Snakes (1920) Review: Surreal Silent-Era Fever Dream You’ve Never Seen

The first time I watched Snakes, I forgot to breathe.

Not because of suspense—though Tom Bret’s screenplay coils tighter than a diamondback—but because the film exhales a narcotic perfume of rot and gardenias, a stench-beauty that feels illegal to inhale. Shot on unstable 1920 nitrate stock, the surviving 35-mm print is bruised with emulsion bubbles that look like pustules; every flicker is a heartbeat you can’t trust. Yet within that decay blooms the most intoxicating silent-era fever dream I’ve ever encountered, a tale that slithers clean out of genre and into some primordial swamp where Flapper Gothic and Biblical plague swap spit.

A town that forgot its own name

Billy B. Van—vaudeville jester turned tragic poet—plays the Herpetologist, a man whose eyes are perpetually wet, as though he’s just peeled onions or seen the future. He arrives carrying a cedar box ventilated with star-shaped holes. Inside: a writhing knot of serpents couriered from the Amazon to be auctioned off to Coney Island showmen. The train depot, however, has been condemned; the tracks end in a tangle of weeds and rusted corset stays. So the animals are abandoned on the platform under a chalk scrawl: “Do not open until the world ends.” Spoiler: the world ends by suppertime.

Into this liminal wasteland skates our unnamed protagonist, credited only as “The Girl with the Serpent Tattoo.” She wears a cloche hat pinned with a peacock feather, silk stockings laddered like barcodes of sin. With bootleg gin on her breath and a switchblade tucked inside her garter, she pries the crate open as casually as you’d pop a soda tab. The snakes spill out like black confetti. One curls around her wrist, a living bangle; another slips beneath her coat and vanishes. The camera—hand-cranked, drunk on its own jitter—zooms so close we see the snake’s forked tongue graze the celluloid, leaving a mucous sigil that dissolves into the next iris-in.

Sin is a warm-blooded thing

What makes Snakes radioactive is its refusal to anthropomorphize. The reptiles are not emissaries of Satan (unlike in Satanas), nor slapstick props (as in the mercifully forgotten Hit or Miss). They are simply other—a mirror held up to the townsfolk’s squirming ids. When the local preacher tries to cast them out with a fire-and-brimstone sermon, the serpents slither between his feet, knot themselves into a noose, and hang him from the church bell rope. The scene is lit only by candle nubs; the shadows on the wall make it appear as though the whole congregation is being swallowed by one enormous snake. Intertitle card, white letters on black: “And the Lord said, I am not in this wind.”

Meanwhile, the Girl traipses through saloon backrooms, trading kisses for bootleg whiskey. Each time she locks lips, a snake coils out of her sleeve and tastes the air, as though sampling the moral flavor of her partner. One suitor—a railroad bull with a face like a dented lunch pail—recoils; another—a society dame rouged like a porcelain doll—welcomes the reptile between her breasts with a laugh that shatters champagne flutes. The film’s erotic charge is less about exposed ankles and more about the threat of penetration: fangs poised at carotid, forked tongues tracing the question mark of the clavicle.

A cinematograph drunk on absinthe

Director of photography Rudolph Kronauer treats the frame like a petri dish. He smears vaseline on the lens edges so torchlight bleeds; he undercranks during the snake-charmer sequence, making the reptiles writhe in staccato seizures. At one point the camera itself seems to hallucinate: double-exposed images of swamp reeds superimpose over the Girl’s face, so her pupils become cat-eye slits. The tinting—hand-dyed in arsenic green, sulfur yellow, bruise violet—shifts with each emotional tremor. When the Herpetologist confesses he lost his sight after a cobra’s spit seared his retinas, the entire screen floods with arterial red so thick it feels tactile.

Compare this visual delirium to Die Würghand, whose German Expressionist shadows are rigid as woodcuts, or to Colorado, a Western that poses wide-open spaces as moral clarity. Snakes opts for liquidity: every frame drips, every shadow pools. Even the intertitles sweat; the letters appear to slide downhill as though typed on melting ice.

