In 2014, an anonymous buyer paid $478,000 for a movie poster advertising a film no living person has seen. That film is London After Midnight, the 1927 silent mystery horror directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney as the terrifying Man in the Beaver Hat. This episode explores why this lost film became the holy grail of vanished cinema and how its destruction transformed it into an enduring myth.

We walk through the bizarre plot, the live armadillos on set, Chaney's agonizing eye-wire makeup, and the box office success that made it MGM's most profitable Chaney-Browning collaboration. Then we examine how the last surviving print burned in the 1965 MGM Vault 7 fire, and the surprising historian consensus that the film may be far more revered than it actually deserved.

• Why cellulose nitrate film stock was chemically related  ...