The Vampyr: A Soap Opera

BBC TV musical film based in an opera which as inspired by the first modern vampire published story ever. The movie is adapted to modern days and all dialogues but narration are sung as in opera.

The original story has been written by John William Polidori but was miscredited, while published in 1819 and often ever since, to Lord Byron, who had written a fragment of a similar story but quit without finishing it. Both met Mary Wollstonecraft, her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont in Switzerland in June 1816. In that occasion, Byron suggested that each one wrote a ghost story. That amusing contest would enter the history of world literature, as Mary Shelley developed a story that would originate her Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote some ghost stories that would also eventually be published besides reviewing Mary's draft, Byron wrote his aforementioned fragment with a character named Augustus Darvell, and Polidori would get that character and merge him with a parody of Byron himself in order to create Lord Ruthven, the core character in what would be the first published modern vampire story in English, The Vampyre.

That tale by Polidori would be adapted as a play named Der Vampir oder die Totenbraut by Heinrich Ludwig Ritter in 1821, and this would be the basis for the libretto Wilhelm August Wohlbrück would write for his brother-in-law Heinrich Marschner's opera Der Vampyr, firstly performed in 1828.

This TV film is a 1992 "modernized" adaptation of that opera. It is quite sluggish and boring. I wished it were a plain film version of the original story written by Polidori and born in the very night Frankenstein and the modern Prometheus have also been created.