A first-timer’s guide to cliffhangers, crime rings and the queens of danger
On July 6, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has announced that they will be screening Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires from 1915. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen any silent serial all the way through and I already know I’m going to be obsessed. Because this is more than a seven hour French crime saga from 1915, this is a window into how people first experienced suspense, action and episodic storytelling at the movies.
Long before streaming and long before “binge-worthy” was a marketing term, silent film serials had already figured it out.
What Are Silent Film Serials?
Before trailers, before blockbusters, before cinema became a machine of glossy marketing, there were silent film serials. These were episodic, suspense-driven stories told across multiple short films, usually screened before the main feature.
They weren’t side dishes. They were the appetizers that kept people coming back week after week.
The format exploded in the 1910s and 1920s. Some theaters even promoted the serial more than the feature because audiences were loyal to their characters and the drama. You’d catch Part One this week, sit through the cliffhanger, then show up the next Saturday to see if your heroine escaped the train tracks or if the masked villain got away again.
These weren’t just filler. They were bold experiments in suspense, pacing and character building. Story arcs stretched across weeks. Plots unfolded in pieces. Title cards teased mystery or betrayal or explosions. The magic happened without sound, just live music and the hush of a captivated crowd.
The stories ranged from crime thrillers to supernatural plots to full blown action. But what tied them all together was the cliffhanger. That edge of your seat ending and the moment of danger with no resolution. It was designed to keep you in the theater, paying attention and coming back.
Silent film serials gave early filmmakers room to play. They tested camera tricks, costumes and editing styles that would go on to shape film genres for decades. They introduced masked villains, femme fatales, double lives and secret codes. And even without dialogue, they knew how to stir a crowd.
So when we talk about Les Vampires, Fantômas, Pauline or Helen, we’re not just talking about film history. We’re talking about the roots of everything we now know as binge culture, prestige TV and cinematic universes. These stories walked so the cliffhangers of today could run.
Why Audiences Fell in Love With Silent Film Serials
To understand why silent film serials took off, you have to picture what moviegoing looked like in the 1910s and 1920s. This wasn’t just “catch a flick and go home.” This was an event and people dressed up to go to the movies. Some theaters were built like opera houses where others might be scrappy neighborhood nickelodeons. Either way, going to the movies had a vibe.
And it was affordable and I mean really affordable, not like now where two tickets to the movies in Los Angeles might set you back $50 before your $15 popcorn. In the 1910s, movie tickets typically cost five to ten cents. Even as theaters got fancier in the 1920s, you could still get in for a quarter or less. The average daily wage in 1915 was around two dollars, so spending ten cents on a movie was a cheap thrill most people could afford.
That ticket bought you a full program. You might get a cartoon, a comedy short, a newsreel and then a new episode of your favorite serial. After all that, a feature-length film would play. You were getting hours of entertainment for a few coins. Sometimes the serial was the highlight. If it was in the middle of a big storyline, people came just to see what happened next.
Silent film serials gave audiences something rare at the time. They were getting a familiar faces and ongoing stories seeing as television hadn’t been invented yet. Feature films wrapped things up neatly. Serials kept the tension alive. You had to come back to find out if the heroine escaped the runaway train or if the masked villain had pulled off another heist. The cliffhanger was everything.
People became invested. They picked favorite characters. They talked about plot twists with neighbors or coworkers. For many, these serials were more exciting than the main feature because they felt personal. They kept you hooked and they came out every weekend so much like we did Saturday morning cartoons, moviegoers went every Saturday to catch the next episode.
And unlike highbrow theater or opera, this was storytelling for everyone. Silent film serials were made for the people. They were gritty, inventive and often chaotic in the best way. And just when it got good, the screen would go dark and a title card would promise more danger next week.
So you’d come back, again and again because the story wasn’t over yet.
Before Hollywood Got Censored:
The Pre-Code Impact of Silent FILM Serials
All of the silent film serials we’re about to discuss were made before the Hays Code locked Hollywood into its puritanical chokehold. That code wasn’t just about toning things down. It was a full-on moral straitjacket designed to keep films “respectable” by forcing stories into neat little lessons where bad guys lost, women behaved and sex or power never went unpunished from separate twin beds.
The Code went into effect in 1934, but even before that, studios had already started self-censoring to avoid pushback. Once the rules were enforced, filmmakers could no longer show certain things on screen.
That included criminals who looked too cool, women who had agency or desire without consequence and anything that looked like it might challenge all those white Christian values.
Silent film serials didn’t play by those rules. They came from a time when the industry was still finding itself. Filmmakers experimented and they let villains win. They actually allowed women to run the story and let danger go unresolved. These serials were messy, chaotic and alive with possibility.
