UNTRUE BLOOD

Happy Halloween next Wednesday! That evening, Turner Classic Movies will be showing their ingenious 45-minute still-photo reconstruction, by restorer Rick Schmidlin, of Tod Browning’s 1927 lost silent London After Midnight, featuring…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, “The Man in the Beaver Hat,” with buggy eyes and a grin of nasty big pointy teeth...

This iconic vampire visage was created and played by the famed Lon Chaney, Sr., and [spoiler alert!]…

…it turns out that he’s fictitious even within the context of the movie: a policeman in bloodsucker disguise, part of an elaborate charade to get a murderer to crack and confess. It’s somehow more implausible than the idea that vampires are real.

Browning remade the film, entertainingly but with the same hard-to-swallow twist, as Mark of the Vampire in 1935, with Lionel Barrymore, Bela Lugosi and Jean Hersholt.