Bela Lugosi - Dracula Stand Up
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Genre: Horror/Drama

Director: Tod Browning

Writing Credits:

Bram Stoker (novel),

Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston (play). 

Garrett Fort (play script).

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was first represented on Broadway in 1927.  The stage adaptation of Stoker’s novel – with Hungarian expatriate actor Bela Lugosi playing Count Dracula – became legendary in its own time.  It ran for three years, and then was filmed by the acclaimed German silent film director Tod Browning in 1931, starring Lugosi.

But the tale of Dracula is also a criticism to the dominant scientific paradigm of our era - we are made to believe that everything can be explained in scientific terms.  But this makes us blind. “The strength of the vampire..." – Prof. Van Helsing (Van Sloan) says to his sceptical colleagues, "...is that people will not believe in him”.  And this makes them weak.  Dracula hypnotizes his victims, and can do that because they don’t want to accept him for what he is - a supernatural force that does not obey the laws of the world as we know them. Only Helsing’s will is strong enough to resist Dracula, because he knows him and so he knows how to confront him. 

Visually, Browning’s Dracula has all the features of an expressionist film - it’s almost like watching a silent German expressionist movie of the Twenties – Robert Weston’s The Cabinet of Dr. Calligari (1920) or Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922).  The long tracking shots give us the impression we’re being pushed against our will to go to different areas of Dracula’s castle.  And the castle itself brings us back on the settings of those mute movies.  It looks like a broken-down Gothic cathedral, with huge cobwebs hanging down from the high ceiling like funereal veils, strange little creatures – armadillos – running around, bats floating overhead.  One of the most visually powerful scenes is the framing of a Gothic window - outside it bats squeal and flap their wings but remain almost immobile as if hypnotised by the dark interior of the mansion, contrasted by the bright sky, lit by a fool moon, wolves howl, and we are told that is “Walpurgis Night, the night of Evil Nosferatu”.

And then there’s silence.  In the film there are sequences in which Browning seems to use silence to create a mood of mystery, a way of introducing the viewer to an unknown reality where even sound is suspended.  Silence is a key element also in the weird rhythm of Lugosi’s speech - he spells out words very slowly, pausing briefly between a word and the following one, and he doesn’t make a sound when he moves, as if his body was lacking in weight and consistence. 

Surprisingly, there are touches of humour in the movie. Like when, in one of the first scenes in the castle, the miniature coffin of a vampire bee opens up just after sunset, together with Dracula and his wives’ coffins.  Or when the odd Count introduces himself to Mr Renfield in his eerie mansion, and the gentleman replies “It’s really good to see you!”

Reviewed by Claudia Sandroni, Premier Movie Reviews 2006

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• Bela Lugosi – born Ferenc Dezco Blasko in the city of Lugos – was a prominent Hungarian stage actor escaping political prosecution.  He landed in New Orleans in 1920 without any skills in English at all.  He made his way to New York learning many early parts phonetically.

• After his success as Dracula, his reputation rapidly declined, and he ended his career working in horror B-movies for the legendary Worst Director of All Time, Edward D. Wood Jr.  He died of a heart attack in 1956 and was buried in his Dracula’s cape. 

• Murnau’s Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922), was the first movie on the character of Dracula.  The actor who plays Count Orlok, German stage actor Max Schreck (whose second name means terror in German…), he’s said to have really embodied the essential repulsiveness that Stoker intended to attribute to the protagonist of his novel. 

• Bram Stoker drew Dracula’s character on the historical figure of a 15-century Transylvanian prince called Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula.  He attached to him the myth of the vampire, already establishes in literature and folklore.

Bela Lugosi

Helen Chandler

David Manners

Dwight Frye

Edward Van Sloan

Herbert Bunston

Francis Dade

John Standing

Charles K. Gerard

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