Famous Monsters of Filmland: Dracula (Dir Tod Browning, 1h17m, 1931)

It being October, that month of monsters, scares and tricks, it would be remiss not to talk about its great icons. Whilst the patheon of horror's great and ghoulish has never stopped expanding, from the slasher villains-Freddie, Jason, Mike et al-of the late 70s and early 80s, to its more recent additions-Jigsaw, Pennywise, Sadako, and so on, you simply cannot beat the classics. Enter thus, the Universal Classic Monsters-classic is apt, given how famous these depictions have become, becoming a veritable shorthand for each famous creature in cinema-arguably the first, and the original cinematic franchise-even if this franchise packaging is a product of canny retroactive marketing after the films entered syndication in the 1960s and early 70s.

Thus, decades after they were made in the early 1930s to early 1950s, our screens, our collective imaginations, our very idea of these horror archetypes, are haunted by the Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney), the Wolf Man (played by his son, Lon Chaney Jr), The Invisible Man (Claude Rains), The Mummy and Frankenstein (both Boris Karloff), and Dracula (Bela Lugosi). These are not just tales of creatures born to scare us, but of astonishing technical innovations in the fields of makeup and special effects, of cinematic artistry coming up against actors making their careers, or finding themselves trapped by typecasting, playing monsters, an increasingly daring Hollywood coming up against the fanatical rigour of the censorship of Hays Code, and the genius-and the tragedy of perhaps cinema's first great horror director.

What better place to start, then, but at the beginning of this great cinematic odyssey, in darkest Transylvania with the Count himself? Written by Bram Stoker, an Irish theatre critic, manager, and assistant to the colossal figure of Sir Henry Irving (an influence on the Count), and published in 1897, Dracula takes the form of a number of letters, diary entries and newspaper articles (in that great Victorian of the epistolary novel). Together, it tells the tale of the mysterious Dracula arrival of Jonathan Harker in Transylvania, the unveiling of the Count as a vampire, Jonathan's escape, the arrival of the Count in Victorian England/Whitby, and his eventual defeat at the hands of a group including the legendary Van Helsing. It was an immediate success, financially and critically, genuinely frightening to its readers, and thus, with the continuing popularity of theatre, and the arrival of the nascent cinematic medium, a perfect tale to adapt for stage and screen.

First up, ironically, was Stoker himself; a single adaption of the play just before the book's publication sufficing to give the author the copyright for any future adaption; next up was the now-lost adaption, Drakula halála (The Death of Dracula) in 1921, bearing little relation to the novel, and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), F. W. Murnau's entirely unauthorised and unofficial adaption of the novel that matches the striking visuals of the German Expressionist movement, with the striking and otherworldly figure of the legendary Max Schreck, its nigh-destruction at the hands of Stoker's litigious heirs making the film even more notorious and nigh-legendary (even more so at the hands of Werner Herzog's remake and Wilhelm Dafoe's portrayal of Schreck as an actual vampire in 2000's Shadow of the Vampire).

But, it is theatre that proves to be the genesis of Dracula's first true appearance on the big screen-the rights sold to Stoker's colleague, Hamilton Deane, by his widow in order to fill the coffers to carry on the lawsuit against Murnau and Prana Film, Deane wastes no time in hammering out a script, redesigning Dracula as a more urbane and typically Victorian figure, in tuxedo and stand-up collar, and a long flowing cape to aid the actor playing the Count's appearances and disappearance via trapdoor. It's a massive success in the UK, and the Count inevitably heads stateside, where it is further re-written by a man who will become very familiar over the next few weeks, playwright and screenwriter, John L. Balderston, who strips the play of its surplus characters, and combines other.

