02 Mar The Secret of House No. 5 (1912)

Choose your own Revolution

Just the basic info first. This is the first 15 minutes of a silent film without inter-titles that we are told is both a vampire story and a mystery. The people appear and act as any actors would representing the upper class of a European city. It would be entirely believable for this to be a French, British or German film. But it is Russian, made a bit over a hundred years ago. Before two world wars. Before a few Russian revolutions, Stalin’s murderous time. 70 million Russian deaths from those three.

Before Russia became the cruelest empire on the planet, twice. Before Russia with its deep, proud legacies in art and culture threw it all away. Before the top scientists and artists ran away.

You may simply consider this a trivial curiosity, a movie before any of the actual story happens. We see unscrupulous lovers plotting for the (presumably beautiful) woman to entice a rich aristocrat for funds. Then being ditched and subsequently accepted into his trust again. Her disguised boyfriend tricks the mark into the titular rundown mansion (House #5) where spooky things start to happen. That’s all, end of what we have. No vampires. No mystery.

Or rather, the best kind of mystery, because we can fill in what we might imagine these storytellers would fabulate — souls from a tradition that no longer exists, eaten by many beasts.

So here’s what I think this film was/could be.

Leningrad, a playboy detective Peter has family money, is a genius at solving crimes, but is hedonistic. A glamorous, scheming woman, Nykras has her eye on his money and thinks that simple seduction will work. It does in the short term but he wanders.

So she plans with her actual lover Dénes to devise a fabricated crime for him to solve with her. Dénes is a lowlife with gypsy connections, and he employs them to set up a crime in an abandoned, mysterious mansion. They successfully lure him to the house, where he discovers the body of a woman, identical to Nykras but with different hair and dress. On a distraction, the body disappears. He discovers a life-sized painting hidden behind a curtain of the same woman, dated hundreds of years ago.

He later returns to the house, deeply intrigued, and discovers that it was abandoned some 23 years ago after its owner was accused of sorcery and vampirism and killed. His wife killed herself and an infant girl was lost. All of this is discovered over the course of an hour in movie-time, and we have no idea how much if any is fabricated and if so to what end.

The resolution is that it is a mix, but the supposedly fabricated parts like the initial body (there are four by this point, including Dénes) were indeed plotted by Nykras and the gypsies but under the spell of the evil vampire doctor who still lives, with his wife embedded in the painting, to sometimes wander in confusion. Of course, Nykras is the lost daughter, unbeknownst to her.

Peter deduces that the pain in the house is because of the lost daughter whose soul is in-between. He reveals the secret to her when she is in her ‘modern’ persona, and she chooses to cross over, by some combination of ancient and evil magic — walking into the painting to meet her disembodied parents. The mansion collapses into a chasm, and we hear a fire has ravaged the gypsy camp.

Cut to later to discover that the entire story we see is as recounted by Peter to his rich friends at his house, which looks eerily like the original mansion. Once his friends leave, he takes off what we now know is a fake moustache, pours a drink, and uncovers a life-sized painting behind a dark curtain; it is of a much more beautiful Nykras. Fade.

This is written and produced in 1910, but with a complete understanding of 2025, which both Peter and Nykras do/will know — they are still present and some incarnation of the house exists.

So, many things in the mystery of the house in Act 2 are metaphors for what happens to Russia.

If this film existed — and I suppose it does now — it would be on my list of best films. Should my true identity be revealed, it will be.

Posted in 2025

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

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