There is little argument that the biggest part of the vampire legacy has been achieved through the medium of film and the growing breadth of vampire literature. The truth of the matter is that no other novel has achieved such acclaim as Bram Stoker's 1897 masterpiece, Dracula, which has sold millions of copies throughout the past century and launched a franchise of entertainment on both the literary and theatrical fronts. It is within the film industry, however, that Dracula has achieved its greatest popularity, serving as the impetus for more commercially successful films than any other literary work in history. Tragically, that success is an inescapable irony, given the fact that Stoker died in relative poverty never realizing the true cinematic immortality of his legendary creation, whose inspiration began in the Silent Era not long after his death in 1912 (see Chapter 3).

The Silent Era of motion pictures marked not only a groundbreaking period in the evolution of entertainment and technology, but also introduced an entire world of vampiric show and tell, and many of those films prove that silence is indeed golden. While Thomas Edison's 1903 The Great Train Robbery is perhaps the best known and earliest of the silent film genre, it's less well known that there are a host of silent vampire flicks that were made, beginning with the short 1896 French film short Le manoir du diable, otherwise known as The Devil's Castle or Manor of the Devil, which is often cited as the first vampire film (see Chapter 16). Many more silent films would follow, but there is one masterpiece in the golden era of silent pictures that stands alone in its popularity among vampire aficionados.