I recent­ly spot­ted that the 1931 film Drac­u­la was play­ing on the Hor­ror chan­nel, and duly record­ed it with one eye on a sea­son­al blog (this) and anoth­er eye on a suit­ably creepy fam­i­ly night-in with a clas­sic, jus­ti­fied by the prox­im­i­ty to Hal­loween. Frankly, I was scep­ti­cal about the lat­ter, giv­en that my mind’s eye visu­al­i­sa­tion of an ide­alised fam­i­ly event or shared expe­ri­ence doesn’t always pan out as imag­ined; I sus­pect­ed that the obvi­ous ancient­ness of the movie would turn off teenagers. Indeed, it did turn one of them off and she soon drift­ed vam­pir­i­cal­ly off to her bed­room, but the oth­er one, and her moth­er, were grat­i­fy­ing­ly drawn into this atmos­pher­ic and trope-laden clas­sic.

The cul­tur­al icon that is Count Drac­u­la had had its treat­ment ear­li­er than this movie: the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist film­mak­er F W Mur­nau had filmed Nos­fer­atu in 1922 (though with­out per­mis­sion and sub­ject to a copy­right infringe­ment claim brought about suc­cess­ful­ly by Bram Stoker’s wid­ow). The first autho­rised adap­ta­tion of Bram Stoker’s 1897 nov­el was the stage play writ­ten by Irish play­wright Hamil­ton Deane in 1924 and revised for Broad­way in 1927 by John L Balder­ston. The Broad­way pro­duc­tion cast Hun­gar­i­an actor Bela Lugosi in the lead role, which helped him (though not with­out oppo­si­tion from cer­tain quar­ters) secure the role in the film ver­sion four years lat­er.

Direct­ed by Tod Brown­ing, the film pre­miered at the Roxy The­atre in New York City on Feb­ru­ary 12, 1931. News­pa­pers report­ed that mem­bers of the audi­ences faint­ed in shock at the hor­ror on screen. This pub­lic­i­ty, shrewd­ly orches­trat­ed by the film stu­dio of course, ensured that peo­ple would flock to see the film, and indeed, with­in 48 hours of its open­ing, it had sold 50,000 tick­ets, and end­ed up being the biggest of Uni­ver­sal’s 1931 releas­es.

The mes­meris­ing per­for­mance of Bela Lugosi was of course a key ele­ment in the suc­cess of the movie. It is said that he was quite an odd and qui­et man; David Man­ners (who played Jonathan Hark­er) said: “He was mys­te­ri­ous and nev­er real­ly said any­thing to the oth­er mem­bers of the cast except good morn­ing when he arrived and good night when he left. He was polite, but always dis­tant”. How­ev­er, on screen he cer­tain­ly looked and act­ed the part to the point of cre­at­ing an endur­ing arche­type.

The atmos­phere of the movie is clev­er­ly craft­ed, and it has all the defin­ing fea­tures that you’d expect: the huge, cob­web-bedecked cas­tle, with an impos­si­bly large and rang­ing stair­case, an inor­di­nate num­ber of can­dles and hov­er­ing bats at the win­dow. Lugosi nails the Count’s stand-off­ish charm and of course the authen­tic east­ern Euro­pean accent, and there is a lin­ger­ing, per­va­sive sense of dan­ger.

Enjoy this clip, the excel­lent “mir­ror scene” in which, after a tense meet­ing between Drac­u­la, Van Hels­ing, Dr Seward, Jonathan Hark­er and his fiancée Mina, Van Hels­ing notices some­thing very unusu­al…