Too Much TV: DRACULA (2020)

The creators of Sherlock claim that one purpose of their free adaptation of Bram Stoker's famous character -- to call their Dracula an adaptation of Stoker's novel may go too far -- is to make the king vampire the central character, "the hero of his own story" as it were. They then open their first of three episodes with a framing device ensuring that, as ever, we will see Dracula through Jonathan Harker's eyes. Harker tells his story at the convent where he takes shelter in the novel, to an irreverent nun (Dolly Wells) who apparently is the sister of Abraham Van Helsing, sharing his preoccupation with the undead. Harker (John Heffernan) as narrator is an unsettling sight, far more damaged than we're used to seeing, as if Deadpool had mated with a 1980s AIDS patient. This comes to seem appropriate as Harker endures a more severe ordeal than even Stoker had imagined through the hospitality of a rapidly-youthening Count (Claes Bang). This all begins quite promisingly; for much of the first hour co-writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat succeed at making a Dracula story feel more disquietingly Gothic than Stoker's novel by introducing the idea of a secret prisoner in Dracula's castle and later showing how the Count treats some of his victims as experiments. This sets the tone for the rest of the story, establishing that Dracula, after so many centuries, remains uncertain about exactly how his vampiric powers work and whether they're inherited by his "brides," female or male. But a discordant note begins to creep in as the vampire, absorbing Harker's knowledge by drinking his blood, starts talking in a familiarly glib, almost slangy way, calling his guest Johnny and generally sounding more and more like a standard 21st century charismatic villain. At the same time, commenting throughout on Harker's story, Sister Agatha tends to quip in drastic hit-or-miss fashion. The writings clearly aspire to accessibility at whatever cost, and the tone becomes too comic -- however fun it may be to hear Sister Agatha taunt Dracula near the end of the first episode -- for its own good. But I'm probably mistaking my own idea of its own good for its creators' intentions.

The second episode -- all three run approximately 90 minutes -- comes closest to the Dracula-as-central-character idea, though it also interposes a framing device, this time with Dracula narrating his famous voyage on the Demeter to a surprisingly friendly yet still skeptical Sister Agatha.  This second episode is also the worst by far of the three, introducing a shipload of thinly sketched passengers for the vampire to victimize before Agatha breaks out of the framing device and reclaims the upper hand. Inclusiveness substitutes for substance here as the passenger list includes an Indian scientist and his mute daughter as well as the black gay lover of this episode's walking in-joke, the decadent Lord Ruthven. Yet this group may as well have come from a Russian novel of Stoker's time compared to the cartoon characters who pass for the Demeter's crew. They all amount to vampire fodder, of course, and with Dracula the focus rather than his victims his attacks are more reminiscent of Bugs Bunny's inevitable triumphs than they are horrific to any extent. It becomes less a question of which of the crew or passengers will survive than whether the viewers will survive -- and yet it's all nearly redeemed by the episode's closing twist.

The finale picks up threads of Stoker's story in the present day, as Dracula wakes from more than a century of recuperative slumber underwater to walk into a trap set nearly that long ago by a vampire-hunting organization founded by none other than Mina Murray, whom Dracula spared from a bad predicament at the end of the first episode for no apparent better reason than that the writers needed someone to found this organization. Working for this shadowy group is a familiar face: Zoe Helsing, Agatha's great-great-grandniece. She survives a vampire attack because her blood sickens the Count, for the all-too-mundane reason that she has terminal cancer. Other stories make dead people's blood potentially fatal to vampires, so this arguably is a modestly plausible leap forward. Zoe's organization wants to preserve Dracula and experiment on him, but they're thwarted by, of all things, a lawyer. Try and guess his name! After this presumably powerful, possibly malevolent organization meekly gives up its prisoner, the episode introduces us to a 21st century Lucy Westenra (Lydia West) and her familiar suitors -- minus one if the gay guy was supposed to be Arthur Holmwood. Dracula becomes obsessed with this reckless girl without really understanding why as we pick up the thread that may unravel the vampire after all. Just as he's never fully understood his own powers, this show proposes that Dracula has never understood, or at least hasn't fully come to terms with, his own nature. Inquisitive Agatha had wanted to know why Dracula fears Christian symbols -- apparently, their being holy never satisfied her inquiring mind, and in any event we'd seen another vampire in the first episode regard the same stuff without fear or pain -- and the Count's own half-baked idea that Christianity's bloody history makes the cross a symbol of death isn't satisfactory either. His fascination with Lucy -- who suffers an even more horrific fate than in the novel -- offers an important clue, but Zoe needs to drink Dracula's own blood in order to get insight from her feisty precursor Agatha. The resolution of all of this is weak: Dracula the mighty warrior, it turns, out, has always been ashamed of his own fear of death, and flinches from the traditional portents of his extinction -- the cross, the sun, etc. -- even when they won't hurt him at all, as Zoe/Agatha proves by aping Peter Cushing's heroics from Hammer's Horror of Dracula. So enlightened, our protagonist decides he may as well die. I'm not sure if that follows, but I suppose it effectively preempts any talk of another season -- unless, of course, the vampire rises to shrug, "Well, that didn't work!" and goes on about his business, should the ratings require it.

DVR Diary: BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966)

You get the feeling watching William Beaudine's horror-western that the real creative work had been done when someone thought up the titles for the notorious double-feature of this film and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. Put those titles on a poster, someone must have thought, and you'll get people into the theaters. At that point, it doesn't matter what they see. It has to have been like that -- doesn't it? -- to explain what we still see. Beaudine was near the end of a very long career that stretched from Mary Pickford A pictures in the 1920s to Bowery Boys Bs and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla in the 1950s. Apart from the color, BvD is no real advance on the horror films Beaudine had made with Lugosi twenty years earlier for Monogram. For John Carradine, returning to the role of Dracula (though no one calls him that in the film) after twenty years, it was the opposite of an advance. He is a sadly shabby vampire despite the desperate attempt to tart him up with poofy cuffs and a huge red tie. His hypnotic gaze looks more like the drunken leer it probably was. His special-effects surrogates are some of the worst bat effects you'll ever see, and the transitions are truly primitive. A fake bat glides behind some object -- a rock or a stagecoach, for instance -- and Carradine scuttles out from behind.  He's probably the least graceful Dracula, though that's more the producers' fault for casting so physically limited an actor in the role. And with all these handicaps, Carradine is almost still the best actor in the cast. His only real rival is Olive Carey as a folksy old female doctor who becomes the nearest thing this film has to a Van Helsing.

