 The negative was lost, and there were no prints that are known to exist, and anyone who's ever seen the film is dead. So that's how you lose a movie, and how do you make a remake of a lost movie? There are photographs, and there was a continuity script, and there are articles that people wrote about the film when it came out, just like London After Midnight, which is another Lon Chaney film, which is also lost, famously lost.