They were raw in ways that would be scrubbed clean just a few years later.
Characters like Irma Vep or Helen from the train station would’ve been forced to either repent or die under the Hays Code. Their stories would have ended in punishment or marriage. Fantômas would have had to be caught and executed by the final reel. Pauline would have been softened into a cautionary tale about stepping out of line.
But in the silent serial era, none of that happened. These characters survived and sometimes they thrived and audiences loved them for it.
This was cinema before the leash and before the industry decided it needed to behave. These serials remind us what stories looked like when filmmakers had nothing to lose and everything to invent.
Silent Film Serials That Shaped Cinema
These weren’t just flickering reels or forgotten curiosities. These were the building blocks of modern storytelling. Below are four of the most iconic silent film serials that defined the format, inspired generations of filmmakers and still leave their mark today.
Les Vampires (1915)
Directed by: Louis Feuillade
Episodes: 10
Total Runtime: Approximately 7 hours
This is the one I’ll be seeing for the first time, and it’s already haunting me in the best way.
Les Vampires follows an investigative journalist trying to bring down a secret crime syndicate known as The Vampires. The real power behind the gang was Irma Vep, played by the unforgettable Musidora. Her name is an anagram for “vampire,” and her presence is pure danger wrapped in silk and shadow.
Despite the horror-tinged name, there are no actual vampires here. What you get instead is hypnotism, murder, coded messages and rooftop escapes. Feuillade shot the series quickly, often improvising the story as he went. Still, it holds together as a masterclass in tone and visual tension. It’s moody, surreal and way ahead of its time. Irma Vep would go on to become a muse for generations of filmmakers, and the serial format never got cooler than this.
Pre-code Red Flag: Irma Vep.
A woman in a skintight bodysuit leading a crime syndicate without remorse, repentance or a tragic downfall was a hard pass. Irma Vep is stylish, powerful and evil but never defeated. The Hays Code would’ve made her fall in the final reel or tone her down into a tragic figure. Her costume would’ve been a full-blown scandal. Nope. That breaks multiple Hays Code rules, including:
- Women can’t appear sexually provocative unless punished
- Criminals must never escape justice
- Evil cannot be glamorized
Fantômas (1913–1914)
Directed by: Louis Feuillade
Episodes: 5
Total Runtime: Around 5.5 hours
Before Irma Vep, Feuillade gave the world Fantômas. He was a masked criminal genius who changes identities like most people change socks. He’s slippery, stylish and terrifying, and every episode finds him one step ahead of the law. If Les Vampires is the blueprint for elegant crime, Fantômas is its chaotic predecessor.
Based on a popular pulp novel series, Fantômas captured the public’s imagination. The visuals were inventive and the tone was both gritty and dreamlike. Police procedurals, detective dramas and antihero thrillers all owe a debt to this shadowy figure and his twisted games.
Pre-Code Red Flag: Getting away with everything. Fantômas murders, lies, steals, escapes, changes identities and mocks law enforcement. There’s no moral center here. No lesson. Just pure chaos. Fantômas didn’t just bend the rules. He laughed in their face. The Code wouldn’t have let him survive Episode One without a moralizing narrator reminding you that crime doesn’t pay. Under the Hays Code:
- Crime must always be punished
- Law enforcement must be respected
- Evil cannot appear sympathetic
The Perils of Pauline (1914)
Produced by: Pathé Frères and Eclectic Film Company
Episodes: 20 (some lost or edited in surviving versions)
Total Runtime: Varies by edition, originally around 7 hours
Pearl White stars as Pauline, a woman who wants adventure instead of marriage. Her guardian disagrees and repeatedly tries to kill her off to steal her fortune. That’s not a metaphor. Every week, Pauline faces a new brush with death, from runaway balloons to collapsing bridges.
While the “damsel in distress” trope came later, Pauline was actually far more independent and clever than she’s often remembered. Audiences loved her for it. She was smart, daring and always two steps ahead of whatever trap she had to escape. The serial was a massive hit and launched White into stardom. It also helped lock the cliffhanger into the DNA of screen storytelling.
Pre-Code Red Flag: Independent women and “female rebellion”. While Pauline is often remembered as a damsel, she was originally framed as a woman resisting traditional roles. She refuses marriage. She seeks danger.