But who needs Van Helsing when you have Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney)? The legendary gunman has gone straight and hopes to live in obscurity as just plain old William Bonney the ranch foreman, even though everyone in town seems to know about his past. He's sweet on Betty Bentley (Melinda Plowman), the gal who's inherited the ranch he works on, and he has a rival so we can have a fistfight every few reels. Betty is expecting an uncle to arrive and act as her guardian, but she's never seen the man before -- no photo, no painting, no lithograph. Unfortunately, the uncle and his wife divulge this fact to their fellow stagecoach passenger in black and red, who boards not long after draining but not killing the blonde daughter of an immigrant couple. At the next stop, the vampire bites an Indian girl, inciting the nearby tribe to massacre the stagecoach while he flaps to town to introduce himself as the uncle arriving early. The immigrants reach the same town and recognize "Mr. Underhill" as the vampire. If you're a vampire trying to maintain an imposture, what do you do at this point?

A. Kill the entire immigrant family.
B. Kill the daughter while leaving the mother, sleeping beside her, alone, and allowing the immigrant elders to live even after Betty has hired them as your household servants who constantly interfere with your plans, from spouting vampire lore to lining Betty's window with wolfsbane.


Underhill apparently prefers to rant at the hapless foreigners and occasionally shove them, because that way he gets more lines. That's the only motivation that makes sense. But the vampire's lack of self-preservation instincts is partly understandable: the poor man's in love. From the first time he saw Betty's face in a black and white miniature, he had decided that she would be his immortal mate. Underhill has set up a challenge for himself: seduce a woman while passing himself off as her uncle. But never underestimate an old man's stare and the seductive power of Raoul Kraushaar's generic spooky music. All that's left is to consummate the unholy marriage in an abandoned silver mine -- who knows how he got the big bed in there? But it's Billy to the rescue, having overcome everyone's skepticism about "bats and vampires" (both being equally mythical, I guess) and armed himself with Doc's book-learning -- admittedly incomplete since her German isn't so hot -- and the metal spike necessary to kill a vampire. Of course, Billy being Billy, he leads with his revolver, but bullets can't hurt the undead! Bullets can't, but the gun itself can as Underhill takes a vicious blow to the face that sets him up for the deathblow. Apparently a vampire can not only transform into a bat, but can also project a bat from his body, as one takes flight as Underhill squirms in Billy's grip. The bat flops to earth as the vampire dissolves into nothingness. But we don't see the bat dissolve, so is this truly the end??? Gott in Himmel, let's hope so.

DVR Diary: DRACULA UNTOLD (2014)

If "zero to hero" is the popular paradigm today, the reverse of the coin is the villain who has his reasons. Just as we seem uncomfortable with characters who are inherently good or effortlessly competent, so we seem, if anything, more uncomfortable with characters who are innately wicked, neither reformable nor redeemable. Given a widespread inclination to see the mythic Dracula -- a modern amalgam of Bram Stoker's fictional character as interpreted in numerous films and the historic Vlad Tepes -- as a tragic figure, something like Dracula Untold was inevitable. It's not exactly "hero to zero," since this film's Vlad is always too scrupulous and sensitive to truly go bad, but it still reflects audiences' presumed obsession with the becoming of heroic or legendary figures, and in this case especially, to understand is to excuse.

Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans) is the stren, protective ruler of his people after a hard childhood as a hostage and child soldier of the rising Ottoman Empire, where he learned the fine art of impaling and its strategic uses.Gary Shore's film is at pains to tell us that Vlad doesn't impale folks gratuitously, but as a deterrent, for all the good that does when Islam is on the march. But despite what I just said, Dracula Untold admirably underplays the Turks' religious aspect. For this film's purposes they're generic invaders and enslavers, the better to make clear that Vlad does what he must for his people to survive. Understanding that the odds against him are hopeless, he takes interest in a legend of a powerful, demonic figure dwelling in a cave recently occupied by now-dead Turkish troops. This mystery man is a very old vampire (Charles "Tywin Lannister" Dance) who offers Vlad a deal. He'll let Vlad drink his blood, which will give the prince vampire powers for three days, time enough to fend off the Turkish threat, and when those days expire that will be that -- unless Vlad should drink human blood, at which point he'll become a full-time vampire, while his sire will be freed from his cave prison to pursue some nebulous mission of vengeance that may require Vlad's assistance down the line. An optimistic judge of his own integrity and willpower, Vlad accepts the generous offer.

Turk-trained Vlad is already a formidable fighter; we see him take out a half-dozen Turks singlehandedly to save his own son from enslavement. Now, with vampire blood seething through him, he's literally a one-man army, not to mention a one-man flock of bats. It's no longer cool enough for Dracula to turn into a bat; he's got to be lots of bats, a cloud of them, though there's no practical point to this. Shore clearly though it was a cool video-gamey effect for him to turn into a cloud of bats when he flies speedily from one opponent to another, but wouldn't it make his task easier if he could, in bats-form, attack multiple foes at once? Well, it's a moot point, since even in his own pokey one-at-a-time fashion he can take out an entire Turkish army by his lonesome. This show of power takes his people aback ever so slightly, but it's not until he starts to sizzle in sunlight that they really start to take offense. Still, they're going to need him when his childhood pal Mehmet II, the Conqueror, the man who took Constantinople (Dominic "Howard Stark" Cooper), comes calling with the main Turkish army. For the big battle he gets help from an actual flock of bats, and when his lady love (Sarah Gadon), dying from Turk treachery, begs him to drink the blood he'll need to finish the job, even at the cost of his soul, it looks like another rout. But Mehmet's not "the Conqueror" for nothing. He lays a trap for Vlad, luring him for a final battle in a tent piled ankle-deep with silver coins, nullifying our hero's vampire powers. But don't assume that history's a guide to what happens next, because there weren't vampires in history, after all.