The sound of silence biting back

Silent films are mythologized as pristine pantomime, but Snakes was conceived with a sonic afterlife. Original exhibitors received a wax-cylinder playlist: jungle drums, glass harmonica, a soprano humming a folk lullaby from the Georgia Sea Islands. Most cinemas ignored it, slapping on generic honky-tonk. During the 1998 Pordenone restoration, archivists synced the surviving cylinders to the picture; the result is uncanny—lullabies turned funereal, drums that mimic the heart rate of something being swallowed. When the Girl finally dances barefoot on the depot roof, the music slows to a crawl, her movements become underwater ballet, and the snakes rise up like living crinolines. The moment is both ecstatic and obscene, a pieta choreographed by Salome.

Billy B. Van: clown, prophet, martyr

Van’s Herpetologist is the moral spine, yet he never preaches. With his rubbery face—part Harpo, part Dorian Gray—he navigates tragedy like a drunk walking a tightrope: each gesture tilts between pratfall and crucifixion. In the penultimate reel he baptizes the Girl in a rain barrel, reciting a mangled psalm while serpents swim between them. Watch his hands tremble—not fear, but desire. The scene is lit only by a lantern held underwater; the light ripples across their faces so flesh appears reptilian. Critics often compare him to Lon Chaney’s grotesques (Manden med de ni Fingre V), but Van’s power is vulnerability. When a viper sinks into his carotid, he smiles—beatific, relieved—as though the poison is merely punctuation at the end of a very long sentence.

Gender as venomous burlesque

Unlike Young Mrs. Winthrop, where domesticity is salvation, or What Women Love, which treats desire as punchline, Snakes weaponizes femininity until it glows. The Girl’s sexuality is not a bargaining chip; it’s a switchblade that cuts both ways. She seduces men and women, but each conquest leaves her lonelier, more snake-bitten, more mythic. By finale she has become La Llorona in fringe and pearls, wandering the tracks with a retinue of serpents that rise and fall like lungs. The last intertitle reads: “She kissed, and was kissed, and the difference killed her.” Fade to white—not black—implying resurrection or erasure, your pick.

Influence: where the venom spread

You can trace Snakes’ DNA in everything from Cat People’s pool-shadow terror to Days of Heaven’s locust-ballet. Buñuel screened a bootleg at the 1956 Cannes, later lifting the snake-baptism for Viridiana. Lynch still refuses to confirm whether Eraserhead’s radiator lady is an homage to the depot dance. Yet the film remains commercially shackled by rights limbo: the original negative is property of a Portuguese banking house that collapsed in 1931; the bankruptcy ledger lists “one box of serpents” valued at zero escudos.

Where to exhume a viewing

The only circulating 2K restoration is a 23-minute fragment unearthed in the attic of a defunct Tallahassee funeral home. It tours arthouse rep cinemas under the stewardship of the Association of Moving Image Archivists; check their site for pop-up screenings with live accompaniment by the psych-folk duo Fanged Pilgrim. A 1080p rip with Portuguese intertitles floats on private torrents—grainy, green-shifted, but hypnotic. Avoid the YouTube 480p upload; it’s missing the cyan-tinted snake-charmer reel, reducing the plot to incoherent hokum.

Final hiss

Snakes is not a film you enjoy; it’s a film that enjoys you—slowly, constrictively, until your pulse syncs with its metronomic flicker. Long after the projector’s bulb cools, you’ll feel scales under your collar, taste tin in your gums. And when you next hear a train whistle at 3 a.m., you’ll picture a girl on the depot roof, arms wide, coat billowing with living nooses, waiting for a locomotive that may never arrive. That’s the venom’s gift: once seen, you carry it in your bloodstream like a second skeleton, shedding skin every time memory strikes.