10 Lost Horror Movies You Can't Watch
8. Alraune
Ten years before the highly successful 1928 horror movie Alraune came a Hungarian adaptation to which very little information exists at all. We know it does exist because posters and playbills can still be found, but the movie has completely vanished off of the face of the earth.
From what information that does exist, the 1918 version of Alraune was much more faithful to the original novel published in 1911 by Hanns Heinz Ewers, where a woman is impregnated by a mandrake root by a mad scientist, and gives birth to a beautiful but demonic child.
Most of the information about this movie is found in David Wingrove’s Science Fiction Film Source Book, and it states that it was directed by two men: Michael Curtiz and Edmund Fritz. Edmund Fritz didn’t go on to do much after Alraune, but Michael Curtiz left a legacy in Hollywood due to the fact he directed the iconic Casablanca.
Thus, there is strong evidence that this version of Alraune exists, it is just a mystery as to where any surviving print of it can be found; if it did exist, that is.