Tod Browning's London after Midnight, released by MGM in 1927, represents America's first supernatural vampire feature film. Except that it isn’t. It does not depict a supernatural vampire, not really. Its story features Lon Chaney as a detective, Inspector Burke, who costumes as a supernatural vampire (“The Man in the Beaver Hat”) as part of an elaborate ruse to catch a murderer. The detective also enlists an actress (Edna Tichenor) to costume as a vampire known as the “Bat Girl.” Here is thus a supernatural vampire film without a supernatural vampire, a paradox, one perhaps well suited to the subject matter.

During its running time, London after Midnight included an insert shot of a “vignetted passage of the printed page of an old book, the paper of a parchment-like quality, aged, the print in an Old English type.” According to the script, the page read as follows: “– the undead, the vampyrs [sic]: dead bodies which leave their graves at night to suck the blood of the living.” Here was a definition, one that made vampires synonymous with the “undead,” a term that Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) rendered with uppercase letters and hyphenated as “Un-Dead.” In the novel, Dr. Van Helsing explains that the Un-Dead are “desperate,” “strong,” and are distinctly different than the “common dead.” In response, Arthur Holmwood exclaims, “Un-Dead! Not alive! What do you mean? Is this all a nightmare, or what is it?”

The questions are hardly unexpected. The term undead was little-known in English prior to Stoker, not appearing in such nineteenth-century literature as John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), James Malcolm Rymer's Varney the Vampire (1845–7), and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). True, the concept was present in those tales, as well as those published after Stoker's Dracula. F. Marion Crawford's short story For the Blood Is the Life (1911) describes “a woman's shriek, the unearthly scream of a woman neither dead nor alive, but buried deep for many days.” Nevertheless, the concept remained difficult to fathom, to understand, and the term was rarely used during the silent film era.