Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) is a pivotal movie in the history of horror movies. It is the first major horror film of the sound era. Without its success, the explosion of horror movies during the pre-Code era possibly doesn't happen, or, maybe, happens on a smaller scale or just differently. The movie studios of the day, big and small, were increasingly desperate for hits in 1931 as the Great Depression deepened and paying audiences evaporated. Anything that drew a crowd was all right by the heads of the studios. What drew crowds in those days was sin, salaciousness, violence, licentiousness, and sensation. Horror movies could provide all of that. The genre itself is built on transgression, after all. Moreover, the elements of what came to be defined as the Universal horror movie were already in place. Universal made big money on horror movies during the silent era. Two of Lon Chaney's biggest hits--The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1926)--were made at Universal, as was the John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). Universal was also the landing spot for Paul Leni, the German director who had huge success for Universal with The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928). So Universal, at least, was already in the horror movie business before Dracula.
Carl Laemmle, Sr., the company's founder, did not want to make Dracula. He thought it was essentially demonic, unlike the studio's previous horror films, which he viewed as essentially humanist. Carl Laemmle, Jr., however was keen on the property and only convinced his father to buy the rights to the play because MGM was ready to step in if Universal passed on it. It is likely that an MGM production would not have been very different from what Universal eventually made. Tod Browning was under contract to MGM, after all. Universal had to borrow him for their film. Browning for his part wanted Dracula long before Universal took an interest. He had already discussed the possibility with Lon Chaney. Chaney had already worked up a make-up look for The Count. He wanted it as much as Browning. Other filmmakers at Universal wanted Dracula, too. Paul Leni was keen to make Dracula with HIS frequent collaborator, Conrad Veidt, in the role. In some alternate universe, such a picture is one of the masterpieces of the genre. Veidt might even have made the film had he not gone back to Europe at the time, afraid that his thick accent would be a hindrance to his American movie career. If he only knew... Two things conspired to shape the film that was ultimately made: Leni died of blood poisoning in September of 1929. Chaney died of lung cancer in August of 1930. Without Chaney, MGM lost interest in the property. Browning, without a star for the project, decided to cast the relatively unknown Hungarian actor, Bela Lugosi, in the part. He had worked with Lugosi once before in The Thirteenth Chair (1929). Lugosi had drawn crowds to the theatrical version by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston on the stage and had a much publicized dalliance with Clara Bow, so he wasn't obscure, exactly. Just obscure in movies. The match was made and Dracula went into production on September 30, 1930.
The story opens on a carriage traveling through Transylvania. On the carriage is solicitor Carl Renfield. At the feet of the mountains, the carriage stops and unloads the other passengers, but Renfield insists that he must carry on to Borgo Pass, where he is to meet the carriage from his employer, Count Dracula. The locals urge Renfield to stay away from Borgo Pass and cross themselves at the mention of Dracula. Renfield dismisses this as a bunch of superstition and carries on. At Castle Dracula, Dracula and his brides rise from their sarcophagi to greet the night. Dracula assumes the guise of a footman to drive his carriage to Borgo Pass, where he meets Renfield and brings him back to his castle. The grand ballroom is a ruin, festooned with spiderwebs and vermin. Here, Dracula reverts to his guise as a noble Count and welcomes Renfield. He guides Renfield to the rooms appointed for him and invites him to dine. During the meal, Renfield accidentally cuts his finger, which draws Dracula's intense interest. He is repelled by Renfield's crucifix, though Renfield believes his host is squeamish about blood. When Renfield offers his host some wine, the Count tells him, "I never drink...wine." Their business concluded, Renfield retires for the night. But the denizens of the castle are not through with him. Dracula's three brides appear on the balcony intent on feasting on Renfield, but Dracula waves them away. Instead, Dracula himself initiates Renfield into his service. They take ship to England the next day on the ill-fated Vesta. Renfield is the only survivor of the trip, found in the hold barking mad. He likes to consume small lives--flies and other insects--with the intent of graduating to larger creatures. He's institutionalized at Dr. Seward's Sanitarium, which is conveniently next door to Carfax Abbey, where Count Dracula has taken residence. Dracula contrives to meet Seward and his daughter, Mina, socially at the symphony, and becomes an infatuation for Mina's companion, Lucy. Dracula visits Lucy at night and soon, she perishes from a wasting disease. Seward's friend, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing has his suspicions about Lucy, and about the rash of murders in the area where victims have been drained of blood. Against all modern scientific instincts, Van Helsing suspects a vampire. His suspicions are confirmed when Dracula comes to visit, and Van Helsing notices that the Count casts no reflection in the mirror of John Harker's cigarette case. Soon, Mina has fallen under Dracula's sway as well, and her fiance, Harker, and Van Helsing must rush to save her from a fate worse than death as one of Dracula's newest concubines...
