I don’t really love Halloween, but I love one of its main characters. I love Dracula. I don’t even care about vampires but I care about Dracula, and, not to presume that the readers of this site are particularly attuned to the oeuvres of any one of its writers, but if you have noticed a glut of Dracula content on CrimeReads throughout the past few years, especially around this season, it’s probably because of me. I love Dracula, from Transylvania to London and back again.
So, if you’re looking for something to watch this Halloween weekend, I ask you to look no further than Halloween’s undying great-great grandfather. But which Dracula movie should you choose? There are lots of options, and some are better than others. But, for my money, I think the best one is Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula from 1958. Christopher Lee is Dracula and Peter Cushing is Van Helsing and all the blood is hot pink.
When the film was released, the tagline instructed “don’t dare to see it alone” but you absolutely can. It’s not scary. Well, that’s a matter of opinion. If I were a child in 1968, I probably would have been terrified. But since I saw it for the first time as an adult, I was and have always been fascinated by it.
Why? First of all, the fog! There’s tons of fog! Hammer Film Productions (a low-budget, English movie studio that was started in the 1930s and hit its stride, specializing in horror and sci-fi movies, in the 1950s-1970s) must have bought out every single block of dry ice in London, it’s so foggy. I don’t know why, but I love it. It feels extravagant, in its own B-movie way.
Second, and this is the real reason, it changes the plot in a very interesting way. Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula was turned into a play before it was adapted to film, and most films actually adapt the play, rather than the novel. Now, most Dracula movies make large-scale narrative changes. For example, Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau’s unlicensed adaptation from 1922, heavily messed with the plot to paint over the similarities between Bram Stoker’s novel and his own version. And Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula takes the whole novel and stuffs in a Vlad the Impaler history and a reincarnation love plot. But Horror of Dracula, directed by Terence Fisher, is different. It goes completely wild, making up its own story entirely rather than simply reproducing a playscript which in turn awkwardly interprets the novel.
Get this: Jonathan Harker shows up to Castle Dracula on business, but it turns out he’s actually a vampire hunter there to stake the Count. He doesn’t fulfill his mission, so his old friend Abraham Van Helsing has to finish the job. But in the meantime, Dracula causes a lot of hoopla hypnotizing and seducing Jonathan’s fiancee and her best friend. It’s a very tidy remaking of the original novel, plus there’s something so fabulously scary about Lee’s Dracula—incredibly imposing and his mouth frequently dripping with blood. He’s handsome but not in a way that distracts from his monstrousness; he’s elegant and well-spoken but not in a way that’s particularly sensitive.
As the Law of Diminishing Returns instructs us, in the later Hammer Dracula movies (there are seven more, people), Lee’s few character traits and even his ability to speak almost entirely fade away; eventually he’s just the world’s tallest pair of fangs in a cape, with an unconscious woman draped in his arms. He probably has the same number of lines in the first film as in all the rest of the movies combined. So, you don’t have to watch the rest of them. But you should settle down with Horror of Dracula. It is really perfect, in its low-budget, 60s way—campy enough to make you giggle, bloody enough to make you gasp.
