This Halloween marks the 90th anniversary of one of the most influential films in horror history. Cinema Paradiso invites you, therefore, to get your teeth into Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), as well as some of the other tempting titles you can watch if you enjoyed this enduringly creepy gothic masterpiece.
Released by Universal Studios, Dracula wasn't the first horror movie made in Hollywood. Indeed, director Tod Browning had made some chilling silent tales with Lon Chaney, the master of disguise who would be played by James Cagney in Joseph Pevney's biopic, Man of a Thousand Faces (1957).
Browning's take on Bram Stoker's novel was also heavily influenced by German Expressionism, which Cinema Paradiso examined in the article, 100 Years of German Expressionism. But this was the first official version of the 1897 bestseller and, by bringing terror into the talkie era, it helped reinforce the foundations of a genre that continues to flourish almost a century later.
Page, Stage and Scream
By day the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London's West End, Dubliner Bram Stoker had started writing fiction in 1875. It wasn't until the 1890s, however, that he began publishing books on a regular basis. Following on from The Snake's Pass (1890), The Watter's Mou' and The Shoulder of Shasta (both 1895), Dracula appeared in 1897, as an epistolary account of the encounters between a Transylvanian count and an English solicitor and a Dutch doctor.
Academics still debate the influence on the text of such historical figures as Wallachian voivode Vlad Draculea and Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory. The latter has appeared on screen on numerous occasions, with Cinema Paradiso users being able to access the insinuating performances of Ingrid Pitt in Peter Sasdy's Countess Dracula (1970), Delphine Seyrig in Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness (1971), Paloma Picasso in Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales (1974), Chantal Contouri in Rod Hardy's Thirst (1979), and Anna Friel in Juraj Jakubisco's Bathory: Countess of Blood (2008).
Another claimed source of inspiration for Stoker was 'Carmilla', a story in compatriot J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly (1872). A lesbian seductress, Countess of Karnstein has also been portrayed on several occasions, most notably by Ingrid Pitt in Roy Ward Baker's The Vampire Lovers (1970), Sylvia Colloca in Phil Claydon's Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009) and Kylie Brown in Brent Wood's The Unwanted (2014). However, the novella also impacted upon Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) and the Hammer duo of Jimmy Sangster's Lust For a Vampire and John Hough's Twins of Evil (both 1971).
Back in Victorian London, Stoker sought to persuade his boss, the great actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, to stage an adaptation of Dracula in 1899. However, Irving rejected the offer and it wasn't until 1921 that German film producer Albin Grau realised the first dramatisation. although he had to break the law in order to do so.
While serving in Serbia during the Great War, Grau had met a farmer who had claimed that his father was a vampire who existed on the blood of the living. Teaming with Enrico Dieckmann, Grau formed Prana-Film and hired Austrian actor-director Henrik Galeen to produce a screenplay about the undead. As Prana had failed in its bid to secure the rights to Stoker's tome, Galeen - who had collaborated with Paul Wegener on the pioneering German horror, The Golem in 1915 - decided to bowdlerise the text in creating Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922) for rising director F.W. Murnau.
The vampire's name was changed to Count Orlok and all mention of Professor Van Helsing was removed. But Stoker's impecunious widow, Florence Balcombe, received an anonymous missive from Berlin containing the programme from the premiere of Murnau's feature, which boasted that it had been 'freely adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula'. She promptly sued for copyright infringement and won her case in 1925, with the judge ordering that all existing copies of the film be destroyed. However, too many had been distributed worldwide for the bankrupted Prana to comply with the ruling and, mercifully, Murnau's masterpiece survived.
By the time Nosferatu was eventually seen by US audiences in 1929, a play based on Stoker's text had taken the West End and Broadway by storm. Written over four weeks while he was recovering from a cold, Hamilton Deane's Dracula rearranged the source's various diary entries, letters and newspaper cuttings into a linear narrative. It opened at the Grand Theatre, Derby in 1924 before coming to London in 1927, with Deane as Van Helsing and the title role going to Raymond Huntley, who went on to become a leading character player in British films. Some 75 of his performances can be found via the Cinema Paradiso searchline. But might we recommend features like Basil Dearden's They Came to a City (1944), Robert Day's The Green Man (1956) and Terence Fisher's The Mummy (1959), and the TV series, That's Your Funeral (1970-71) and Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), in which he played the Bellamy family solicitor, Sir Geoffrey Dillon.
