To watch "The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris" today is an experience that transcends mere cinematic viewing; it is an act of media archaeology, an immersion in a torrential flow of images that seems to spring directly from the collective subconscious of an era on the brink of the abyss. Forget the three-act structure, character psychology, narrative coherence as we understand it. Louis Feuillade’s magnum opus, a ten-episode serial shot between 1915 and 1916, is not a film; it is a nearly seven-hour-long hallucination, an urban epic poem written in the black ink of the Parisian night and the silver nitrate of the film stock. It is the progenitor not only of the conspiracy thriller, but of the very idea of serialised narrative, a "binge-watching" experience avant la lettre for an audience whose daily reality was fragmented by the senselessness of the Great War.

While Europe was bleeding out in the trenches, Feuillade offered Parisians an escape that, paradoxically, mirrored the chaos of the world outside. The threat in "The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris" is not an external enemy, an invading army, but an internal cancer, a secret society of bourgeois criminals operating under a patina of respectability. The Vampires are not creatures of the night with fangs and capes, but bankers, opera singers, moneylenders, and concierges. Their vampirism is social and economic: they drain the lifeblood of the Third Republic through theft, murder, and blackmail. The title itself is a brilliant red herring and a powerful metaphor: the true monster is not the supernatural, but modernity itself, with its amorality, its speed, and its ability to mask the abyss behind a façade of normalcy.

At the centre of this narrative vortex, which unfolds with the feverish logic of a penny dreadful by Eugène Sue or a Fantômas adventure, we find two opposing forces. On one side is the journalist Philippe Guérande, our hero. He is the embodiment of bourgeois rationality, a tenacious sleuth but, let’s face it, a bit bland. He is our point of reference, but he is not the film’s beating heart. His personal Watson, the hilarious Mazamette, a redeemed ex-Vampire, provides an almost Dickensian comic counterpoint, an anchor of humanity in a sea of deadly intrigue. But the true engine of the film, its immortal icon, its jolt of pure energy, is Irma Vep.

Played by the magnetic Musidora, Irma Vep (a transparent anagram of vampire) is an archetype that cinema would spend the next century trying to replicate. She is the primordial femme fatale, a flash of darkness and desire. When she dons her iconic black silk catsuit to move, sinuous and lethal, across the rooftops of Paris, she is no longer a character; she is an idea. She is a living hieroglyph, an abstraction of danger and seduction. She is Bob Kane’s Catwoman fifty years ahead of her time, Pabst’s Lulu without the burden of victimhood, an embodiment of the anarchic instinct that the Surrealists, not coincidentally, would come to idolize. André Breton and Louis Aragon saw in "The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris", and especially in Irma Vep, the convulsive beauty, the involuntary poetry that springs from chance and chaos, the perfect manifestation of the marvellous bursting into the everyday. Her presence is a fracture in the fabric of the real, an ink blot that expands to engulf the screen.

Feuillade’s style, often dismissed as "primitive" or theatrical, is in fact the key to the film’s unsettling power. His camera is an impassive, almost documentary-like observer. He uses fixed shots, a depth of field that allows the action to unfold on multiple planes simultaneously, and, above all, he shoots in real locations. This choice is fundamental: the implacable realism of 1915 Paris (the streets, the apartments, the theatres) serves as a backdrop for events that are utterly mad and incredible. A cannon emerging from a window to blow up a bank, soporific gas seeping through walls, poisoned rings, decapitations, and daring escapes. It is this short circuit between the banal and the fantastic that generates a unique atmosphere, a "magical realism" that anticipates the cinema of Buñuel or Rivette (whose entire oeuvre is a tribute to Feuillade’s Parisian psychogeography) by decades. The city is not a mere set, but a labyrinth of possibilities, an organism with a circulatory system of secret passages, cellars, and rooftops—a character in its own right whose external topography mirrors the intricate inner map of its inhabitants.

The narrative itself, with its digressions, its characters who appear and disappear, its plot twists that seem improvised on the spot (and likely were, given the speed of production), is not a flaw but the very essence of the work. "The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris" does not have the compactness of a Flaubert novel, but the sprawling, tentacular expansiveness of Joyce’s Ulysses. It is a world-work that devours different genres—the detective story, comedy, the thriller, adventure—and spews them back out in a new, hybrid form. The plot, if one were to trace it, concerns Guérande’s struggle to unmask the Vampires, led first by the Grand Vampire and later by the lethal Moreno, but this is merely the red thread guiding us through a series of tableaux vivants of extraordinary visual and imaginative power.

The legacy of "The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris" is incalculable. Fritz Lang, with his Dr. Mabuse, grasped and elevated its idea of the criminal conspiracy as a mirror to the social pathology of the Weimar Republic. Alfred Hitchcock absorbed its lesson on building suspense through the irruption of the absurd into the normal. The entire conspiracy thriller genre, from Three Days of the Condor to The Parallax View, is indebted to Feuillade’s paranoid vision of a society where no one is who they seem and power operates in the shadows. And, of course, its influence on television serials is self-evident: the intertwining subplots, the cliffhangers at the end of each "episode," the construction of an expanded narrative universe are all elements we take for granted today, but which find one of their earliest and purest formulations here. Olivier Assayas, with his 1996 film Irma Vep and the subsequent miniseries, did nothing less than make this debt explicit, creating a meta-textual work that reflects on the persistence of this myth, on its phantasmagorical charge that still haunts filmmakers today.

To watch "The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris" is to surrender to a lucid dream, to accept getting lost in a labyrinth of stories that generate one another with no apparent destination beyond the pure pleasure of storytelling. It is cinema in its nascent state, and yet it contains within it the seeds of everything that would come after. It is a historical artefact and, at the same time, a work of startling modernity, a nocturnal epic that reminds us that long before superheroes and shared universes, there was a woman in a black catsuit dancing across the rooftops of Paris, embodying the sublime and terrifying poetry of chaos.