"Dracula, Lord of the Damned"
was originally shot entirely on the cinematograph
by it's rightful originator, Aloysius Monahan Wildebeast Trout, in 1901.
Although feature length films were still a generation away,
Trout, driven by a strange obsessive mania, conceived a film based on
Bram Stoker's ‘Dracula’ years before the technology existed to make
any kind of film run more than a few seconds.

The fact that there was no way to feasibly exhibit such a film
at the time did not deter him, and he in fact proposed the
construction of a mutoscope the size of a ferris wheel,
which would require a team of horses to revolve in order that
a single viewer could enjoy the entire three and a half hour epic
as a gigantic flip-book.
Needless to say, despite the elaborate nature of Trout's designs
for the machine, it proved impossible to construct,
and in fact several men were injured in the attempt.

After squandering a small fortune that had been left to him
by his immediate antecedents, Trout was left with a warehouse
full of mutoscope cards each bearing a single frame of his epic,
and a small cartload of wax cylinder recordings
(bearing the recorded soundtrack which was to have been played
on the gramophone as the viewer enjoyed the film),
and no access whatever to the copyrighted novel upon which
his masterpiece was based.

Trout died a broken man, giving apocalyptic sermons on
street corners to attract passersby, then telling them filthy jokes
for beer money.

Then in 2005, the keys to Aloysius Monahan Wildebeast Trout's
warehouse came into the possession of his descendent,
Theodore Normal Moron Trout.
Having been brain-damaged in a nail-gun fight at birth,
the younger Trout was even more possessed of an obsessive mania
for perseverating on monotonous repetitive tasks,
and quickly set to work scanning every single mutoscope card
into his home computer, one by one by one.
Many of the cards had been damaged by mould and weevils, but through
the miracles of Photoshop and Perseveration, each has been lovingly restored
to at least some level of watchability.
By judicious use of 'cross-dissolves' (impossible in Aloysius' day),
the running time has been shortened to around 100 minutes, and the soundtrack restored
and synched as nearly as possible to the film itself.
Add to this the fact that Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' entered the public domain
in the 1970's, and it is now finally possible to enjoy this remarkable find of
unknown Early Cinema.

Dracula, Lord of the Damned
Dracula Lord of the Damned
Dracula: Lord of the Damned