Chris recently ran across a mystery novel both written and set in the 1920s. The action takes place during the filming of a silent movie, and it talks about how the actors are all playing stock types in movies of that era. For example, there’s  always the ingenue, an innocent young woman; the menacing “heavy”,  who is the villain and the “juvenile”, who is the young male romantic lead. Plus, there’s always a vampire.

Wait. There’s always a vampire in a silent movie?

In context of the plot, the vampire was described as the “bad” girl who use her feminine wiles on men. She’s what I thought was always called the “vamp”, not “vampire”. But as it turns out, the term “vamp” comes from “vampire”, and vampire was indeed the terms that was used through 1910s and 1920s to refer to a woman who is  femme fatale. This usage is traced back to a Rudyard Kipling poem called, yes, The Vampire.

In that 1920s murder mystery, they always use the full term, not the shortened term “vamp”, which made this modern reader stop short every time the one woman was referred to as being a vampire in real life, even though she played the ingenue onscreen.

Now the best known American actress to play the femme fatale in the silent movies was Theda Bara. She retired in 1926 before the advent of talkies, and it turns out that most of her films were accidentally destroyed in a fire at a movie studio in the mid 1930s. So hardly any footage of her as a vampire remains.

Now, when you read that last sentence, didn’t that strike you as odd to have her called a vampire? I mean, despite my explanation earlier in the post, I bet you momentarily pictured her as playing Dracula’s sister, and not a “vamp”, didn’t you? I’m just saying.

But I digress. Here’s posting I found on YouTube from Theda Bara’s film, A Fool There Was; the movie is based on Kipling’s poem. It was daring in its day for the title card that pops up in this place in the clip, around 20:00. It reads Kiss me, my fool. Shocking! (BTW, that is  often misquoted as, “Kiss me, you fool.”

Yup, Theda Bara portrayed quite devilish women in her day. As Cher put it back in the 1970s,

She was a scamp,
a camp,
and a bit of a tramp,
she was a V.A.M.P. …

VAMP!

Those lyrics kept running through my head every time I mentally changed “vampire”to “vamp” while reading that book. Don’t remember it? It’s from a recurring comedy bit on the Sonny and Cher show in the 1970s. Here’s a clip  – I’ve queued it to start at 0:36, where Cher is singing about Theda Bara. 

Enjoy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theda_Bara