Trivia / London After Midnight

• Actor-Inspired Element: Lon Chaney did his own makeup and London After Midnight is the one film in which the character he plays, Inspector Burke, is a make-up artist himself. This is part of the plot, because it and the acrobatic talents of Lunette are what make the vampire charade believable. In the final scene, he is depicted finishing up with his makeup case.
• Deleted Role: At least the scene in which Harry's corpse is discovered was filmed, but Harry is absent from the final film despite the huge plot hole this causes. The actor who played Harry is yet to be identified.
• Early Draft Tie-In: The 1928 novelization by Marie Coolidge-Rask is based on an early version of the script and contains some details found in the shooting script but not in the actual film as well as unique details of which the origins are either even older or made up for the novelization.
• Executive Meddling: There are many differences between the early material and the final film, some of which for known reasons, others for deducible reasons. What is known is that the intensive use of hypnotism formed an objection because it was feared that people would try it out for themselves, and this may very well be the reason that the original title, The Hypnotist, was changed and the usage of hypnotism reduced to the two inoffensive essential instances. In the wake of the Nosferatu lawsuit, the original short story was also tweaked to resemble Dracula less. As for deducible reasons, Hamlin's pedophilic obsession with Lucille in the novelization and shooting script is much more intense than in it is in the film and even includes incestuous undertones in Hamlin's jealousy towards Lucille's love for her father and him stepping into that fatherly role after murdering Roger. Pre-code or not, one can easily imagine this change to have been a demand by the studio heads. The film's poor narrative flow and major plot holes even regarding material that is unlikely to have been objectionable are probably due to cuts to reduce the running time to an hour.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • Inspector Burke undergoes a change in fashion and demeanor between his initial investigation and the second one five years later. Yet he goes back to acting like his former self in the final scenes. The warm handshake with which Hamlin greets him five years later also is peculiar because nothing indicated a good standing between the two men in the opening scene. The reason for all of this is that the scenes with Inspector Burke that occupy the middle of the film were shot for Burke's persona Colonel Yates. As Yates, he hypnotized Hamlin into believing he was an old army friend, hence the warm welcome. But in the final cut, the Colonel Yates persona is removed and his scenes are reframed as Inspector Burke being himself.
  • The instruction to place a sword and a wreath of tube roses over a keyhole as a protective measure against vampires made a bit more sense in the shooting script where the Man in the Beaver Hat gets past a door by taking the form of mist and going through the keyhole. In the final film, the mist goes underneath the door.
  • Hamlin tries to murder Arthur by injecting him with a poisoned needle in the neck. This is supposed to be the reveal how Hamlin murdered Harry in the early drafts and why it looked like he'd been bitten by a vampire, which sets off the whole vampire charade by Scotland Yard. But without Harry, there's no more narrative significance to the murder attempt than that Arthur can be written off as a suspect.
• Write What You Know: Lunette the Flying Woman was an actual circus and street act popular in the early 20th Century. Conceived by John Henry Shields between 1893 and 1899, Lunette the Flying Lady is an acrobatic performance in which a pretty woman in a flowing robe "flies" above the audience. The inclusion of a Lunette performer to make the vampire charade look believable is a very Tod Browning thing to come up with, because he spent much of his life before coming to Hollywood as a carny.

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