Deane had been granted the rights, as he had been a former neighbour of the Stokers in Dublin, as well as a member of Irving's stock company. But, when American producer Horace Liveright pitched to transfer the show to the Great White Way, Deane decided it needed Americanising. He entrusted the task to playwright John L. Balderston and the play proved a huge success, breaking box-office records across the country over the next two years. Huntley returned for the touring show, but he passed on the Broadway lead and later joked, 'I have always considered the role of Count Dracula to have been an indiscretion of my youth.'
Universal Appeal
Horace Liveright died before he could pay Florence Balcombe the full monies to which she was entitled. Consequently, even though the stage plays had made $2 million by 1930, she readily responded to a request from Hollywood mogul Carl Laemmle, Jr. to rework both the novel and its stage derivations as a motion picture.
Laemmle paid $40,000 for the rights to the novel and the plays. His father had considered adapting Dracula back in 1915 and strong rumours had circulated in 1920 that Lon Chaney was being lined up to headline for director Tod Browning. But these proved to be no more reliable than 1928 speculation that Conrad Veidt was being considered to play the count or that Chaney was preparing to double up as Dracula and Van Helsing in the same film.
Following the success of his old dark house chiller, The Cat and the Canary (1927) - which was remade by Elliott Nugent in 1939 and Radley Metzger in 1979 - Paul Leni became associated with the project. However, both he and Chaney had died by the time Junior Laemmle finally greenlit the Stoker story as part of a raft of prestige pictures designed to haul the studio out of the doldrums following the Wall Street Crash of October 1929.
Having returned to Universal after a profitable spell at MGM, Browning was the natural choice to direct, as he had flirted with the subject of vampirism in the now-lost Chaney vehicle, London After Midnight (1927). Moreover, his talkie debut, The Thirteenth Chair (1929), had featured Bela Lugosi, who had played Dracula 261 times on Broadway before deciding to quit the touring production and resume a film career that had started in Germany after he had been forced to flee his native Hungary after the 1919 revolution.
Born in Budapest and a decorated wartime captain with an army ski patrol, the 6ft 1in Lugosi had an imposing screen presence and his thick accent enabled him to see off competition from John Wray. Paul Muni, Chester Morris, William Courtenay and Ian Keith to reunite with Edward Van Sloan and Herbert Bunston, as they reprised their stage roles of Professor Abraham Van Helsing and Dr Seward. Lew Ayres and Robert Ames declined the part of Jonathan Harker before it was taken by David Manners, while contract wrangles meant that Mary Nolan and Jeannette Loff were respectively replaced as Mina Holmwood and Lucy Westenra from the stage production by Helen Chandler and Frances Dade.
While casting proved relatively easy, the screenplay went through several drafts before Laemmle was finally satisfied. Hired to produce a treatment that combined elements from both the book and the plays, Fritz Stephani also borrowed the odd idea from Nosferatu. However, he was replaced by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louis Bromfield, who opted to stick closer to Stoker before being teamed on another rewrite with Dudley Murphy, a talented avant-garde film-maker who had made the influential Ballet mécanique (1924) with French artist Fernand Léger.
It's suspected that Murphy was primarily responsible for the first script, which downplayed the role of Harker and placed more emphasis on the asylum patient, Renfield, who would be brilliantly played by Dwight Frye. Murphy might even have had a hand in the final shooting script, along with Browning. But the sole on-screen credit went to Garrett Fort, a jobbing writer who had earned plaudits for his work on Rouben Mamoulian's landmark talkie, Applause (1929). Despite working on Lugosi's The Midnight Girl (1925) and Browning's sound remake of his own 1920 Chaney silent, Outside the Law (1930), Fort had no prior connection with horror. But he subsequently became 'a specialist in sin and jitters', thanks to James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Lambert Hillyer's Dracula's Daughter (1936).
Out for the Count
Worried about falling foul of the Hays Office that controlled Hollywood's system of self-censorship, Junior Laemmle had signed off a rather tame scenario and Browning soon started extemporising after filming commenced on 29 September 1930. Despite being an alcoholic, Browning had a reputation for authenticity and meticulous preparation. Yet, curiously, he discarded script instructions to show the vampire's fangs and similarly avoided the depiction of puncture wounds on the victims' necks. This has caused some critics to accuse Browning of being lazy on set. Indeed, a remark by David Manners has led some to conclude that Browning was so disengaged that Austrian cinematographer Karl Freund was responsible for much of the direction.
