London After Midnight

London After Midnight (1927)

Lon Chaney in a great Scotland Yard mystery

The abandoned Balfour House, the owner of which was found dead five years earlier, comes back to life with the arrival of two suspicious sinister-looking tenants.

Date of release
1927-12-03
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (32)
Runtime
1h 9m
Genres
Horror, Mystery
Director
Tod Browning

Casting

Interesting facts

London After Midnight is a lost 1927 American silent mystery horror film directed and co-produced by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney, with Marceline Day, Conrad Nagel, Henry B. Walthall, and Polly Moran. The film was distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and was written by Waldemar Young, based on the story "The Hypnotist" which was written by Browning. Merritt B. Gerstad was the cinematographer, and the sets were designed by Cedric Gibbons and Arnold Gillespie. Harry Sharrock was the assistant director. The film cost $152,000 to produce and grossed $1 million.

Production

Lon Chaney's makeup for the film included sharpened teeth and the hypnotic eye effect, achieved with special wire fittings which he wore like monocles. Based on surviving accounts, he purposefully gave the "vampire" character an absurd quality, because it was the film's Scotland Yard detective character, also played by Chaney, in a disguise. Surviving stills show this was the only time Chaney used his famous makeup case as an on-screen prop.

The story was an original work by Tod Browning, with Waldemar Young, who had previously worked with Browning on The Unholy Three and The Unknown, as the scenario writer. Young was previously employed as a journalist in San Francisco, during which time he covered several famous murder investigations, a distinction which saw him lauded as knowing "mystery from actual experience."

In adding an authenticity to both Chaney's character and the atmosphere within the haunted house scenes, bats, armadillos, and owls were used.

When London After Midnight premiered at the Miller Theater in Missouri, set musicians Sam Feinburg and Jack Feinburg had to prepare melodies to go with the film's supernatural elements. The musicians used Ase's Todd and Eritoken by Greig, Dramatic Andante by Rappe, the Fire Music from Wagner's The Valkyrie along with other unlisted aspects of Savino, Zimonek and Puccini.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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