Enough of this ancient black and white shit. Enough of your great-grandma's vampires! It is time for a new generation of bloodsucking. Let's check out our grandma's Dracula, with none than the great Christopher Lee. Today we have color. We have red blood. We have big breasts clad in very sheer white dresses. Most importantly, we have FANGS!!
Yeah, amazingly enough, vampires did not have fangs in movies regularly until the Hammer Horror series. Count Orlok in Nosferatu had his two sharp rat-like teeth. But the classic big long canines? The classic look of plastic vampire teeth toys you get from Halloween stores? That does not appear until the 1950s. Fangs don't originate with today's movie Horror of Dracula (AKA, just "Dracula" in its native Britain). However, you could not really have a vampire movie without fangs after this. Finally, the iconic look is completed.
Hammer Film Productions in the late 1950s picked up the baton dropped by Universal Pictures in the mid-Forties. During these years they would release their version of Frankenstein, The Mummy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, and most prominent of all, Dracula. There's eight of these Hammer Horror Dracula movies which ran all the way to 1974. I would love to run down the entire franchise with its various ups and downs. These movies are famous for pitting Christopher Lee's Dracula up against the equally impressive Doctor - not Professor - Van Helsing, played by Peter Cushing. The franchise becomes basically a precursor to the Eighties Slasher formula, considering how many ways Dracula dies, and how many ways he comes back. They all have awesome, evocative names like "Dracula Has Risen From the Grave" or "The Satanic Rites of Dracula".
But we can't cover all of them. In fact, I'll only cover three. We only have thirty-one days, you gotta cut somewhere.
The original Horror of Dracula seems to be the one best-remembered, most acclaimed, and also just the one people like the most. It could not open more memorably. After the blood-red opening titles, we pan in on Count Dracula's immense stone sarcophagus, zooming right into the word "D R A C U L A". Then they drizzle bright neon red blood on the name like a baker decorating with powdered sugar. That's how a movie makes a mission statement!
This is also the Hammer movie closest to the original Bram Stoker source material, while still taking multiple liberties. For example, Dracula never makes it to London, instead Van Helsing and company are based out of Bavaria. There is no Renfield character. The characters of Mina (Melissa Stribling) and Lucy (Carol Marsh) are flipped, so this Mina is paired with Arthur (Michael Gough), not Jonathan. Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) opens the movie in traditional Bram Stoker fashion as a studious young man looking to serve Count Dracula. We even get voice over narration from him which matches the Stoker epistolary structure; the narration is directly from Harker's diary. Then we swerve dramatically off Stoker's map when Harker reveals that he's a double-agent working to kill the Count.
Well, that does not work out, Harker is sucked-in by Dracula's sexy wife, and then gets bitten by Dracula and becomes a vampire himself. After this, he is kinda tags-in for Renfield, if for only one scene. Van Helsing is remarkably quick with mercy killing his best friend. That means Arthur winds up being Helsing's sidekick, desperately trying to save the women in his life from fully transforming into the undead, with frankly very little success. Both actresses get their big spooky turns while under the influence of evil. A fully vampired-out Lucy might even get the most scary scene in the entire movie.
There's a lot about Horror of Dracula that's smoother and more thrilling than the 1931 original. The sets and castles all look quite handsome in full color. All the characters have distinct personalities - except weirdly, the Count himself, but I'll get to that in a moment. Michael Gough and Peter Cushing together are solid heroes with a ton of charisma. And the evil they're facing is more brutal and physically intimidating than any vampire before.
Christopher Lee was a tall man, and he looks massive in a cape and a domineering position on top of a staircase. There's a truly great effect when Lee first bares his fangs, as he appears with blood gushing down his mouth and bloodshot eyes. (Apparently the contact effects were so irritating to the actor they never used them again.) One of Arthur's maids describes Dracula as looking "like the Devil", and she's not wrong.
The problem for me is that you expect more than just bigness out of Dracula, especially a Christopher Lee Dracula. This version has no dialog at all in the whole second act of the movie. He gives up any illusion of humanity after the first ten minutes. Lee is an amazing actor whose voice is one of his great tools, but he never talks to Van Helsing. These two are supposed to be the great rivals here, maybe they should have a game of wills at some point? Let Saruman use his voice! He's great on the mic! (I'm to understand this doesn't get better in the sequels, including the second movie where Dracula doesn't have even one line.)
Bela Lugosi's Dracula was an evil human with dark powers. This Dracula is a Monster that Walks Like a Man, which is terrifying in its own right. And as mentioned before, the various undead women in the movie do pick up a lot of the slack from a too-often missing Lee.
So certainly Horror of Dracula is not a bad movie. It has most of the hallmarks you'd want in a classic, and its a massive step forward in vampire cinema. The promise given in the opening from that bloody sarcophagus is fully fulfilled.
Next Time: Skipping ahead to the very last Christopher Lee Hammer Dracula movie, Dracula A.D. 1972. What happens when Dracula meets hippies?
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