Vampires come and they go, but there is only one Dracula. By now, he’s such a part of the popular culture that he needs no introduction. We all know what he does, what he doesn’t do, and how he goes about (not) doing it. New Orleans-based vampires may become rock stars and teenage un-dead may become targets of teeny-bopper lust. But Dracula soldiers on, no matter how many stakes have been driven through his chest.
I have my little favorite Dracula moments, assembled from hither and yon. For example, there’s House of Frankenstein: criminal-mastermind-posing-as-carnival-operator Boris Karloff owns Dracula’s skeleton, preserved in a coffin with the stake still positioned between the ribs, just inviting somebody to come along, yank out the stake, and bring the Count back to life. That duly happens (oh, how surprising) and for a while (not very long) we have a rather interesting Dracula played by John Carradine. But then somebody treats him to an impromptu sunbathing session, and that’s that.
For whatever mysterious reason I have always found Count von Count on Sesame Street wildly amusing. I suppose it’s the very notion that something as fundamentally icky as a vampire could become a funny educational puppet who doesn’t want to hurt anything, just count it all. Besides, the puppet itself is a tour de force, fangs and all.
So a few thoughts about various items of Dracula-lore over the 113 years since he first bared his big pulsating fangs to a panting nubile wench.
Dracula, by Bram Stoker is the start of it all, the 1897 novel by Sir Henry Irving’s stage manager, friend of Oscar Wilde and Robert Lewis Stevenson, a mostly failed novelist save this one perennial favorite. To tell the truth it gets kind of tedious here and there. But the technique of telling the story through a series of diary entries, letters, and newspaper reports is a good one and carries you past the occasional dull patches. Sometimes critics accuse various movie versions of incoherencies in their plots—but I would hold that many of those are endemic to the original, filled as it is with improbable coincidences, unbelievable characters, and melodramatic posturing. But it’s fun, no doubt about it.
Dracula by Todd Browning is the classic 1931 movie starring Bela Lugosi, whose performance has become so indelibly linked with the character that it overshadows what is otherwise a talky drawing-room drama. Browning wasn’t much of a movie director, and the budget was sharply limited. Take a good look at the screen next time you see the movie and notice that in one of the Dracula seduction scenes, they’ve actually resorted to sticking a piece of cardboard in front of a lamp to mask a lighting problem. Nighttimes during the filming a different cast and director filmed a Spanish-language version, using the same script (translated) and sets. That one has survived in terrific shape (an original nitrate, no less), the camerawork is much more fluid, and the performances are often much less stilted than the English-language version. Alas, the Count himself isn’t very good, limited mostly to looking bug-eyed. But most DVDs of the 1931 film include the Spanish-language version as well, and it’s definitely worth seeing. Finally, I should mention that the 1931 version features Dwight Frye’s unforgettable Renfield with that sinister heeeeeeheeeeeeeeheeeeeeeee laugh of his.
Incidentally, it doesn’t really make any sense for Dracula to have a Hungarian accent, à la Bela Lugosi. He comes from a Romanian-speaking area of Europe, after all, and Romanian is a Latin language closely related to Italian, French, and Spanish, whereas Hungarian is a completely different animal, being related to languages like Finnish and Mongolian.
Bela Lugosi: It’s the wrong accent, but who cares?
Dracula Etc. movies from Universal. Dracula’s Daughter, House of Dracula, Dracula Meets the Wolf Man (I don’t think that last one actually exists, but it might as well). Mostly forgettable but they can be kind of fun in their own silly way. After all, one of them gives us "Count Alucard", a disguise ranking right up there with Clark Kent’s glasses for subtlety.
Horror of Dracula from Hammer Films is known in Britain just as Dracula. It’s the first of those big-time Hammer horror films, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, notable for high-gloss technicolor and lots of poofy-haired blonde babes with BBC accents. I’ve never liked them. There: I’ve said it. They’re too bright, too stagey, too mod-London. But the acting is uniformly better than the old-time Universal flicks, and the blood is nice and red.
I always rather liked the BBC made-for-TV Count Dracula starring Louis Jourdan. Perhaps the camerawork is a bit self-consciously arty, but that’s more than counterbalanced by seeing Frank Finlay (Pontius Pilate in Ben-Hur) as a really imposing Van Helsing, not to mention Jourdan’s slimy-gigolo performance in the title role. On the other hand, I found the version with Jack Palance to be downright tedious.
There have been a ton o’ books about the Count or featuring him as a character in some guise or another. Of those, I think The Dracula Dossier by James Reese is hands-down the most intriguing that I’ve read, being a delightful Victorian romp in which Bram Stoker gets involved with Jack the Ripper. Talk about mixing your horror genres. On the other hand, Dracula The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker has little to commend it, even if it is written by a direct descendant of the original author.
My all-time favorite movie adaptation is the lavish romantic Francis Ford Coppola eye-candy-fest, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It takes its own share of liberties with the original story (not necessarily a bad thing) but provides gorgeous visuals, a wonderful score, some dandy performances and in general a compelling Victorian dream-vision that serves the over-the-top story as well as could be imagined. In particular I love the film’s use of old-fashioned cinema devices and its unabashed joy in assembling onscreen images. It suffers from two glaringly off-key elements: Keanu Reeves as an impossibly wooden Jonathan Harker, and a puling pop song that oozes into the final credits, displacing the near-perfect score by Wojciech Kilar and mandating ejecting the DVD shortly after the end-credit crawl begins.
Coppola’s Dracula: really a shame about Keanu Reeves and that horrid pop song at the end
And just to balance things out, we were recently treated (?) to the all-time nadir of vampire flicks in the hopelessly horrid Van Helsing. I can’t say much about the movie given that I lasted, oh, maybe ten minutes before moving on to something more rewarding in life—say, spraying the bathroom grout with mold remover.
But there will be more Dracula and vampire lore: You can count on it. (Yuk, yuk.)