Dracula Untold is unrepentantly preposterous but the director and writers brought some redemptive imagination to what could have been simply a by-the-numbers origin story. The fight in the silver-tent is an inspired idea, and despite the inevitable dull CGI skies the picture has some decent production design. Its main fault is its dogged refusal Dracula become truly evil -- though I suppose you could see something evil on the level of hypocrisy about the denouement. While Vlad's been fighting Mehmet the Turks have pretty much massacred his incompetent subjects. Our hero finds a handful of wounded survivors to whom he offers vengeance via vampirism. A total wipeout of the Turks results, until the only humans left alive our Vlad's son and a monk. The other vampires are his people now, but Vlad suddenly grows less protective of them. To be fair, their desire to drink his son's blood has something to do with that. After sending his son off with the monk, Vlad uses his vampire magic to part the clouds and expose himself and everyone else to purging sunlight, but before he can join them in deserved oblivion, a gypsy proto-Renfield he met earlier in the story (Zach "Captain Charles Vane" McGowan) drags his scorched form to shelter, and that leads us to the present day. Has Vlad lived out Dracula's legendary career of wickedness or has he just hung around Transylvania as a benevolent spirit? The film isn't telling, but the filmmakers feel that one thing Dracula must do is meet a reincarnation of his lost first love -- and it also chooses this point to remind us that Vlad still owes that older vampire some service, hopefully in a sequel that a worldwide gross of a quarter-billion dollars may justify. I understand that hopeful filmmakers like to leave their pictures open-ended, but it was kind of demoralizing to have this film's last words be "Let the games begin." The film we have is a tale told by talented idiots, but a lot of that was due to the pictorial potential of the period, and I doubt strongly that they can repeat what modest success they had with a period piece in modern dress, especially when burdened with the tired gimmick of the reincarnated lover. Better, I think, to quit when they're slightly ahead and leave the rest of this story untold.

Wendigo Meets DRACULA: THE VAMPIRE AND THE VOIVODE (2009)

When I told my friend Wendigo about a new Dracula documentary available for streaming on Netflix, we both felt it would be interesting to check it out as a kind of update of the 1970s book tie-in documentary In Search of Dracula. That earlier film was virtually a Mondo Dracula from the golden age of exploitation documentaries that could be sold as a virtual horror movie thanks to Christopher Lee's participation. The new film from Michael Bayley Hughes is both more modest and more ambitious, claiming to be the first movie that tells the true stories of both Bram Stoker and his subject. Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller appears on screen frequently and was a script consultant; her participation made it credible for Wendigo, who has corresponded with Miller. There's still something of the Mondo method to this movie. It travels to the novel's locations, from the Borgo Pass to Whitby, and lingers in Romania to investigate the Dracula-centered tourist industry that's grown there since In Search of Dracula was made and Communism fell. Like many a Mondo movie, it has an eye for the tellingly tacky and sometimes salacious detail. Those bits may make the film entertaining for those who find its main storyline a little dry.

Wendigo wants to send a shout-out to his virtual friend Elizabeth Miller.

Under Miller's influence, Hughes takes the anti-In Search of Dracula approach, refusing to equate Stoker's character with the historical voivode Vlad Tepes. He emphasizes the shallowness of Stoker's research and his creation of a fantastical Transylvania that Romania has a hard time living up to. Hughes practices biographical criticism on Dracula, stressing how Stoker's personal experiences before his research for the novel shaped some of its scenes and moods. Wendigo found a lot of Hughes's interpretations tentative or merely conjectural. The filmmaker proposes that many events "may have" influenced Stoker without really nailing down any proof, from a legend about poet Christina Rosseti's wondrously preserved corpse to the mummies kept in an overrated state of preservation in a church near one of his homes. This sort of stuff is inevitable in almost every literary biography these days, but Wendigo was at least happy that Hughes got the key point right about Dracula and Vlad.

Bram Stoker is remembered by a Whitby re-enactor (above) and a Romanian hotel (below)

But there wouldn't be much of a movie if they didn't talk about Vlad at all. Wendigo found the Romanian half of the picture "interesting but odd." Again, Hughes scrupulously distinguishes the fictional vampire from the famous voivode. It seems, however, that the Romanian tourist history makes no such distinction. Stoker draws tourists there, and they honor the author with a statue for that, but they exploit the interest in Dracula by selling Vlad paraphernalia. Wendigo finds that a sad way for Romania to sell out their own history, and we suspect that Hughes shares Wendigo's point of view. The director focuses on the vulgar in time-honored Mondo fashion, from voivode knicknacks and mugs to the Miss Transylvania beauty contest in Bistrita. There's also some of the same sort of peasant footage we got in In Search of Dracula, with Hughes stressing how the peasantry is still largely unchanged since the Seventies.

Faces of Transylvania

Overall, Wendigo was underwhelmed by Vampire and the Voivode as a movie. It's informative enough, especially on Stoker, but given the film's own ballyhoo it has surprisingly little to say about the actual writing of Dracula. Hughes neglects to mention one of the by-now best known tidbits about Stoker, his modeling of the vampire on his employer, the Victorian master thespian Henry Irving, and ignores Stoker's own account of an erotic dream that inspired the episode of Dracula's brides. We both objected to the claim that no other work of Stoker's endures, when movies have been made of at least two other novels -- and more than one from The Jewel of Seven Stars. Visually, Hughes went easy on re-enactments. His attempts are so minimal as to be funny, consisting of a guy dressed up as Vlad striking poses and an elderly, confused-seeming man wandering around with a candelabra in a supposed recreation of a scene from the novel. The picture is heavy on talking heads, some adding to the amusement by dressing in costume like Harry Collett as a Whitby coachman, but few apart from Miller really added to its credibility.

