It is perhaps of no surprise, dear reader, to you or me when I say I became rather besotted with the old photo. An attractive gothic woman highly stylistically posed, at once both protective and predatory over a human skeleton, her eyes - those eyes - framed in thick black shadow looking straight back at me, through the exposure, through time!
To my delight, a twitter conversation with the amazing @soniasuponia provided me not only with a name of the woman, but also a reason for the photograph. The woman in the photo is Theda Bara. The reason for its existence is as one of a set to promote the silent movie, A Fool There Was. With this information I now possessed the recipe of the potion still potent enough for an unsuspecting man to drink. Theda Bara was meant to besot me in this photograph.
A Potted Biography
Theda was Hollywood’s first sex symbol of the moving picture. Up to this film, Theda was already creating a small reputation as an alluring actress after two earlier films. However, Theda’s third production, A Fool There Was, is a watermark in cinema. A Fool There Was is regarded by some as the first ever Vampire film. From the moment the film roll whirred through the projector, a new type of actress portraying a new form of character was revealed to beguile audiences across America. It was culturally ground-breaking. The term “Vamp” was first coined for this, considered controversial, film and it was coined for the femme fatale character Theda was apparently born to play.
Theda was herself an early product of the Hollywood fame machine. “Theda” was pure creation of the movie industry. We recognise this easily today in enigmatic people such as Lana Del Rey who show how deliberate mystification is intoxicating to the imagination of the public. Her name was a stage name: although a few reasons are given, surely it is no mistake Theda is an anagram of Death. Her background was a back story presenting her as superlatively exotic: Egyptian born to a French actress and Italian sculptar. Theda entered the psyche as a ready-made sensuous, dangerous stranger.
In truth, Theodosia Burr Goodman was American, born in Ohio, to immigrant parents. Far from an accented drawl from the Old World, a rare radio interview gives Theda a crystal clipped, Anglo-American voice.
Theodosia would regret the typecasting roles sent for Theda, but they gained her mass popularity. It is a sad final fact that, despite starring in over 40 films (all from the silent era) due to a fire in Universal Studios consuming all but 6 of them, very little remains of her career output.
And so – to the film! *there be spoilers*
A Fool There Was (1915) is a horror of sorts: A grim fable.
Based on Kipling’s poem, The Vampire, Theda’s character is introduced formally on an intertitle card as “The Vampire”. A woman who holds sway over the dominion of men, we are quickly introduced to her powers to use men for the motive of her own self aggrandisement. The character metaphorically “sucks” the essence of her male victims and drains them of their wealth and will, leaving them destitute without means or rationality.
The vampire is only about using. She is attracted to status and money and seeks to sexually manipulate men with both to give it to her. She holds the men themselves with contempt, and this only grows as the men become meek and more snivelling around her as they seek an affection she will always refuse to them.
Once the film establishes the players, it centres on the story of a wealthy and happy family man who is destroyed by his (not so chance) meeting with the vampire.
It is possible Theda’s Vampire character could be the most fearsome of all vampire incarnations. She is not caged or curtailed by the trappings of folk-lore. She moves as easily in the sunlight as in the moonlight. Garlic and religious motifs give no defence from her. She is not undone by love or hesitates from compassion. She is a modern, real threat: her kind talked of and recognised in society. Her castle is a flapper bar. Her blood runs dollar-green. She is single minded, self-serving but worse than this, is also callous. We find her, when the husband is a drunken wretch and of little more use, once again seducing him to prove he will choose her over his wife and child even as they stand pleading in front of him to regain his senses. The Vampire revels in the scene: how she will pick over what remains of his carcass and he will let her, it seems, to show the wife he may have happily lived for his family, but he will gladly die for the Vampire.
Although, overtly, the Vampire appears to possess no supernatural powers, there are hints. In a brief scene, a husband takes leave of his senses (and his wife’s side) for a split instant when the Vampire brushes past not as much as noticing him – as if her thrall is a pheromone plume of perfume. We see the Vampire in an act of almost smelling out her pray in another scene. During the film the Vampire neither ages nor comes to harm. When threatened by a discarded, broken lover wielding a revolver, he still cannot quite bring himself to injure her and so in his final desperation instead takes the only option left, to shoot himself in the head to cure the madness she infects him with.
The Vampire, as she always does, moves on unchanged. And move on she does to the film’s downbeat conclusion. As you can see for yourself with the full film for your enjoyment here:
What of this fable’s message? Beware harlots? Beware the Vampires? Beware then the Vamps?
Maybe, like all good horror movies, there is no single message. Maybe, like all good horror movies, it is showing contemporary society a reflection of itself back from the warped hall of mirrors of a carnival side-show. Maybe, like all good horrors, the villain survives to strike again.
And so I go back to the photo. The mystery of it uncovered: a promotion still for a film so scantily melodramatic by today’s plot standards it would struggle to find an audience on the Hallmark Channel. Yet… and… yet… I still can’t quite take my eyes off it.
