Reception
The merit of this film is still debated among horror movie fans due to the ending, which reveals that the vampires were in reality actors hired to help trap a murderer. While films of the previous decade commonly revealed the supernatural threat to be fake—such as The Cat and the Canary or The Gorilla -- the arrival of such films as Dracula and Frankenstein in the thirties saw horror films become more fantastic. This is perhaps why some see the ending as a cop-out and Bela Lugosi reportedly found the idea absurd (then again, the film is a semi-remake of Browning's London After Midnight in which Lon Chaney played a vampire who turned out to be a detective in disguise, so it couldn't have been that unexpected). Many viewers see the film as a satire on the conventions of the horror film.
Read more about this topic: Mark Of The Vampire
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)