Waiting in the wings, though, is the man who will arguably become the popular shorthand for the vampire (alongside the late, great, Sir Christopher Lee). Bela Lugosi is in his early forties, and has arguably lived one of the most fascinating lives of the early sound actors, fleeing his native Hungary (and his first wife) in the aftermath of the 1919 Communist Revolution, acting in several films in his adopted homeland of Weimar Germany under the name of Arisztid Olt, before once more setting out as a seaman, arriving in New York, and proceeding to return to acting alongside other Hungarian ex-pats, touring across the North-East. Branching out into English language plays, he soon attracts the attention of Horace Liveright's production of Deane and Balderston's script, and becomes the vampire on-stage, appearing in nearly 300 performances.

Adaptions of successful stage productions are, of course, cinema's bread and butter; Dracula's cinematic odyssey starting with Carl Laemmie Jr (another figure who we'll come back to, as he will become absolutely pivotal in the history of Universal Monster Movies) seeing the promise of Stoker's work, and aiming high in wanting his film to be the rivals of the great silent horror pictures (1923's Hunchback of Notre-Dame and 1925's Phantom of the Opera). Teaming up with Universal Pictures (then barely two decades old), and Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Louis Bromfield (later replaced by Garrett Fort, who would turn to Nosferatu for inspiration), the film was to star Lon Chaney as the Count and Van Helsing. Unfortunately, Chaney's sudden death rather curtailed this plan, and several other major actors of the era were considered.

A cavalcade of actors were then cast as The Count; Lew Ayres, who promptly left for another Universal Pictures film, Robert Ames then cast, and then replaced with David Manners, who himself would change roles to play Jonathan Harker. With Lugosi lobbying hard for the role, willing to take a pay-cut to just $500 a week, he was finally hired, reuniting with his stage co-star, Edward Van Sloan as Dr Abraham Van Helsing, Dwight Frye as Dracula's servant , Renfield, and Helen Chandler, nigh-lost to already heavy alcoholism, as Mina. Production, by many accounts, was a disorganised affair, director Tod Browning leaving his cinematographer, Karl Freund (A man with no less than Metropolis already under his belt, and who will reappear in a couple of articles to direct The Mummy), to basically direct the film. Most bizarrely, the film had to work around its co-production, Drácula (1931), a Spanish language film, directed by George Melford, and starring Carlos Villarías as the Count that used the same sets during the night, whilst Browning/Freund directed during the day.

Dracula's narrative is perhaps the most straightforward thing about the film-in essence, despite the embellishments and abridgement of Bromeld, Fort, Deane and Balderston, it remains a by-the-book adaption of the novel. Its biggest change is substituting Jonathan Harker with the hapless Renfield, who falls victim to the vampire despite the warnings of the nearby villagers, and who, together with the Count, arrives on the doomed Vesta, now a raving lunatic. Dracula quickly integrates himself with London society, meeting the Seward family (whose patriarch runs the sanatorium Renfield is kept at) and Jonathan Harker, proceeding to entrance their companion, Lucy, who he later visits and fatally drinks from.

With the film now concentrating upon the figure of Renfield, and slowly unmasking exactly what has afflicted him, and led to his obsession of eating insects, so Dracula once again enters the story, biting Mina, and confronting the rest of the household, only driven away by his lack of reflection, and further attacking Mina. With Van Helsing, a friend of Seward, now leading proceedings and a way to protect Mina, so Dracula arrives, warning Van Helsing that Mina is now his, and after a battle of wits with Van Helsing, retreats, only to, with Renfield's help, spirit her away. Van Helsing and Harker follow, and finding the Count in his coffin, kills him with a stake through the heart, returning Mina to normal.

It is the tone of Dracula that makes the film-Dracula is a film ruled by darkness, by horror, and by its protagonist. Nowhere is this better seen than in the opening ten minutes of the film (its shortness, at least by today's standards, lends the film an almost brutal economy, a mechanism of pure tension wound up to its maximum then released), where we are introduced to Renfield, travelling through Transylvania. He is warned of the threat of Dracula, a name that the villagers openly fear, beholden to superstition, armed with a crucifix by one of their number, and travels to Dracula's castle; whilst it's a sequence that everyone from Coppola to Herzog to Murnau has tried their hand at, the simplicity, the eeriness of suddenly being abandoned in the middle of nowhere is perfectly wrought, the sense of the uncanny only growing once his transport to the castle of his employer is revealled to be driverless at its arrival. It is gothic cinema in its infancy, and it is, even for a film largely shot in the studio. nigh perfect.