A veteran of such European classics as Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael, F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (both 1924), E.A. Dupont's Variety, Murnau's Tartuffe (both 1925) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), Freund had enough to do lighting the sets designed by British art director Charles D. Hall and his Dutch assistants Herman and John Hoffman Rosse, who raided the Universal backlot to create Castle Dracula and Carfax Abbey. Moreover, Lugosi was in no doubt who helped him stop projecting to the back row of the gallery. 'I played the role of Dracula for two years on the stage,' he explained, 'and in this one role I found that I have become thoroughly settled in the technique of the stage; and not of the screen. But, thanks to my director, I am “unlearning” fast.'
In fact, Browning kept the production going after Universal posted losses of $146,340 and Junior demanded cutbacks. Forced to compromise his vision, Browning trimmed the scenes aboard the ship and lost the 'Woman in White' cemetery sequence. What's more, he even found time to shoot a silent version with a camera placed alongside Freund's, as not all American cinemas had been wired for sound. Consequently, Laemmle commissioned writer Gardner Bradford to compose 200 intertitles, the majority of which quoted directly from the dialogue.
Browning was not the only director using the sets, however, as they were also occupied at night. The transition to talkies had prompted the studios to produce foreign-language versions of their more prestigious pictures and Laemmle had invited George Melford to shoot a Spanish variation of Dracula, starring Carlos Villarías and Lupita Tovar. Even though Melford borrowed some of Browning's footage to keep costs down, this was no mere exercise in shot-for-shot duplication. Indeed, Melford and cinematographer George Robinson showed Tovar biting a victim on the neck.
Some have suggested that Melford's version is superior to Browning's. In truth, it's inferior, but intriguingly different. Villarías lacks Lugosi's sense of menace, while the over-reliance on proscenium framing constricts the action. Nevertheless, Melford delivered his 104-minute picture for $68,750, while Browning's 75-minute version wrapped after 42 days some $14,000 under budget. And, even though he was a week over schedule, his timing couldn't have been better, as Helen Chandler was hospitalised on 15 November to have her long-grumbling appendix removed.
'Dracula Never Ends'
When Universal incurred losses of $2.2 million in 1930, Carl Laemmle, Senior resumed control of his studio on 5 January 1931. Following lukewarm preview screenings, three cuts were required from editor Milton Carruth before Laemmle passed Dracula for its premiere at the Roxy in New York on 12 February.
Oddly, the studio declined to promote it as a horror film and used taglines like 'The story of the strangest passion the world has ever known,' 'He lived on the kisses of youth,' and 'The kiss no woman can resist' in order to boost it as a romantic thriller. Exhibitors across the country took a different tack, employing coloured spotlights, flying bats and cackling caped figures rushing through the auditorium to generate a suitably eerie atmosphere before screenings. Their efforts paid off, as Dracula grossed around $700,000 and helped put Universal back in the black.
The reviews were largely positive and the front office began contemplating a sequel. However, Browning and Lugosi's contracts had expired and the studio chose to team James Whale and Boris Karloff on Frankenstein, instead. Lugosi informed the press, 'When I finish this picture, if it is possible to avoid it, I shall play Dracula no more. No. Never!' But he was later forced to concede: 'Dracula never ends. I don't know whether I should call it a fortune or a curse, but it never ends.' Consequently, he reunited with Browning at MGM for Mark of the Vampire (1935) and Universal had to do without Lugosi in Dracula's Daughter, despite Van Sloan returning as Van Helsing in a follow-on story that, intriguingly, was concocted by Balderson and Fort.
Although it was frequently revived - albeit with Renfield's death scream and Dracula's moan of anguish on being staked having been cut by Joseph Breen's Production Code Administration in 1938 - the film started coming in for negative criticism shortly before it debuted on television in 1957. The release of home entertainment editions only intensified the accusations that the action was docile and that Browning's direction was lacklustre and sloppy.
Several critics insisted that the restorations released in 1999 and 2012 only partially rectified the situation. Yet nothing sends a shiver down the spine quite like the first sight of Lugosi (in the green Jack Pierce make-up that he always insisted on applying himself) welcoming Frye to his Transylvanian bastion with the macabre words: 'Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.'
Life After the Undead
They got their money's worth in Golden Age Hollywood. Despite becoming an instant icon, Bela Lugosi was made to work hard by the major studios before being ushered on to Poverty Row. In the silent era, he might have been able to capitalise on his newfound stardom by playing exotic romantic leads. But his thick Hungarian accent limited his range and, while he proved himself to be a deft comedian opposite Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), he became synonymous with horror, which wasn't considered a respectable genre in the 1930s.