Wendigo found V&V in many respects less scholarly than In Search of Dracula, if more respectable in its conclusions. He would have liked more readings from Dracula or from chronicles of Vlad, but for whatever reason V&V was surprisingly lacking in these. Intellectually, Wendigo's more in a agreement with this movie, but he still considers In Search Of the more entertaining film. Either way, the definitive documentary about Dracula as a historical and cultural phenomenon remains to be made.

Wendigo cumpla DRACULA (1931)

"Dracula hasn't had servants in 400 years and then a man comes to his ancestral home, and he must convince him that he... that he is like the man. He has to feed him, when he himself hasn't eaten food in centuries. Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine? ...The loneliest part of the book comes... when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table."

Steven Katz, Shadow of the Vampire (2001)

 

Like many horror-film fans, my friend Wendigo and I were excited twenty or so years ago when we learned of the rediscovery of a long-lost Universal horror film from the studio's classic era: George Melford's Spanish-language version of Dracula. Before its release on videotape the "Spanish Dracula," now probably the best-known instance of the short-lived studio practice of filming alternative foreign-language versions of certain films rather than dubbing or subtitling the originals, was hyped to the skies as a cinematic revelation. At least we were told it would seem like that when compared to Tod Browning's stodgy old Dracula. The camera moves more! The women look hotter! There's half an hour more of the story! We'd heard the legend, and Wendigo had read it long ago in Famous Monsters of Filmland: Melford shot his version at night on the same sets Browning used and, knowing what Browning had done, he and his crew tried every night to top the English-language version. There were wild rumors, too. Could the great F. W. Murnau, the director of Nosferatu, have been coaching Melford behind the scenes? Could it be true that Melford managed the shoot without knowing Spanish? Could any old film live up to that kind of fan hype? Wendigo's memory of his first viewing is dominated by the camera movement and the sexier vampire brides and victims -- he dug their longer hair compared to the American actresses Browning used. Beyond that, the story seemed to have been performed differently in nearly every way by nearly every actor -- and the differences seemed to make Melford's the superior Dracula in every respect but the obvious one. Bela Lugosi remained unassailable, and we'd also say that Edward Van Sloan's Van Helsing remained unchallenged, but technically and artistically Melford appeared Browning's master.

Our viewing of Melford's Dracula this week was Wendigo's third. He's seen the Browning many more times in between viewings of Melford, and over time he's gained a fresh appreciation of Browning's strengths, some of which became still more clear after a fresh comparison with Melford. Wendigo now readily concedes that Browning is the better director, with a far superior eye for framing iconic images. He seems to have had an extraordinary rapport with both Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye and directs both actors for maximum creepiness, while Melford often seems to have no control over his Renfield -- about whom more later. Browning's 75 minutes now seem more efficient and effective than Melford's sometimes meandering 104 minutes. Browning seems to have had a superior instinct for pruning the core script from which both directors worked, while little of what Melford keeps (most of which deals with Renfield) really enhances his version. Some parts of Melford are just plain repetitive, especially the shots we once so much enjoyed of his Dracula rising from his smoke-spewing coffin. Do it once and the point is made, but Melford must have wanted to use every foot of footage of his vampire puttering around. Some other parts are just bad, like the terrible continuity mismatch of Dracula's hand first emerging from a coffin, followed by the vampire rising from an obvious crate, or the borrowing of a stock shot of Browning's brides before we first see Melford's much different vamps. And, as Wendigo must emphasize, Melford's bat effects are crap. When Dracula flies into Lucia Weston's room, the bat first swings in and swings right out again, then crashes into the windowframe and bounces off until it finally swoops drunkenly over Lucia and out of frame for the last time. Was it too late for a retake?

Wendigo is still impressed by Melford's greater mobility, and by his exploration of areas of the classic sets that Browning never examined in any detail. Melford's fluidity, especially during dialogue scenes, sometimes makes up for his lack of dramatic framing. The greater length allows for nuances that are interesting if not significant, particularly during the interviews with Renfield that reveal his academic background. On the other hand, the big confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing is protracted and slackened, awkwardly intercut with a scene of Eva Seward and Juan Harker, and finally belittling to both characters. The business of Dracula hiding his face and asking if Van Helsing has obeyed him by putting his cross away makes the vampire look just plain stupid, while the vampire hunter had looked utterly weak until he revealed his ruse. To sum up, the longer script comes with pluses and minuses, and we can mostly take or leave it. And overall the Melford Dracula remains a good, entertaining film in the Universal horror tradition. We wrapped this latest viewing with a better appreciation of some aspects of the film, especially that aspect most often criticized: the star.

We don't think anyone has ever claimed that Carlos Villarias (not Vallarias as in the ad art above) was better than Bela Lugosi, and we're not going to say that, either. But while the consensus has been that Villarias was only doing a failed Bela impersonation -- he alone of the actors, supposedly, was shown the Browning rushes -- we saw something far different this time. If the studio's thought was that he would simply ape Lugosi, Villarias clearly had a different idea. Critics find his performance awkward, with its grimaces, idiot grins and overall leering and mugging, but we'd like to suggest that a good deal of that awkwardness is deliberate. Watching him this time, we were reminded of what Willem Dafoe's Count Orlok says about the literary Dracula in the movie Shadow of the Vampire, as we quote above. Villarias's awkwardness, his tendency to switch from a simpering smile to an impatient frown or a petulant pout, is his way of expressing Dracula's alien, inhuman nature -- the same quality Lugosi expresses with his uncanny stillness, his carefully choreographed hand movements, and his accent. Since we don't understand Spanish, we can't tell whether Villarias is playing the vampire with a "foreign" accent, whether Spanish speaking audiences would hear him as a Lugosi or as a Christopher Lee. Given our uncertainty about his vocal performance, we focus on Villarias's physicality.

