1958 horror, dir. Terence Fisher, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee:
IMDb /
allmovie. The Count
relocates from his castle to… Karlstadt? US vt Horror of Dracula.
This makes something of a mess of the original story, but it's
saved by the acting. We open on Jonathan Harker travelling to the
castle, but supposedly to catalogue the Count's library; soon it's
revealed that he's actually a vampire hunter, working with van
Helsing. He fails in his task and gets turned himself; van Helsing
shows up and finishes him off, but by this point Dracula has seen
Jonathan's picture of Lucy and become obsessed. (One feels that
perhaps a more competent vampire hunter wouldn't bring a picture of
his fiancée on the job.)
Then we're on to Arthur Holmwood and his wife Mina in Karlstadt…
well, you get the idea. Names and relationships have been thoroughly
moved around; but Lucy will still die of mysterious blood loss, and
van Helsing will save the day. More or less.
Jimmy Sangster claimed to have taken out the animal transformations in
the name of realism, but I can't help thinking he had an eye to the
budget too. But as with The Curse of Frankenstein it's Cushing's
performance that anchors this, as a van Helsing a little less wild
than some but very much a driven man. (There's a moment with a weeping
servant when his expression says to me "aha, grief, I've heard of
this".) Lee gets a slightly larger part than in that film, but after
the initial scenes in the castle he's seen remarkably little; it's a
testament to Fisher's direction and Sangster's script that unless I
was paying attention I didn't notice, because Dracula's machinations
are driving everyone else's actions.
London becomes Karlstadt so that we don't need the Voyage of the
Demeter, but hardly anything changes; about the only "outside"
scenes we get in town are near an undertaker's. Lucy dies, and Mina is
seduced. And in the end, van Helsing and Dracula have a brief fight
back at the castle, until van Helsing tears down a curtain.
It really shouldn't work. But again I have to emphasise that the
acting is good. And if I wanted a straight adaptation of the book,
I'd watch Nosferatu or the Tod Browning 1931 Dracula. Perhaps this
might have worked better if they hadn't borrowed the names, but it
works well enough for me.
(A contemporary critic wondered: why should vampires eat so much more
messily than anyone else?)
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.