Lugosi was well used by Robert Florey in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edward Halperin in White Zombies and Erle C. Kenton in Island of Lost Souls (all 1932) and formed a partnership of sorts over eight films with Boris Karloff. Cinema Paradiso has Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934), Louis Friedlander's The Raven (1935), Rowland V. Lee's Son of Frankenstein (1939), Arthur Lubin's Black Friday (1940) and Robert Wise's Val Lewton-produced classic, The Body Snatcher (1945), on its books. But it's not currently possible to see Karl Freund's Gift of Gab (1934), Lambert Hillyer's The Invisible Ray (1936) and David Butler's You'll Find Out (1940), two of which saw the duo in guest roles.
But Lugosi's decision to turn down the Monster in James Whale's Frankenstein cost him dear and, having earned only $3500 for playing Dracula, he had to declare himself bankrupt in 1932. When it suited them, Universal could show loyalty by offering Lugosi parts in Albert S. Rogell's The Black Cat, George Waggner's The Wolf Man (both 1941), Erle C. Kenton's The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and Roy William Neill's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), in which Lugosi played the Monster. But he often had to accept whatever was offered him in the B-Hive.
Lugosi made a rare colour appearance in Christy Cabanne's Cinecolor shocker, Scared to Death (1947), and donned the count's cape one more time in Charles Barton's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). He found himself in Blighty in Walter Summers's The Dark Eyes of London (1939) and John Gilling's Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on Renown's The Old Mother Riley Collection. But chronic back pain caused him to become hooked to morphine and methadone and worthwhile roles started drying up as he became increasingly incapacitated.
Nevertheless, he found a friend in Z-grade director Edward D. Wood, Jr., who cast him in Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955) and Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957). The latter included archive footage and was posthumously released, as Tim Burton reveals in his affectionate biopic, Ed Wood (1994), which earned Martin Landau the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Lugosi.
Just because we've not highlighted them here, don't go thinking the other Lugosi titles available from Cinema Paradiso aren't worth seeing. They may not always make the most of his talents, but they are a must for completists and cult aficionados and you might well discover a new guilty pleasure amongst the likes of Ford Beebe's Night Monster, Wallace Fox's The Corpse Vanishes, William Nigh's Black Dragons (all 1942) and William Beaudine's Voodoo Man (1944).
Fangs For the Memory
Although Lugosi's caped shadow will forever hang over Count Dracula, several other actors have got their teeth into the role over the last nine decades, including fellow Hungarian Erik Vanko, who took the lead in Károly Lajthay's Dracula's Death (1921). Apart from the character name, however, this long-lost short actually has no connection with Bram Stoker's novel. Indeed, with its asylum setting, the narrative is closer in tone to Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920).
As one might expect, Cinema Paradiso has a wide selection of these Transylvanian excursions, starting with Robert Siodmak's Son of Dracula (1943), which employed an on-screen man-to-bat transformation for the first time, as Count Alucard (Lon Chaney, Jr.) travels to New Orleans to marry the occult-obsessed Katherine Caldwell (Louise Albritton). Chaney would become a key member of the Universal horror ensemble. But John Carradine became the first actor to play the bloodsucking count twice, as he is revived by Gustav Neumann (Boris Karloff) in The House of Frankenstein (1944) and seeks a cure for vampirism from Dr Franz Edelman (Onslow Stevens) in House of Dracula (1945), which were both directed by Erle C. Kenton.
Following a detour to Turkey for Mehmet Muhtar's Dracula in Istanbul (1953), we come to Bray Studios, where Christopher Lee would become a sex symbol for his dangerously alluring turn in Terence Fisher's Dracula (1957). Photographed in lurid Technicolor by Jack Asher and with Peter Cushing proving a redoubtable Van Helsing, this Hammer gem changed the face of cinematic horror. Yet almost a decade passed before Lee could be coaxed into a sequel, Fisher's Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966), although only two years were to elapse before he returned in Freddie Francis's Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968).
Suddenly, Lee seemed to be permanently baring his fangs, as he followed a cameo in Joseph McGrath's The Magic Christian (1969) with the leads in Peter Sasdy's Taste the Blood of Dracula and Roy Ward Baker's Scars of Dracula. He also travelled to Spain to double up in Jess Franco's Count Dracula and Pere Portabella's Vampir Cuadecuc (all 1970), which were shot on the same sets. Two years later, Lee signed up for Alan Gibson's Dracula A.D. 1972, in which the vampire is summoned by London hipster Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame).