To make this Hays Code compliant, they would’ve likely cut her autonomy and stuck her with a husband by the final chapter. The fact that she doesn’t end up safely paired off would’ve raised alarms under Code rules about:
- Women needing to uphold traditional values
- Marriage as the ultimate goal
- No “female defiance” unless it ends in reform
The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917)
Produced by: Kalem Company, later Thanhouser Company
Episodes: 119
Total Runtime: Most episodes under 15 minutes
This serial didn’t just raise the bar. It ran past it, jumped on a train and kept going for three freaking years. Helen, played first by Helen Holmes and later by other actresses, worked at a train station and regularly found herself in the middle of robberies, accidents and full-blown sabotage.
Unlike most heroines of the time, Helen was the one doing the rescuing. She ran across rooftops, drove speeding engines and took down criminals on her own terms. Audiences couldn’t get enough. The Hazards of Helen proved that action and agency weren’t just for men on screen. It was fast, furious and decades ahead of its time in showing women as capable leads.
Pre-Code Red Flag: Women in charge. Helen saves herself, chases down bad guys, and stops trains with her bare hands. She also works a blue-collar job and has zero romantic subplot in many episodes. In fact, Helen broke every one of those boxes and kept doing it for 119 episodes. Under the Hays Code, this would’ve needed “correcting.”
- Women weren’t supposed to be shown as stronger or more capable than men
- They weren’t supposed to take violent action
- Female leads were expected to be mothers, wives or glamorized love interests
Cultural ROI > Financial ROI
Silent film serials weren’t blockbuster moneymakers on their own. They didn’t rake in massive profits like prestige features or sell out theaters based on star power. What they did do was keep audiences coming back, week after week and chapter after chapter. That kind of loyalty was priceless, especially since the novelty of film was still so new and studios were still figuring things out.
In 1915, the entire American film industry was worth around $100 million. That was a fraction of what other major industries were pulling in. Steel and oil were making hundreds of millions. Railroads were a multibillion dollar machine. Even catalog retailers like Sears were out earning Hollywood.
For theater owners, though, serials guaranteed repeat business and while they were there, they bought snacks because even back then, snacks were important. In 1915, a bag of popcorn and a soda cost around ten cents total. That meant a family could spend less than a quarter and still make an afternoon of it. Theaters knew exactly what they were doing. The movie ticket may have been cheap, but the real money came from the popcorn machine and the steady stream of return customers hungry for the next chapter.
Serial Stars in Their Own Lane
Studios loved serials because they were cheap to produce. You could make an entire 15 part story for a fraction of the cost of one big feature. No stars and no frills, just suspense, stunts and a killer cliffhanger.
That said, a few performers did rise to fame through serials, especially women who did their own stunts and carried entire stories on their shoulders. Pearl White became a global sensation thanks to The Perils of Pauline. Helen Holmes turned The Hazards of Helen into a landmark of action and agency. Ruth Roland and Grace Cunard also carved out space as stars, writers and producers in a world that rarely let women take the lead. They weren’t “names” in the traditional studio system but in the world of serials, they were icons.
Still, it’s worth noting that most of the biggest names from the silent era didn’t come up through serials. You won’t find Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford or Rudolph Valentino dangling from cliffs or chasing down criminals in weekly chapters. Serials were barely even considered second tier productions because they were made faster, cheaper and aimed at working class audiences or kids. T
They weren’t the path to prestige but that didn’t make them less important. It just meant the stars who built their careers in serials were operating in a completely different lane. They weren’t studio darlings. They were scrappy, self-made and often doing their own stunts before anyone was calling that “empowering.”
So while the financial return per episode wasn’t huge, the cultural return was massive. Serials taught studios how to build franchises, how to tease a next chapter and how to turn moviegoing into a habit. In many ways, they laid the foundation for the serialized storytelling machine we’re living in now.
Sidebar: Why Stars Bought Property, Not Hype
As a sidebar (because I get a little tangent-y and fact happy when writing pieces like this related to movies and money): Back when Los Angeles was still banking on orange groves and oil wells, acting wasn’t seen as a career. Movies were seen as a gamble and actors, like the ones in silent film serials, couldn’t rent apartments or find places to live. If you were a big actor on a film, sometimes you had to take your crew’s fate into your own hands.
