This isn’t the best filmed version of Bram Stoker’s famous novel. That would be F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). However, Horror of Dracula (1958) is one of my favorites, along with that great 1922 version. I’d actually seen this film years ago, on late-night cable as I remember, under its original British title, simply Dracula. The title was changed for stateside exhibition to avoid confusion with the 1931 version staring Bela Legosi. While it’s the image of the infamous Count from that picture, with the exaggerated widow’s peak, which has been solidified in the popular consciousness, I feel that this later English B-picture has the slight edge.
What makes Dracula pictures so interesting, at least from the filmic perspective, is that so many of them have been made throughout the years. In a way, we can almost chart the technical advancements of the medium through the multiple retellings of this one horror story. It’s also a narrative that has been tackled by some of the most interesting directors to ever call “action,” and seeing their various takes on the novel, and inevitably on the films that preceded their own, makes it an intensely rewarding exercise. For example, a comparison between the Werner Herzog telling, Nosferatu the Vampire (1979), and the Francis ford Coppola treatment, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), would reveal quite a bit about the similarities and differences between these two sometimes megalomaniac directors.
Furthermore, it’s always fun to note what additions, subtractions, and changes the adaptor has made from the source material. In this version, Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) is drawn to Dracula’s castle not naively under the pretense of a real estate venture, but under his own false pretense, as he plans from the outset to kill the count and end his reign of terror. It’s an interesting twist on the classic tale that points the story in a slightly different direction. It’s likely that the changes made throughout the narrative were put in place to shave the production budget, and because audiences were already familiar with the story. In either case, they indeed provide a welcomed shift in the well-known sequence of events.
As I mentioned, this is a B-picture and thus it features plenty of hokey special effects and poor make-up jobs. But where I find these things to be intolerable in Hong-Kong action pictures from the Shaw Bros. studio, I have a strange affection for them in B-grade Horror. The film is also notable in this respect for its relatively early performances from Christopher Lee (as Count Dracula) and Peter Cushing, who went on to play Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (1977). Also appearing is Michael Gough, who is best known for his role as Alfred in the Tim Burton imagining of Batman (1989).
In all, this adds up to an enjoyable Saturday matinee or late-night couch flick, one that shouldn’t be missed for pure enjoyment of the movies.
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