1001 Movies Club - Vampires, Les (1915)

#4. Les Vampires (1915)

Why It's In The Book: "Louis Feuillade’s legendary opus has been cited as a landmark movie serial, a precursor of the deep-focus aesthetic later advanced by Jean Renoir and Orson Welles, and a close cousin to the surrealist movement, but its strongest relationship is to the development of the movie thriller. Segmented into ten loosely connected parts that lack cliffhanger endings, vary widely in length, and were released at irregular intervals, Les Vampires falls somewhere between a film series and a film serial… Much like the detective story and the haunted-house thriller, Les Vampires creates a sturdy-looking world of bourgeois order while also undermining it… Reinforcing this atmosphere of capricious stability, the plot is built around a series of tour de force reversals, involving deceptive appearances on both sides of the law… It is Feuillade’s ability to create, on an extensive and imaginative scale, a double world – at once weighty and dreamlike, recognizably familiar and excitingly strange – that is of central importance to the evolution of the movie thriller and marks him as a major pioneer of the form." -1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Member Ratings

Kim Wilson  - 9/10
"This crime thriller is an interesting watch. Later films in this genre owe a lot to Feuillade. But be warned, you must have patience to enjoy this film."
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JayCluitt - 7/10
"If acclaimed surrealist master Luis Bunuel is a fan of your work, it’s fair to say it’s unlikely to be a straightforward police procedural picture."
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Nicolas Krizan  - 7/10
"Dated in tempo, acting and technique of course. But the creative storyline alone keeps it in my book."
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Tsorensen  - 7/10
"With Irma Vep the serial has a real star. She is far from the passive female lead of so many other early films. She has real drive."
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Klaus - 6/10
"the intriguing Irma Vep, played by Musidora...deftly manipulates power from behind the scenes as cinema's first "liberated" woman"
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Adolytsi - 4/10
"This is one I can't really recommend aside from 1001 Movie completionists, and they've got quite a long haul to get through with this one."
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Siochembio - 4/10
"Six and a half hours of watching one hidden identity after another makes each subsequent plot twist less shocking, and by the end, you're pulling your hair out"
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Squish - 4/10
"The only good effects were the stunts and then they went and killed them by showing them to us for minutes at a time. I get that you're climbing down a rope or up a drain pipe, fine, I'm over it.
 How this stood the test of time, I have NO clue, this film series is NOT important."
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Movie Guy Steve - 3/10
"By the last episode, I was watching in five-minute bursts and rocking in my seat, praying for the end."
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Overall Rating: 5.7/10