What we know (or think we know): The last known print was destroyed after an electrical fire broke out in MGM’s Vault #7 in 1965. Another print is rumored to exist somewhere in the hinterlands of Canadia but, again supposedly, the owner has declined to make the film available for preservation. In 2002, Turner Classic Movies tapped Rick Schmidlin to produce a 45 minute reconstruction of the film having little more than the original script and some publicity photos at his disposal. While not a film per se, it has been lauded as an atmospheric approximation of the still-missing original film.

 

A lost movie… how awesome... for a few reasons: One) You’ve got a creep-tacular movie with Lon Chaney exhibiting 2 of his 1,000 faces (he plays two parts in the film, a Scotland Yard inspector and a squatter/vampire). Two) It’s ‘lost’. I’m not being facetious or snide here either. It’s being lost adds a great mystery. Three) There’s the fur-trapping, Canadian mountain man who has the last known print and refuses to share it with anybody... Actually, there’s no mountain man. I just liked the image of the missing film reels sitting in some snowbound log cabin amidst stuffed animal heads and wall-hung snowshoes. If not in a cabin, it is somewhere up in the Great White North. Or at least is reputed to be.

 

So, you’ve got a movie that has a certain mystique by being unseeable. And it grows all the more horrible every day that it remains ‘lost’.