 

Above, Villarias's Dracula impatiently observes Renfield's dinner.

Is Dracula more disturbed by the sight of blood (above) or a cross (below)?

His Dracula is a predator barely capable of pretending to be a human being, who often goes overboard with his goofy smiles while pretending, and his concentration fails easily. While Lugosi is almost always masterful, except when blocked by a cross or thwarted by Van Helsing, Villarias is barely master of himself, and hardly seems in Lugosi's league as a mesmerist. His hand gestures are all wrong; he seems to be threatening to pat people on the head. It's an interesting and even intelligent performance -- Villarias seems to have calculated his every expression carefully -- but the qualities that make him a distinctive Dracula disqualify him as a scary one. If anything, as Wendigo emphasizes, his awkwardness while pretending to be human ends up making his vampire all too human. In the end, it's a performance we can respect without ranking it highly among vampire actors.

Villarias's eccentric performance leaves the film for Pedro Alvarez Rubio's Renfield to steal in a way Dwight Frye could never have dreamed of. Alvarez can match Frye madness for madness, but there are different methods to each. Wendigo hears in Alvarez the laughter of a completely shattered mind, and sees in his performance a more completely fractured, mercurial personality. Alvarez can turn from calm or arrogant to batshit shrieking crazy on a dime, while Frye is in a constant simmer of insanity that occasionally boils over. Alvarez gives a more theatrical performance, while Frye plays more conscientiously to the camera. You remember Frye's face and his thin, simpering laugh above all, while Alvarez is all shouting and arm-waving, effectively often enough but too often playing to the balcony rather than with Frye's creepy intimacy.

Renfield is a test of directorial control, and the final exam is his scene with the fainting nurse. Browning films it with Frye creeping straight ahead in one of his best shots, while Melford has Alvarez come in from the side and turn in her direction in an inferior composition, holding the shot until Alvarez turns the scene into a joke by snatching at a fly in the air. In this tag-team comparison, Wendigo and I agree that Browning and Frye win hands down.

Probably the greatest acting disparity between the Browning and Melford versions comes in the form of Van Helsing. Edward Van Sloan's iron-willed performance remains definitive for many and second only to Peter Cushing for the rest. By comparison, Eduardo Arazomena impressed Wendigo as some bum who got hired while sleeping on the set. He brings no sense of authority or power to a role that demands those qualities. The most he offers is sympathy, and that's not nothing. Wendigo noticed how often Arazomena wears a horrified or baffled expression compared to the imperturbable Van Sloan. That may make Arazomena's a more humane or warm performance, but the language barrier leaves him looking weak to us based on his soft, doughy presence.

In Bram Stoker's novel, Van Helsing describes Dracula's "baby brain." The "Have you obeyed me?" moment from Melford's movie (below) appears to prove the doctor's point.

Wendigo also suggests that Melford may have needed a relatively wishy-washy Van Helsing given the limitations of his Dracula. You can imagine Villarias immolating under Van Sloan's gaze, while Villarias vs. Arazomena is more like a battle of equals -- or as Wendigo proposes, a battle of clowns hitting each other with flour.

On the other hand, if one actor from the Spanish cast surpasses his English-language counterpart, it'd probably be Barry Norton as Juan Harker. He is the superior of David Manners as long as you understand that Harker is meant to be dull and dense, for Norton achieves the miracle of coming off as a duller, denser twit than Manners, Universal's sublimely named embodiment of stalwart dullness. Those plus-fours he wears help make the right impression, though he does get one unexpectedly noirish badass moment when he stands outside the cemetery in a heavy coat, head down, his face shielded by his hat, after he and Van Helsing have dispatched the "Lady in White."

At age 101, Lupita Tovar may be the last survivor, apart from child actors, of Universal's classic horror era. Seeing her in this film, you can believe that she has a life force that keeps her with us today. Perhaps because Melford's Spanish collaborators were less constrained by lingering Victorian sensibilities, the director is able to get a far more vivacious, voluptuous performance from Tovar as Eva Seward than Browning got from Helen Chandler -- especially after she's been halfway vamped.  It's not hard to dominate a Harker actor, but Tovar practically devours Norton in a seduction scene that's far more aggressive than Browning's and topped with laughter that nearly gives Alvarez a run for his money. Both versions of Dracula are pre-Code films of course, but it's Melford's version that really looks and feels like it. Here, too, Wendigo claims, Melford's casting tops Browning's.

Ever since Melford's Dracula returned to circulation, horror fans have wished for the best of both worlds. Some suppose that Lugosi directed by Melford would have made the ultimate vampire film. Wendigo wouldn't mind seeing that theoretical film, which should also import Van Sloan and Frye from the Browning version while employing Melford's art directors, who give the Spanish version more visual variety than Browning offers. Wendigo could have fun fine-tuning the casting, down to the actor in Browning who tells Renfield, "Nooooo...." when he learns of the solicitor's Borgo Pass itinerary and the two crypto-lesbian tourists in Melford. There may never be a definitive cinematic Dracula, but there is a cumulative version out there, made up of bits and pieces of all the famous and infamous versions, and the novel, that's always in production. Once nearly forgotten, Melford's contributions to the Dracula script of our collective imagination should now be permanent.

Wendigo Meets HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

My friend Wendigo estimates that he's seen Terence Fisher's landmark vampire film more times than any other "Dracula" movie, unless you count Nosferatu. Despite that, he was still able to look at it with fresh eyes to mark our return from an unintended hiatus following Wendigo's discovery of the Encore Westerns channel. Someday we might start doing "Wendigo's Wild West," but for now we've taken the latest title off the top of his to-do pile and asked ourselves where Horror of Dracula's real significance lies.

