The Whispering Shadow series

The Whispering Shadow is the title of a near-forgotten ten-part adventure serial film from 1933 that starred Bela Lugosi and an otherwise obscure cast of semi-professionals. The movie,which was made in only twelve days, is striking mostly for its differences in quality from the great Tod Browning-directed Lugosi classic Dracula of two years before. It is a curiosity from a lost era, offering—despite its faults—glimpses of the early Culver City studio ethos, and the titles of its episodes seemed to me genuinely poetic.