He reunited with Gibson on The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), but decided that enough was enough after spoofing the role in Édouard Molinaro's Dracula and Son (1976). While Lee was getting the count out of his system, a number of other actors took a tilt at the role, including Zandor Vorkov in Al Adamson's Dracula vs Frankenstein (1971), Charles Macauley in William Crain's Blacula (1972) and Bob Kelljan's Scream Blacula Scream (1973), Jack Palance in Dan Curtis's Dracula, Udo Kier in Paul Morrissey's Blood For Dracula, David Niven in Clive Donner's Vampira (all 1974), and Michael Pataki in Albert Band's Zoltan: Hound of Dracula (1977).
After Klaus Kinski and Frank Langella had respectively restored some menacing gravitas to the role in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre and John Badham's Dracula, George Hamilton spoofed it the nth in Stan Dragoti's Love At First Bite (all 1979). Meanwhile, as the Count was helping children with their numeracy on Sesame Street (1969-79), Dracula was falling foul of the meddling kids in the Mystery Machine in Charles A. Nichols's Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School and Roy Patterson's Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (both 1988).
In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola returned to the source to produce one of the most lavish vampire pictures of all time. Gary Oldman headlined Bram Stoker's Dracula, which won Oscars for its costumes, make-up and sound effects editing, while also picking up a nomination for its production design. Yet, while it made money, the critics weren't entirely convinced, although they were more united in dismissing Leslie Nielsen's parodic display in Mel Brooks's Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). But Cult Corner found much to amuse, as Phil Fondacaro essayed a three-feet vampire in Charles Band's The Creeps (1997).
Unleashed from a high-security vault, Gerard Butler heads to New Orleans with vampire hunter Jonny Lee Miller on his tail in Patrick Lussier's Dracula 2001 (1997). Stephen Billington assumed the title role in Lussier's Dracula: The Ascension (2003), while Rutger Hauer took over for the same director's Dracula III: Legacy (2005). Ironically, the Dutchman would later play Van Helsing staking out Thomas Kretschmann in Dario Argento's Dracula 3D (2012).
As Dr Enrico Valenzi, Giancarlo Giannini performs much the same role in keeping tabs on Patrick Bergin's Vladislav Tepes in Roger Young's Dracula. But dancer Zhang Wei-Qiang is much too fleet of foot for David Moroni's Van Helsing in Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (both 2002), although Hugh Jackman puts up a better fight against Richard Roxburgh in Stephen Sommers's Van Helsing (2004).
Rudolf Martin goes back to his roots in mediaeval Transylvania in Joe Chappelle's Dark Prince: The Legend of Dracula (2000), while Dominic Purcell's Dracula finds trouble aplenty in the form of super hunter Wesley Snipes in David S. Goyer's Blade: Trinity. Caspar Van Dien hopes to hell that the Twin Suns of Halbron don't rouse the sleeping vampire (Langley Kirkwood) found among the debris of a missing spacecraft in Darrell James Roodt's Dracula 3000 (both 2004). But his problems pale into insignificance compared to those facing a vampiric single father (Keith-Lee Castle), as he tries to raise children Ingrid (Clare Thomas) and Vlad (Gerran Howell) in a Welsh village in the CBBC take on Michael Lawrence's book, Young Dracula (2006-14).
Younger viewers will also enjoy Adam Sandler's voicing of Dracula in Genndy Tartakovsky's Hotel Transylvania (2012) and its sequels, Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015) and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018). But it's strictly adults only, as Jonathan Rhys Meyers goes on the prowl in Steve Shill's mini-series, Dracula, and as Luke Roberts goes in search of the Lightbringer, an artefact dating back to the days of Cain and Abel, in Pearry Reginald Teo's Dracula: The Dark Prince (both 2013).
Luke Evans headlines another origins story, as Prince Vladimir Tepes (aka Vlad the Impaler) makes a monstrous sacrifice in order to protect his realm in Gary Shore's Dracula Untold (2014), which features one of the grisliest transformation sequences in vampire movie history. Following in the footsteps of Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Geller) in 'Buffy vs Dracula', a Season Five episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Vanessa Van Helsing (Kelly Overton) proves more than a match for Countess Olivia (Tricia Helfer) in Seasons Four and Five of Van Helsing (2016-21). And we stay on the small screen to end our survey, with Dolly Wells doubling up as Sister Agatha Van Helsing and Dr Zoe Van Helsing in pursuit of Claes Bang's count in Dracula (2020), Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat's BBC reimagining of Stoker's extraordinarily adaptable tome.
Mentioned films
