Serials: Louis Feuillade, Les Vampires, 1915 - Part Two: The Ring That Kills

Serials kept the cinema audience returning from week to week to see how an exciting story developed and turned out, in 10-15-minute installments. "Les Vampires" is one of the most successful examples in film history. (The "vampires" of the title are a criminal gang, not the vampires of Dracula, Twilight, or True Blood.)

The conventions are borrowed from 19th-century stage melodrama (as in Griffith's 2-reelers): increasingly bizarre and arcane ways to endanger the heroes and the innocent, cliff-hangers that pose apparently inescapable threats, conspiracies that draw stark lines between good and evil, depravity and innocence.

The posters for Feuillade's serials, including Fantomas and Judex, are a major contribution to French and international popular art in the early 20th-century, and are quoted in the work of Braque, Picasso, and Margritte.

Feuillade was criticized for making his criminal villains appear glamorous. He tried a serial focused on a police detective, but the villains continued to be more interesting than the good guys--another great cinematic tradition.

The figure in bat costume in this episode is said to have inspired Bob Kane to create the Bat-Man.