Released in the U.K. as just plain Dracula -- Warner Bros., the U.S. distributor, was more deferential toward Universal's implicit claim to the Dracula title even though Universal itself distributed Hammer's film in some markets without fuss -- Fisher's film is a natural follow-up to his Curse of Frankenstein from the previous year, bringing back Peter Cushing as the protagonist and Christopher Lee as the monster. Like Curse, it was something new as a Technicolor horror movie. What was new and lastingly distinctive, in Wendigo's opinion, is the paring down of Bram Stoker's source story and the increased prominence of Van Helsing as a more energetic vampire hunter. Renfield is perhaps the most conspicuous absence, and as is almost always the case, Quincey Morris is nowhere to be found. Dracula himself is strangely monogamous, having but one bride when Jonathan Harker visits him, but Wendigo suspects that the master vampire may have had to live on a budget. Most impressive and probably most influential is the physicality of the combat between vampire and hunter. Cushing has to do more than brandish a cross to get the upper hand on Lee -- crossing candlesticks is really more a coup de grace than the decisive blow. Cross damage, however, plays a more important role here than in previous vampire films; Fisher makes much of how they burn a vampire's thrall on contact. That's typical of a greater use of effects to portray supernatural damage, as in Lee's protracted destruction.

Above and below: the power of the cross.

As a new kind of Dracula, Lee makes a strong early impression, but there are already signs of trouble for his later career in the role. In his first appearance he is casually conversational, articulate and businesslike, and Lee handles these scenes with ease. But after he leaves Harker in his room, Lee never gets another line of dialogue, setting the tone for his reappearance in Dracula, Prince of Darkness, when he has no dialogue at all.

Christopher Lee: shadow and substance.

Why silence Lee so soon? I suspect that Hammer may not have been too confident in an un-accented, un-foreign Dracula, but Wendigo makes the more pragmatic point that, in billing and practically every other detail, this is Cushing's movie, not Lee's, and it wasn't Lee's job to upstage the star by grabbing the best lines. Cushing at this point was perhaps the most popular star on British television while Lee was still paying his dues, and the roles are proportioned accordingly.

Wendigo readily allows that Horror of Dracula -- or Dracula, if you prefer -- is a movie about Van Helsing. That may reflect Cushing's stardom, but it also reflects a new sense of what Van Helsing is about that continues into a sequel that also has Dracula in the title, but features Van Helsing instead of Dracula. The scholar and vampire hunter is the initiator of the action rather than an expert called in for help in the middle. Jonathan Harker is only his helper and spy, sent by the good doctor to take the job Dracula was offering (in the want ads???) as the castle librarian. He is one of who-knows-how-many agents Van Helsing employs in his crusade against the "insidious cult" of vampires, and as such, the protagonist of Stoker's novel is no more than cannon fodder. That means, we must note, that Harker has to be stupid. He could have ended this movie after two reels if he had thought to stake a still-helpless Dracula first when he discovers the vampire's sleeping quarters. Instead, the idiot decides to stake the contentious Mrs. Dracula first. What was that, practice? Anyway, for that Harker deserves his fate, and that clears the stage for Van Helsing to take over. Our hero is a man of science as well as fate; in a scene Hammer would come to regret, he tells Arthur Holmwood (the late Michael Gough) that vampires turning into bats is just a myth. Wendigo thinks this bit of debunking was another case of Hammer knowing its limitations. In his opinion, given the studio's history of bat effects, they shouldn't have forgotten them. But he thinks Van Helsing's lecture may have had an influence beyond Hammer, as many modern vampires lack the panoply of powers that the doctor denies.

But for all that's new in Hammer's Dracula, Horror is in some ways reminiscent of Universal's vampire films. The most notable similarity is tied to writer Jimmy Sangster's most significant departure from Stoker -- the fact that Dracula never leaves Europe. The way some people write about how Stoker's Dracula stands for the general threat of the foreigner polluting England, it might seem that Sangster loses the point of the story if the Count doesn't invade the island kingdom. But he sets the story in a landscape much like what we call "preoccupied Europe," the timeless setting of Universal's monster rallies. Casting Lee as Dracula and having him speak without a Transylvanian accent is reminiscent of Universal's use of Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine in its later Dracula movies. By comparison, when an American studio revived Dracula around the same time, they made a point of casting an obvious foreigner, Francis Lederer, in an echo of Bela Lugosi. As for the period, the most we can say is that, whether Sangster meant it or not, the film can take place no earlier than 1903, thanks to Van Helsing's comparison of a little girl to a Teddy bear. But the landscape of Klaussenberg, Ingolstadt, etc., strongly resembles Universal's Visaria more than anyplace else -- with an important bit of difference. Dracula's territory seems to be getting colonized by Englishmen.

Horror of Dracula competed against William Castle's Macabre in some North American markets. At least one enterprising exhibitor thought the film could use a gimmick to compete more effectively.

Jonathan Harker is just an interloper, but Arthur Holmwood appears to be a permanent residence, and another Englishman, Dr. Seward, practices there. Wendigo notes that Hammer's mitteleuropa is really a barely-disguised rural England, given how few actors attempt foreign accents. He suggests that Hammer's Europe may symbolize English nostalgia for a disappearing past and its rustic traditions. I can agree with that, but I'd like to go further out on a limb and suggest that Horror of Dracula is a "postcolonial" film for the dying days of the British Empire. My description of Holmwood and Seward as "colonists" probably tipped my hand already on that point. In that context, it may not be as important for Dracula to invade England as it is for him to be a kind of native insurgent, representing the danger of the "dark" tides engulfing the handful of English whose efforts to civilize the world are apparently failing. Read that way, the "horror" film Dracula is not so different from such Hammer "adventure" films as Stranglers of Bombay and Terror of the Tongs, which also highlight Englishmen in peril abroad among secretive hostile natives with strange powers over the mind, thanks to drugs or fanatic religion. The "cult of the vampires" thus becomes an analogue for the Thugee cult and other terrifying phenomena of imperial history that Hammer would later confront directly. Wendigo sees some merit in this reading, but he thinks it was more likely a subconscious approach by Sangster, the conscious motive being to save money by re-using as many Curse of Frankenstein sets as possible.

