Bram Stoker’s Dracula — The Face of Immortality0

Written by Nishanthini Ganesan

Written by Irish author Bram Stoker in the year 1897, the book’s title char­ac­ter Count Dracula was inspired by the real-life Romanian prince Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia who was infa­mous for his cruel meth­ods of tor­ture and noto­ri­ous for his sup­posed prac­tices of eat­ing his din­ner amongst his dying vic­tims and drink­ing their blood. The char­ac­ter of Count Dracula would then become one of the most fre­quently por­trayed char­ac­ters in film.

In the 20^th Century, this book was adapted into hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent film ver­sions. The pro­gres­sion of this lit­er­ary clas­sic into film after film is as much a story as the tale of Dracula itself. The adap­ta­tions of the title char­ac­ter dif­fer greatly, from the awk­ward, mys­te­ri­ous Count Orlock of Nosferatu(1922) to the ani­mal­is­tic Count of the 1958 Dracula.

The first film adap­ta­tion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the unau­tho­rised 1922 German silent film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (trans­lated Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror) directed by F.W. Murnau and pro­duced by the German film studio, Prana Film. Nosferatu would then become the first and only film ever to be pro­duced by the stu­dio after Bram Stoker’s widow sued the authors of the film for copy­right infringe­ment. Stoker’s widow won the lawsuit, resulting in the bank­rupcy of the German stu­dio and the ordered destruc­tion of all known exist­ing copies of Nosferatu. However, sev­eral pirated copies of the movie have sur­vived to the present, enabling today’s audi­ences to catch a glimpse of this iconic classic.

In 1979 Nosferatu was remade by direc­tor Werner Herzog.

One of the ear­li­est clas­sic American hor­ror films from Universal Pictures was the 1931 Dracula directed by Tod Browning. Browning had already directed two Vampire films, London after Midnight(1927) and Mark of the Vampire (1935), as well as the truly dis­turb­ing hor­ror film Freaks(1932), which achieved cult sta­tus despite being banned in Britain for almost three decades. The plot­line of Dracula(1931) was taken from the 1897 Dracula novel. The screen­play for the film how­ever, was more closely adapted from the suc­cess­ful Broadway stage­play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston.

Hungarian stage actor Bela Lugosi, who also starred in the Broadway play from which the movie’s screen­play was adapted, took the role of the title char­ac­ter, Count Dracula. Lugosi, who had already received good reviews with his por­trayal of Count Dracula on stage, would soon become the defin­i­tive Hollywood screen vam­pire. His dis­tinct Hungarian accent and the slow pac­ing of his sen­tences due to English not being his native lan­guage mes­merised and shocked audi­ences. Dracula(1958) launched Bela Lugosi’s film career and he went on to star in dozens of hor­ror films over the next 20 years. 

By today’s stan­dards the film is hardly shock­ing. However, it opened in 1931 to a fair amount of hys­te­ria. Newspaper reports of mem­bers of the audi­ence faint­ing while watch­ing the movie gen­er­ated pub­lic­ity for the film. Segments of the 1931 Dracula, includ­ing Renfield’s beg­ging scene where he pleads with his cap­tor to allow him to eat spi­ders and flies, were cen­sored in over­seas view­ings. The strange appear­ance of what could either be a tiny bee crawl­ing out of a minia­ture cof­fin or a giant bee crawl­ing out of a regular-sized cof­fin was also cen­sored. The movie’s orig­i­nal end­ing, an epi­logue by Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing in the film, was deleted from the film’s the­atri­cal re-release as it encour­aged the belief in Vampires and the super­nat­ural. The end­ing was never restored and is today pre­sumed to be lost.

Today, Dracula(1931) has been deemed “cul­tur­ally sig­nif­i­cant” by the United States Library of Congress, and has been selected for preser­va­tion in the National Film Registry along with the clas­sic hor­ror film Frankenstein(1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein(1935). All three films were pro­duced and dis­trib­uted by Universal Pictures.

Let the blood in the hour­glass drip to year 1958, and Hammer Films pur­chased rights from Universal to cre­ate its own film adap­ta­tion of Dracula. Hammer would then pro­duce what is con­sid­ered one of the best adap­ta­tions of the Dracula novel into film, Horror of Dracula(1958) star­ring Christopher Lee as the Count. Christopher Lee would also go on to play the same char­ac­ter in Count Dracula(1970), a low-budget film directed by Jess Franco.

Dracula(1958) was named the 30^th great­est British film of all time by Total Film mag­a­zine in 2004. Hammer and Universal would also become the top two movie stu­dios that fea­tured Count Dracula’s char­ac­ter the most in their films.

The most accu­rate on-screen adap­ta­tion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula wan­dered along when the British Broadcasting Network pro­duced a two-part minis­eries, Count Dracula(1977), based on the novel. Count Dracula(1977) fea­tured obscure actors and styl­ized sets, which made for a visu­ally unin­ter­est­ing per­for­mance despite it hav­ing, for the most part, stayed true to the novel.

In 1992, acclaimed American film direc­tor, pro­ducer and screen­writer Francis Ford Coppola pre­sented his ver­sion of Dracula when he directed the Romanian Gothic Horror film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The movie starred actors Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and Anthony Hopkins. This highly roman­ti­sised ver­sion con­tained an addi­tional story of how Dracula became a vam­pire. Female pro­tag­o­nist Mina was also revealed in the movie to be the Count’s great­est love, a sub-plot not present in the orig­i­nal story.

The char­ac­ter of Count Dracula him­self has been adapted time and time again by film­mak­ers. In 1974, Andy Warhol pre­sented a sur­real, and what could very well be the strangest adap­ta­tion of the leg­endary monster. 

Andy Warhol’s Blood of Dracula(1974) is a die or remain undead tale where the title char­ac­ter Dracula’s only way to keep him­self from death is to drink the blood of a vir­gin. He trav­els to Italy, reknown for the reli­gious nature of its peo­ple, where he meets a fam­ily with four daughters. Due to their oath to Christianity, Dracula pre­sumes that all four are vir­gins. He is, how­ever, dis­ap­pointed to find out that not all four have been as reli­gious as they have made him believe them to be. Only one of the four daugh­ters is a vir­gin and Dracula is pressed for time to find out who she is before it becomes too late and he has to spend the rest of eter­nity in a coffin.

Immortality doesn’t mean never dying. It means hav­ing a place on Earth long after the stake has gone through your heart. Immortality is Bram Stoker, who left behind a legacy that con­tin­ues to thrive long after he died. Immortality is the mon­ster he cre­ated, who wrecked its world even after its own death. The Vampire has done noth­ing more than exist. It is our fas­ci­na­tion with this mon­ster that has plagued us for cen­turies. Perhaps, it is our­selves we should be more afraid of; the depths of our imaginations. 

Was the Vampire cre­ated by nature to haunt Man, or did Man cre­ate the Vampire to haunt himself? Every decade or so, humankind will face a rise in the pop­u­lar­ity of goth cul­ture and just as surely, the genre cycle will once again enable Vampires to take their place among the élite in film. Perhaps you shouldn’t wait until then to watch any one of the movies men­tioned above. If you can’t sleep that night, remem­ber that it were mere mor­tals much like your­self who made the films and an Irish writer named Bram Stoker who opened the cof­fin to his imag­i­na­tion and began everything.