Dracula is a confounding film. What's good about it is very good indeed. What's bad about it is stagebound, unimaginative, and dare I say it? Dull. Almost a century later, it's easy to blame a contemporary sensibility for reacting to the deficiencies one finds in Dracula, but its flaws are by no means unique. The movies were still struggling with the switch to sound filmmaking and the limitations were more onerous to some directors than to others. Not everyone had the will or the wherewithal to rip the camera off its mountings to resume the techniques of the great silent films. Not everyone could be William Wellman. Browning certainly had no ambitions along those lines. His cinematographer might have had different ideas, though. Dracula was a chaotic production, and there are many reports from the people who worked on the film that Karl Freund was more than a cinematographer, he was a co-director. This may explain why the parts of the film play more in the silent film's register and why most of the first act resembles the free camera techniques Freund pioneered with F. W. Murnau in Germany. There's not a lot of dialogue in this part of the film, which made it easier to strike silent prints for theaters that were not yet equipped for sound. This is the part of the film where the filmmakers lavished their production resources. Castle Dracula is a vivid piece of cinematic un-real estate, armadillos and possums and all. Even when the film seems like it's unfolding in slow motion, there's always something to look at. Other parts of the film--most of the scenes in Dr. Seward's sanitarium, for example--are slaves to the proscenium of the stage play. Rather than show a big wolf on Dr. Seward's lawn, for example, an actor describes it. The film uses a lot of bat props, but never finds a way to show Dracula transforming into one of them. Dracula's demise at the end of the film is famously disappointing for being off-screen. The film is light on special effects. Its best special effect is Lugosi.
In his early career in America, Lugosi spoke almost no English. One would think that that would be an impediment to an acting career, but Lugosi soldiered on by memorizing his lines phonetically. I do not know how much English Lugosi had picked up by the time he made Dracula, but however much it was, it was buried under an accent so thick that it's a distinction without difference. A great deal of his performance in Dracula is silent. His costars described his process of getting into character as a sequence of poses he assumed in front of a mirror before shooting his scenes, and that makes a lot of sense given the gestural nature of his performance. Beyond that, great whacks of his performance are enhanced by the way it was shot, often in shadow, often with an unearthly light spilled across his eyes. Not everything can be attributed to the craft of the film. There is a complete lack of sympathy in Lugosi's Dracula. He's a malevolent figure without the kind of humanity Boris Karloff would imbue into Frankenstein's monster later that year. And that inhumanity is compelling. When Lugosi is on screen, he draws the eye and holds it. It doesn't matter that his line readings are ornate to the point of parody. They're of a piece with the actors presence. It shouldn't work, but a lot of things in movies shouldn't work but for the alchemy cinema. It doesn't hurt that almost everyone else in the film could be played by a floor lamp for all the impression they leave. Lugosi rides roughshod over David Manners and Helen Chandler and Herbert Bunston, who are all fine in the film. They just can't stick in the mind the way Lugosi does.
The two other actors who rise to challenge are Dwight Frye and Edward Van Sloan. Van Sloan starred in the stage version as Van Helsing opposite Lugosi. His Van Helsing is the template for monster hunters in all of the horror cinema that follows. He's not my favorite Van Helsing--that would be Peter Cushing--but he's good enough. The cut of Dracula I originally saw as a kid had a coda in which Van Sloan turned to the audience and warned us that "there are such things!" which made an impression. Not every print of the film has this coda. The one I watched on Amazon for this review omits it. Dracula was recut a LOT to suit the whims of the Production Code when it was enforced. Then there's Dwight Frye, who plays Renfield. Frye was a go-to actor for twitchy secondary characters. In 1931, he was Wilmer Cook in the first version of The Maltese Falcon and would play Fritz, the hunchback assistant in Frankenstein, after Dracula. Frye is the first actor we meet in the film and the early part of the film features him as the audience's surrogate. This character is sensible and business-minded. Once Dracula has his way with him, he becomes unhinged and Frye plays his insanity to the rafters. His wide staring eyes are enhanced by the make-up department, and he adopts a distinctive mad laugh. You may not remember David Manners as Harker, but you damned sure remember Dwight Frye as Renfield.
If I am honest, I'll own up to the fact that Dracula is not among my favorite horror movies, even from the 1930s. I think it's a deeply flawed film that could use a more cinematic treatment (I should also mention that I don't believe that that "more cinematic" treatment is to be found in the Spanish language version of Dracula made alongside Browning's film). As is the case with many things in cinema, the broader culture doesn't care what I think. In Lugosi, Dracula finds an image to match the archetype and you just can't beat that. This is significant because the character one finds in Stoker is thoroughly unpleasant, more akin to how Murnau depicted Dracula in Nosferatu. Stoker's Dracula was an outlier. The image of the vampire in Victorian literature other than Stoker derived from Lord Byron, whose persona was mapped on to Lord Ruthven in John Polidori's "The Vampyre." With the success of Lugosi's Dracula on stage and on screen, we see the public voting with their wallets for the Byronic vampire. From the 1931 film onward, the archetype was set and fixed in the cultural massmind.
There are a lot of ways to read Dracula that explain its success in its particular place in time. 1931 found the world in free-fall as the worst of the Great Depression took hold on the economies of the world. The first stirrings of National Socialism were abroad in Europe. The Russian revolution had given way to the first of the Stalinist purges. The world was spinning into chaos. The vampire in Dracula could be a scapegoat for all of this. A blood-sucking aristocrat? Sure. A menace from Eastern Europe? Absolutely. A rebuke to the sexual profligacy of the 1920s? Maybe. It's probable that all of these things and more struck the chord. What was bubbling through the culture was fuel for the horror explosion of the pre-Code era. It doesn't really matter whether Dracula is a good film, because Dracula is essentially a match thrown into a room full of gasoline fumes.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code and silent horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track and I feel a need to go back to the basics. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 1
Total films: 3
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