Lee lacks a certain grace in his flight from Cushing, but those stairs probably did neither man many favors.

Horror of Dracula's place in movie history is indisputable, but Wendigo finds the Hammer Dracula series to be less than meets the eye. The studio never really gives the vampire enough to do, or at least enough to make him an interesting character. Most of his favorite Hammer vampire films have nothing to do with Dracula; those do more with vampire concepts than the Dracula movies ever dared. Brides of Dracula is arguably an exception, but mainly because it had no Dracula. Had a Van Helsing series continued from that point, instead of being feebly resumed with Dracula A.D. 1972, Hammer may have changed the face of horror cinema in an even more profound way. Christopher Lee may not be a truly great Dracula, but Peter Cushing is nearly the definitive cinematic Van Helsing, with Edward Van Sloan from the Universal Dracula as his only serious competition. For introducing Cushing's vampire hunter, the model for generations of paranormal warriors to come, Horror's place in history remains secure.

It's harder than I expected to find a 1958 "Dracula" (as opposed to "Horror") trailer online -- so this U.S. trailer uploaded to YouTube by hermankatnip will have to do.

Wendigo Meets DRACULA (1979)

Lightning has not struck thrice. Hamilton Deane and John R. Balderston's stage version of Dracula was revived Off-Broadway last month, with Italian actor Michael Altieri as the Count and such name performers as Thora Birch and George Hearn in support. The reviews have been like garlic. It may be the production's fault, or the actors', but maybe time has finally passed by the great old vampire play. Twice in the past it had been a star-maker, most famously with Bela Lugosi in the title role in the 1920s, then, perhaps more improbably, in the 1970s with Frank Langella. The Langella production so captivated the nation that Universal called for a remake of Tod Browning's genre-defining talkie, with Langella starring and Saturday Night Fever director John Badham at the helm. This just happened to be the movie on top of my friend Wendigo's to-do pile this weekend.

I'd first seen the Badham a few years after its first run, as a Halloween midnight movie at my town's dismal excuse for a multiplex in its dismal excuse for a downtown shopping mall. It was an underwhelming, drab experience that discolored my opinion of the movie. Wendigo also missed the initial July 1979 release and saw it on HBO instead. He liked it better than I would and he still thinks highly of it.

The Wreck of the Demeter: You probably forgot all about that, didn't you?

In one respect, W. D. Richter's screenplay takes us closer to the play, if not the novel, because the play opens very deep into Stoker's story, with "Lucy Western" already dying of her strange blood disease. Richter and Badham's Dracula is unique among movie adaptations in never taking us to Castle Dracula. The film opens with the Count's purchase of Carfax Abbey a done deal, neither Jonathan Harker or Renfield having met him prior, and with the Demeter making an un-novelistic crash landing on the Whitby coast. It was the Seventies, so I suppose there had to be some sort of disaster scene in the picture, and it is a dramatic cinematic opening. In the aftermath, we're treated to what Wendigo says is cinema's most effective evocation of the actual Whitby locations of the novel. Production design throughout is impressive, indoors and out. While the time is about a decade later than Stoker's publication date, you have a stronger sense of periods than in many other Dracula films, with almost gratuitous digressions into social realism. Wendigo perceives a stronger sense of class as well, Renfield here being rendered as working-class trash, but also as having been (presumably) unfairly evicted from his home by Harker before the story starts. The filmmakers are laying the groundwork for the repressive milieu of which its boorish Harker is a product, and against which its Mina -- we mean Lucy, rebels.

"You scared me." Frank Langella (center) drily welcomes a visitor to Carfax Abbey.

Ah, Hollywood! What focus group told you that you should switch the names of Dracula's female victims? Why is Mina "Lucy" and Lucy "Mina?" The way Wendigo heard it, the reason was that "Mina" sounded more foreign than "Lucy," so as long as they were going to turn the heroine's friend, the vampire's first victim, into Van Helsing's daughter and therefore a Dutch woman, she should be "Mina." As a rule, Wendigo finds Hollywood's arbitrary name changes annoying and baffling, but so long as he grasps this reed of reason he can stand it this time. As for making "Mina" a Van Helsing, that seems to be a unique gambit of this version, but it's consistent with Deane and Balderston making Mi--er, "Lucy" a Seward and Jack Seward her father. I suppose it helps maintain the unities of the drama and all that.

Lu-- I mean Mina (Jan Francis) shows the dangers of vampirism when the vampire doesn't really love you.

As for the Count himself, Langella tells us in a DVD interview that he had to fight tooth and claw to maintain his stage interpretation of the role. He refused to wear fangs. He refused to have blood on his face. He resisted, in vain, having to wear disintegration makeup at the end. So far, so like Lugosi, who never submitted to appliances either. Also like his predecessor, Langella does a lot of stuff with his hands. Unlike Lugosi, who had a stronger wrist action, Langella does most of his pantomime work with his fingers, often crooking two together in a manner he considered evocative of bats. He was, of course, in no other way batlike, since that would defeat the purpose of the play and the film.

Frank Langella was afraid that audiences would laugh at him upside down (above), but more people may have chuckled at the volume of fog that announces his arrival at Lucy's bedchamber.

Wendigo finds Langella well modulated, both as a physical and vocal performer. The actor rarely makes a wasted movement and underplays as often as possible, as if to express his absolute confidence in his own expertise. Badham, an unshowy, impersonal director, is wise to simply set up his camera and let Langella work, allowing the audience to grow attentive to his subtle menacings.

