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Theda Bara?

?The Vamp? of the Silent Screen


?? Florenz Ziegfeld

The queen of the vamps was one of America?s most mysterious movie stars ? Theda Bara. The magnetic actress, with her steely gaze and jet-black hair, was the prototype for a movie bad girl. She shook convention so dramatically that a critic called her a ?flaming comet of the cinema firmament.?

Bara might be the most significant celebrity pioneer whose movies you?ve never seen. She was the movie industry?s first sex symbol; the first femme fatale; the first silent film actress to have a fictional identity invented for her by publicists and sold through a receptive media to a public who was happy to be conned; and she might have been America?s first homegrown goth.


Progressive, liberated women were clearly so?frightening?one hundred years ago?that equating them to undead, bloodthirsty creatures borne of Satan didn?t seem so unusual.

In the late 1910s, women were on the verge of winning the right to equal representation in the voting booth. Women were asserting power in unions, and, in the wake of disasters like the?Triangle Factory Fire, those unions were influencing government policy. They were taking control of their destinies, their fortunes, even their sexuality (Margaret Sanger?s first birth control clinic opened in 1916).

This surging independence came just as the entertainment industry heralded the female form as one of its primary attractions. Ziegfeld?s sassy, flesh-filled?Follies?? and its many imitators ? defined the Broadway stage, mixing music, sex and glamour with a morality-shattering frankness.


Combine the power of liberation with the erotic potential of cinema, and in the late 1910s, you got the vampire (or as we would come to know, the ?vamp?).

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