Lon Chaney's grinning, jagged-toothed face from London After Midnight is one of the most iconic images in horror history, yet no one alive has seen the film. This episode digs into the world of lost films: the Library of Congress estimate that around 75 percent of silent-era movies have perished, the Film Foundation's figure that over 90 percent of American films made before 1929 are gone, and the surprising claim that half of all American sound films from 1927 to 1950 are lost too. We trace how a mercenary studio mindset treated movies as disposable carnival attractions, how prints were sold to scrap dealers for their silver content or chopped into toy reels, and how a copyright loophole let the Library of Congress hand flammable reels right back to studios that incinerated them.

From there we get into the chemistry of nitrate film, a gunp ...