Liberated from the Deane-Balderston text by Richter's screenplay (which still includes many of the key scenes and famous lines), Langella develops a tragic, romantic aspect of Dracula that many people consider implicit in the play, if not the novel. A lot of the romantic Dracula archetype is founded on one line uttered by Lugosi in the Browning film, "to be truly dead...that would be glorious." Elaborating on that, Richter and Langella give us a Dracula driven by longing as much as by hunger or survival instinct -- a lonely guy looking for love as well as blood. In this version, he's drawn to Mi-- I mean Lucy by love at first sight. He's the only man around who recognizes her superiority, as the film sees it, and acknowledges it.

Isn't it every girl's dream to share a coffin with her lover?

The 1979 filmmakers were out consciously to distill the inferential romanticism of the vampire story, the element that turned Lugosi and Langella into sex-symbols before they put their performances on film, into a self-conscious woman-oriented romantic fantasy. Wendigo sees the Badham film as a synthesis of the now-traditional Dracula text and Stoker's presumed inspiration, Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. It turns Dracula himself into a heterosexual Carmilla, a demon lover with the emphasis on lover, a menace because of the rebellious passions he awakens in M-m-Lucy as well as the crimes he commits against others. Lucy Seward is a menace before she gets vamped because she questions authority and denies father (a dim, gluttonous Donald Pleasance) and fiancee the deference they expect. Her rebellion may seem modest, but her brush with vampirism symbolizes how much such rebellion must have seemed like the devil's work to the patriarchs of her time. Badham and Richter push this rebellious angle to the edge of outright egotistical amorality. We never get a moment when she might have expressed some outrage or disapproval of what her new boyfriend did to her old girlfriend, which was pretty damn shitty and far from romantic. Instead, she is pure rebellion, pure female if not feminist fantasy, albeit one that comes with a Get Out Of Hell Free card as long as the master vampire is destroyed. Kate Nelligan gives a sort of self-contained performance that Wendigo admires because it expresses the theme of the film, but I wouldn't have mourned if she'd been staked alongside Dracula. That's an ending that'd indict the patriarchy!

Maurice Binder proves that Dracula was the James Bond of his time; that's why chicks dug him.

Badham and Richter worked up what they hoped would be regarded as a classic final image for the film. Dracula has been impaled on a cargo hook and hauled up the mast of the Tsarina Ekaterina to be cooked by the sun. His cape finally flutters loose to be carried by the wind. Lucy, the curse presumably lifted, gazes at the cape and smiles, misty-eyed. The most conventional interpretation of this would be that she's happy because she's free of the vampire curse, but I get a feeling that most viewers don't buy it. Because you hear a wolf howl on the soundtrack, you can also see the cape as a sign that Dracula has miraculously escaped the deathtrap and that Lucy looks forward to an eventual reunion, unredeemed.

Since Badham tells us its supposed to be ambiguous, I'll offer another interpretation. The ending reminds me most of the end of High Sierra, after Bogart has been shot down on the mountain. Ida Lupino asks someone what Bogart's pet phrase "crashed out" means and is told that it means to escape and be free. Lupino gazes toward the mountain, misty-eyed, and mutters, "free..." If we're ultimately meant to sympathize with both Dracula and Lucy as lonely, misunderstood souls, this interpretation of the ending may be the one in which they come off best.

Let's wrap up with some technical notes. Wendigo admires most of the cast, including Laurence Olivier in spite of his dubious "Dutch" accent, which is just his "little old European/Jewish man" voice as heard in The Boys From Brazil, The Jazz Singer, etc. The great man is also phycially limited by recent grave ailments, so that his death blow against Dracula looks physically impossible. Badham gently indicts Donald Pleasance as a "handkerchief actor," and that made us aware of every little thing he does to steal scenes. Jonathan Harker, as usual, is a hopeless role, and Trevor Eve gives little cause for hope, while Tony Haygarth can't help but disappoint as a relatively nondescript Renfield. Technically, I'm more impressed now than when I saw it nearly thirty years ago by the cinematography of Gilbert Taylor and the production design of Peter Murton, which Wendigo admired all along. Its virtually monochrome gothicism anticipates Tim Burton without really looking campy; the visuals fit well with the moody music of John Williams, the signifier of how big the film was meant to be. While I find the score relatively lackluster and definitely unmemorable compared to the great work he was doing for Lucas, Spielberg and Richard Donner, Wendigo likes it because it's right for the film, and I can't dispute that point. As for the special effects, producer Walter Mirisch explains paradoxically that, because movies are a more realistic medium than the stage, a film Dracula requires more "magic" than a stage version. Wendigo likes the frankly magical, pre-fleshpump transformations and materializations, and the bat effects throughout, excepting one puppet used for close-ups, are above average.

"Renfield, you disappoint me." Can't argue with that.

Wendigo has one major peeve about the soundtrack: the wolf howls are canned, he insists, and sound no better than what you might hear on a Halloween party record. He has more of an ear for such things than I do, so I'll defer to his feeling. On the other hand, Wendigo has no problem with the film's infamous Maurice Binder crimson laserlight "vampire wedding" sequence, the love scene between Lucy and Dracula. For him, keeping John Williams in mind, it's Dracula's equivalent of the "Can You Read My Mind?" flying sequence from Superman -- another much-hated moment of late-Seventies cinema. Wendigo says it's just a subjective rendering of the intense romantic experience from Lucy's point of view, and as symbolic sex in a genre film it's really preferable to a shoulder-and-sheets moment. If it looks weird, so what? Deal with it.

Frank Langella first played Dracula on stage not long after Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire was published. While reinterpreting an old role, he was a harbinger of the transformation of the vampire archetype from monster to antihero to romantic icon. The public may not have been ready for it in 1979 -- producer Walter Mirisch complains that Love at First Bite may have ruined people's appetite for a straight vampire story -- but time and our culture may have caught up with the Badham version. Wendigo says that people who've disparaged it or ignored it in the past owe it a fresh look now.

Try to take a fresh look at this beat-up trailer for "the story of the greatest lover who ever lived, died and lived again," as uploaded to YouTube by DIOTD2008.