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:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)