It is here that Lugosi arrives, in all his majesty-the unhurried walk down the stairs, the now-oft imitated Eastern European accent, the arrival of this immaculately dressed figure in the middle of dereliction, all of it makes an immediate impact-the countless stage performances honing this Dracula to perfection. We-and Renfield are charmed by him, by his demeanour, by his arresting performance-several of Lugosi's most famous lines, plucked straight from the novel are here-his iconic "I bid you...welcome" and "Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!" becoming nigh-indellibly linked with Lugosi's incarnation, with that (in fact, Hungarian) accent. It's an impression that, more than anything else, has coloured the Vampire in cinema-it is the moment that Lugosi sinks his teeth into the cultural neck, and creates innumerable homages, parodies and reinventions of the role he originated.

But Lugosi has barely begun. We see Dracula quickly become far more obviously inhuman once he has handed over the papers, Renfield cutting himself on a paperclip-an open homage to Murnau's film-and the Vampire, the dark underbelly to this mannered, if eccentric gentleman, immediately appears, with Lugosi's eyes lit, ominously, the spell of the vampire falling on Renfield, before, as the hapless man retires to sleep, he is set upon by the Count and his wives-a sadly underutilised element of the film-and becomes his thrall. From this point on, we, and eventually, our heroes, are aware that Dracula is a vampire, and for his next trick, Lugosi becomes the charming foreign aristocrat, for which, via his hypnotic powers, he proceeds to charm and drink from young women-the film's most shocking moment coming as he feeds upon a young street hawker whose body is found, as the count continues on his way on the street nearby.

It is here, as Dracula's predation becomes, undeniably, sexual, that the true genius of Lugosi's performance comes out. Whilst, in several moments he is replaced by a (not terribly convincing) bat, perhaps where the special effects hold up least, especially when compared to the rest of the film, and the most obvious place where the film's age, and beholdenness to being, in essence, a theatrical adaption shows, the second half of the film is a masterclass in playing a villain, his slow, inevitable corruption of Mina, murder of her friend, Lucy, and his increasing influence on Renfield, who we see deteriorate to the point of raving lunatic, whilst physically confronting the rest of the group in two memorable scenes, throwing away a mirror that Van Helsing attempts to confront him with, and, in perhaps the stand-out scene, the two engage in a battle of wits that fully displays how practised both actors were in their roles by the time the film was made.

Around Dracula himself, there is the sense of the gothic, of darkness in a way that, previously, mainstream American cinema had never quite captured-its previous outings were either too macabre or too grotesque-Lon Chaney's films in particular, to capture the cold majesty of the gothic. Mina is that typical gothic heroine, a seemingly doomed youth swept up in the machinations of the ancient and terrible vampire, Renfield's insanity, his dwindling grip on his faculties, and increasingly tragic figure as his master approaches a perfect counterpoint. The film dwells brilliantly upon the fog, the tottering ruin of Dracula's towers, on the doomed innocent, and the heightened unreality of the stage lends itself perfectly to the larger-than-life figures of the film. It is, undeniably, the moment that cinema's gothic imagination stirs to life.

But Dracula is more than this. It is the start of Universal's love-affair with the monster, selling 50,000 tickets in under 48 hours, making nearly a million dollars in the process, and paving the way for countless other horror movies-but as much as it is a financial moment, Dracula changes the way that cinema approaches horror, where atmosphere, memorable creatures and villains, and masterful cinematography will birth an entire era of monsters. Over ninety years after its release, like few films in horror, Lugosi has his fangs in us, and we, and the cinematic vampire, are undeniably still under his spell.

Rating: Must See


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