Big names like Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford put their money into real estate and built studios because no one, not even them, believed film fame would last forever and because their cast and crew needed a place to live when Los Angeles didn’t believe in them. They weren’t buying status. They were buying security in an industry still learning how to exist. These properties still exist and some of them you can even live in today. Here’s a few, if you ever want to check them out:
- Normandie Towers (7219 Hampton Avenue, West Hollywood)
- The Harlan Residences (6533 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood)
- Pickfair Estate (1143 Summit Drive, Beverly Hills)
- Chaplin Court (1330 N. Formosa Avenue, West Hollywood)
- Trianon Apartments (1750 N Serrano Ave, Los Angeles)
- Charlie Chaplin Studios (now The Jim Henson Company Lot at 1416 N. La Brea Avenue, Hollywood)
The Merch That Almost Was
Silent film serials didn’t spark merchandising empires the way superhero franchises would decades later, but they definitely laid the groundwork. While it wasn’t common to see lunchboxes or action figures in the 1910s, the biggest serials did inspire early forms of fan culture and collectible marketing.
The most common tie ins were printed pieces like novelizations, pulp magazines and serialized fiction editions that expanded on the stories or promoted the characters. Fantômas started as a novel, but others like The Exploits of Elaine got pulp spin offs after the serials took off.
Promotional postcards, lobby cards and printed portraits of stars like Pearl White and Helen Holmes were sold or handed out at theaters. Fans collected them, traded them and pinned them up. These women became style icons with some reports of girls mimicking Pearl White’s fashion or asking for her signature curls at local salons.
There were also rare activity books, short story tie ins, and branded giveaways. They created things like puzzles or paper dolls tied to popular heroines. None of it was mass-produced the way later serials like Batman or The Lone Ranger would be in the 1940s, but the concept was there. The demand was real. The industry just hadn’t caught up to the idea that storytelling could live beyond the screen.
The Cultural Legacy of Silent Film Serials
The DNA of silent film serials is everywhere today. You see it in the weekly drop of a true crime docuseries. You feel it in the final scene cliffhanger of a horror anthology. You hear it when someone says, “Did you watch the new episode yet?” That kind of cultural ritual started here at ten cents a week which totally beats paying $16.99 a month for your MAX subscription.
Back in the 1910s and 1920s, serials were the original conversation starters. This was their Game of Thrones. People talked about them on factory floors, in schoolyards and across dinner tables.
Whatever the equivalent of a water cooler was, maybe the line at the general store or the front porch at night, that’s where people shared theories, argued about villains and gushed over plot twists. It wasn’t just passive entertainment. It was social currency for real cheap.
The format never truly died. It just moved.
After the silent era, serials continued into the sound era, especially in the 1930s and early 1940s. Studios like Republic and Universal churned out “chapter plays” that featured superheroes, detectives, cowboys and space adventures. Titles like Flash Gordon, The Phantom Creeps and Batman became Saturday matinee staples for kids.
These were shorter, punchier, and aimed at younger audiences, but the core formula stayed the same with the cliffhanger endings, recurring villains and serialized suspense.
By the late 1940s and early 1950s, theatrical serials began to fade. Television was rising and with it came a new home for episodic storytelling. Theaters shifted toward longer features. Cartoons, newsreels and shorts still played with movies into the 1950s, but serialized storytelling had mostly packed its bags and moved to the small screen.
Today’s streaming shows, cable thrillers and genre anthologies all carry the serial spirit. The endless arcs of Breaking Bad, the week-to-week suspense of True Detective, the obsessive unraveling of American Horror Story echoes the structure and emotional pull of early silent film serials. Even the explosion of multi-part documentaries and serialized podcasts can trace their roots back to this format.
What started as flickering black and white reels became a blueprint for how we tell stories, build worlds and keep people talking. And it all began with a masked villain, a daring heroine and a promise at the end of every episode that said: To be continued.
AND To Be Continued… in Real Life
More than a century later, Les Vampires is still daring us to look closer and challenging what a story can do. This amazing series is still slinking across the screen with secrets, codes and a criminal queen who never needed saving. And for the first time, I get to see all ten parts the way they were meant to be seen, on a big screen. In a dark theater and surrounded by people who are just as curious and excited as I am.
This isn’t just a movie marathon. It’s a resurrection and a chance to experience the roots of modern storytelling in their rawest and most experimental form. These serials were the blueprint for how we watch, how we wait and how we fall headfirst into a story that refuses to wrap itself up in one sitting. This is the map to rooting for that anti-hero we’ve come to love.
So if you’ve never seen a silent film serial before, now’s your chance. Join Hollywoodland News at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (and one of our most favorite places in all of Los Angeles) on July 6 and let Les Vampires pull you into its underworld.
Come for the crime ring and stay for the history. And you will leave knowing that long before Netflix, cliffhangers were already doing their job one black and white frame at a time.
This film is screening at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on July 6 and repeating on July 13 Tickets start at $5 and it’s $15 for the entire day. Yes, all 480 minutes, all ten episodes on a Sunday afternoon. You can purchase tickets from the Academy Museum here.
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