Inspired by my friend Rain’s annual tradition, I’m pledging to spend my (little) free time in October getting caught up on spooky movies I’ve never seen, or ones that I haven’t seen in years. Last night I started with Horror of Dracula (or just Dracula outside the US), the 1958 Hammer Horror classic with Peter Cushing and not nearly enough Christopher Lee.
This one is such an undisputed classic that it’s almost inexcusable that I haven’t seen it before. In my defense, I have seen much of it, but never in its entirety. And the imagery is ubiquitous enough that I can recognize most of it on sight. I just took it for granted that I got what it was all about, and the act of actually watching it was nothing more than a formality.
I was mistaken! It surprised me how much I enjoyed it. I went in knowing that I’d have to make plenty of concessions to account for its being made in the 50s, its being a Hammer picture, and its being based on a book that I honestly have never liked. So I was surprised to see how many signs there were that these guys really knew what they were doing!
After a ponderous opening with some of the worst music I’ve heard in a movie, we see the familiar beginning of the story, with Jonathan Harker arriving at the curiously empty Castle Dracula to take a new job with the Count, in this version as his librarian. He’s quickly met by a nightgown-wearing woman, though, who warns him that the Count is evil and begs him to help her escape.
We meet the Count, and he doesn’t have any of the immediately-visible weirdness of Nosferatu or Bela Lugosi’s or Gary Oldman’s versions; he’s just a handsome dude who takes care of everything politely and efficiently. But then we get the first major deviation: Harker writes in his diary about his real plans, acknowledging that he’s not the hapless dipshit from the original story and most adaptations, but a vampire hunter working in league with Van Helsing!
(Of course, he later goes on to do one of the single stupidest things any character has ever done in any horror movie ever. But I guess if he didn’t, there’d be no movie left).
There are several small but clever changes like this throughout, and especially after recently seeing Nosferatu and noticing its deviations from the original book, I really appreciated how much this movie reworked the original. It’s a complete Hammerization: it excises as much as possible of the boring stuff or psychological/psychosexual material, and just spends all its time advancing the plot and keeping it a story about vampire hunters.
I love this version of Lucy. Mostly just by taking her hair out of braids, she seems to undergo a complete transformation from innocent to monstrous. I’ve seen stills from later in the movie several times over the years, and I never made the connection that it was the same character.
And as for the rest of it, it’s almost exactly what I want from a mid-century adaptation of Dracula. Everything keeps moving, innocents are in peril but neither completely powerless nor completely innocent, and the comic relief is overlong and corny as hell.
I would have liked to see more Christopher Lee, though. I’m guessing that he’s a larger presence in the various sequels. I wonder if it would’ve spent the entire makeup budget of the film trying to cover up his prominent five o’clock shadow. (Or maybe that was a key element of his undead character? I prefer to think that the man was just too virile to keep from poking through layers of vampire makeup).
He’s as suave as I’d always expected, not bothering to bring any eastern-European business to the character, both because it’s a little xenophobic but just as much because all of the locations have been quietly relocated to Germany. Or at least the British section of Germany.
Most delightful to me was how the last scenes of the movie transform into a kind of gruesome Benny Hill bit. Especially when Dracula is shoveling dirt into a grave and he spots Van Helsing approaching. He gives the perfect “oh shit!” expression, tosses the shovel aside, and makes a mad dash into the castle. During the ensuing chase, he keeps looking not like the fearsome King of All Vampires, but as if he’s thinking “oh no is this the end of poor Dracula?!”
So I think I’m off to a good but early start to my October spooky-movie viewing. I don’t think I’m going to be able to watch one a night, but I’ll try to cram in as many as possible while I’m avoiding all the tasks I’m supposed to be doing this month.
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