to be another false alarm. My inner monster-kid was too eager to wait for confirmation before posting.”
UPDATE 2: 3:40 PM PT – More info from Carey:
“A film archive in The Canary Islands received what look to be nitrate frames from London After Midnight around 1995. They got these from a private collector.
In 2012, the archive opened a Flickr account and posted this image among others it was posted for about five years and nobody seemed to notice it until last month.
Then this image was posted shortly thereafter…”
“These were both posted on the Facebook page Universal Monsters & More. I’ve contacted them and they have said they have more stills and that they will share them with us.
The school of thought seems to be that these were cut out of trailers for London After Midnight by a projectionist in the Canary Islands. But nobody is sure.
For now at least, it seems that LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT remains lost….
The hunt continues.
ORIGINAL INFO:
Filmmaker Robert Parigi (“Tales from the Crypt,” Love Object, “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D”) just posted the following on his Facebook page…
“I’m noticing chatter that a 7-reel print of long-lost Todd Browning/Lon Chaney film LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (featuring Chaney’s iconic “Man in the Beaver Hat” Vampire) has been discovered in Spain!
I had long heard rumors of a print in Cuba. Is this perhaps that print, now sent to Spain?
20 years ago, I heard rumors of a print in the U.S., and contacted the supposed owner offering to transfer it to (then state-of-the-art) D1, but when it came time to produce the print he backed out.”
Now, yes, there’s nothing solid here, but at least there’s a possibility. We’ll do some digging. At the end of the day, at least we had a reason to talk about Lon fuckin’ Chaney! That’s not so bad, is it?
Synopsis:
The abandoned home of a wealthy man who supposedly committed suicide five years earlier is taken over by ghoulish figures – could they be vampires?
Categorized:News
