In an earlier Gomez de la Serna novel, El incongruente (1922), a movie-viewing protagonist interacts with the characters on screen.

The camera lens took the moviegoer to private places and held images in tantalizing close-ups and freeze shots. Silent film's popularity relied greatly on the enduring gaze, and the new movie houses of the 1910s and '20s provided the perfect peeping redoubt for spectators to contemplate erotic images with anonymity and impunity. There, they let their imaginations go, although the resulting geek fantasies are self-censored to Disney-like standards. In Quiroga's stories, the male spectators sit alone in the dark and enjoy specular access to the starlets on screen. The chapters proceed in choppy, syncopated fashion, an indubitable mimic of film. The book abounds with allusions to then current stars, their foibles, scandals, and successes. (Of course, the Uruguayan is better known for his somber jungle fiction that takes place in the untamed upper reaches of the Parana River, near the tripartite border of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, and generally involves death or insanity.) Meanwhile, Gomez de la Serna wrote Cinelandia (1923)-a novel that satirizes and celebrates the industry's most peculiar aspects. He also penned more than sixty movie columns, which have been reprinted in Horacio Quiroga: Arte y lenguaje del cine. Quiroga's four 'Hollywood stories' have generally gone unnoticed, or are considered a frothy departure. Both set their highly stylized movie tales on the studio grounds of Tinseltown itself or within the confines of cinemas around the world. Their fiction thematically incorporates the celluloid art, its makers, actors, and spectators, its inherent voyeurism, and its fragmentary structure. During the Silent Film Era, two important writers initiate a round of filmic narrative: Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937, Uruguay) and Ramon Gomez de la Serna (1888-1963, Spain).

El vampiro by Horacio Quiroga