Dracula (1931)

1931
Directed by Tod Browning
Starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye and Edward Van Sloan

Cue your Ozzy Osbourne song of choice.  October is finally here!

Yes, folks, Halloween season.  Samhain.  The celebration of the harvest, whatever you want to call it, the most glorious time of the year has arrived, and we're ringing it in with style here on the Lick Ness Monster blog.  I'm sure that all...eight of my subscribers will appreciate it.  Kidding aside, this month will always have a special place in my heart for reasons that I've waxed rhapsodic about endlessly already.  You all know about the Greatest Street in the History of Streets that I grew up on that still gets 1,000+ visitors every year on October 31st, my past with the Friday the 13th series and how it quite literally saved my life in 2007-08, my ten favorite horror villains, every movie in the freakin' Halloween franchise.  Yes, folks, we've had some good times here on the blog over the years.  And now, we're covering pretty much ground zero of American horror films - the Universal Monster Movies.

Now, I know some people who are just absolute connoisseurs of the Universal House of Horror.  For the uninitiated, this was pretty much IT when it came to horror in the golden era of Hollywood.  Universal Studios had the rights to do the movies to all of the big literary monsters at the time, and while they weren't quite as much of a factory as Britain's Hammer Studios would be in the '50s and beyond, they cranked these things out at a pretty impressive rate.  Sequels, spinoffs, crossovers, even parody movies, they did it all with these classic characters.  Thus, while the movies aren't all that scary today, they're worth watching for the history lesson alone.

Fortunately, they're worth watching for much more than that, because I highly doubt that anyone reading this besides myself watches these flicks for their historical context.  Hell, most people on Facebook seem to exclusively care about baby pictures and food selfies.  So if you're looking to have fun, these movies are also a good place to start.  Watching these films today, it immediately becomes clear just how PROUD Universal Studios was of this output.  It's not like back in the '80s, when Paramount was so embarrassed by Friday the 13th that a book was eventually released where just about everyone involved in it did nothing but trash the thing.  'Cus, you know, you're all such amazing actors that getting killed by Jason is what you're best known for.  Not so here.  These movies had big budgets, big promotion, big casts, slick scenery, you name it.  It was all in the presentation, and it would only get better with time.  But every dynasty has to start somewhere, and it started in 1931 with a director named Tod Browning and the first truly epic film version of Dracula.

There had been Dracula flicks before this one, but...well, they sucked.  They were either silent (color me uncultured, but I just can't get into silent movies) or bad.  Universal pulled out all the stops with this one, taking a script based on a 1924 stage play, trotting out character actor extraordinaire Bela Lugosi as a Svengali-esque titular vampire, and a whole lotta fog.  And that would make a hell of a Led Zeppelin song (/bad joke).  Pretty much any Dracula movie comes down to four elements: (1) The dude playing Dracula; (2) The way that the writers decide to interpret Bram Stoker's original novel; (3) The supporting characters; and (4) The atmosphere.  Having said that, let's look at how it played out on the big stage here.

You'd be hard-pressed to find to find many critics out there who express anything other than the utmost respect for Bela Lugosi here, and it's well-deserved.  The movie is far from a direct interpretation of the book; that much is established when the guy's all-powerful telepathic ability becomes his biggest superpower early in the film.  Simply put, Lugosi is money.  Every time the guy speaks, you believe every word he says.  That's another thing about watching old movies - the acting was much more theatrical and unrealistic, but it's infinitely more memorable.  Bela Lugosi is memorable, amazing, and projects just the right amount of menace.  If you've seen the movie Ed Wood, you know how the guy eventually turned out in real life, and it lends watching this movie a little sadness that actually ADDS to the poignancy.  +2 cool points for Bela Lugosi.

The story.  What sets this movie apart from everything that came before and after was how much of a focus it has on the Renfield character.  In this movie, he's played by the unreal Dwight Frye, and he has the greatest creepy laugh in the history of cinema.  People who have read the book know the basics of the Dracula story, so I won't reiterate it here, but it's Renfield who gets the focus instead of Harker in the early goings before setting up shop in a sanitorium that oh-so-conveniently adjoins Carfax Abbey, Dracula's new digs in London.  Mina is now Dr. Seward's daughter, she is still engaged to Jonathan Harker, and Lucy is still the family friend who becomes Dracula's first victim.  However, there's a big focus on the unsavory side of Victorian life in this go-round as the sanitorium becomes one of the movie's key locales.  It's different, but it works.  Oh, and in addition to Dracula turning into a bat and sucking blood, he constantly hypnotizes people with his creepy stare.  And the vampire killer himself, Dr. Van Helsing?  Yeah, he's here, and he's just as much of an ass-kicker as ever.

Moving on, we focus on the characters.  Personal opinion here, but I think there was a point in cinema history (probably sometime in the '50s) when the art of fleshing out characters truly hit its stride.  Thus, we have paper-thin cardboard cutouts here, but they're paper-thin cardboard cutouts that are played with plenty of energy and zeal.  Edward Van Sloan was especially good as Van Helsing  The only person who I didn't respond to strongly here was David Manners as Harker.  For some reason, I've never seen a truly good portrayal of Harker on film.  Ironically, the best might actually be Steven Weber in the freakin' Mel Brooks parody movie.  Other than Lugosi, though, I gotta go back and give more props to Dwight Frye's performance as Renfield.  So much focus is put on him, and he was totally up to it, not caring in the least about acting - and looking - like an ass.  Seriously, this guy cranks up the grease to Philip Seymour Hoffman levels, and he doesn't even care.  Can't give him enough 85-years-late kudos.

Finally, let's look at the atmosphere.  I've touched on it already, but we got glorious black-and-white darkness, fog, and visuals that just look like a funeral dirge.  It works really well with all of the stuff in the sanitorium, although, I'll confess, it doesn't hold a candle to the sheer Gothic madness of the Hammer Dracula films.  Personal preference, glandular condition, call it whatever you want.

Overall, this is a really fun, really QUICK (the running time is 70 minutes - I wish more modern movies would take this example) watch that you can pop in any ol' time and be entertained.  *** 1/2 out of ****, and it's nothing if not a very solid start to a very solid line-up of classic monsters.  And we're just getting started...