Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 1931 Tod Browning film Dracula. Today, he looks at the 1958 Terence Fisher film, Horror of Dracula. This article will contain spoilers.
Dracula (1958), released in the United States as Horror of Dracula to disambiguate it from the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi, blessedly has a lot more going for it than that installment did — it has the juice, as they say, and quite literally as the picture opens with a slow zoom on a stone sarcophagus-style coffin with the name Dracula carved on it and blood dramatically dripping down over the letters. The Hammer Horror films built their reputation off of then-shocking (or at least enticing) levels of practical-effects gore, and while Dracula is by no means a top “offender” in the whole of the Hammer oeuvre, it does get the work done when it needs to. In fact, perhaps the greatest criticism of it is that for various reasons — one must recall the onerous interference of the British Board of Film Classification in cutting these pictures down for broadcast and screening — it spends much of the middle of the picture staying away from the stuff that makes Dracula fun; namely, everything to do with Dracula himself.
Before we get there, a note on the film version: I’m watching the restored 2013 edition which added back in the material cut by the BBFC, alongside a list of what precisely that material was. Predictably, it’s most of the cool stuff: Blood when they stake Lucy, additional licking and kissing as Dracula goes in for his bite on Mina, and the disintegration effects on Dracula as Van Helsing finally kills him. Previous versions before 2013 had gotten some of the blood back in there, but the latter two cuts were only restored quite recently, and are easily among the most memorable parts of the film. The list and history of the nature of the cuts was found at this website; websites that look like this and present niche hobbyist historical material this cleanly are fading into the internet’s past, and we should treasure them while they’re still around.
The Hammer Horror version of the tale makes some substantial changes to move even further away from Stoker’s original novel than the 1931 film did, further cementing this adaptation as a battle between the evil vampire count and the heroic doctor of science, Dracula versus Van Helsing. Indeed, our two leads are Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing, and it’s Cushing who gets top billing over Lee. Here, Jonathan Harker is engaged to Lucy, not Mina, and is a vampire-hunting colleague of the good doctor — a great deal of story has already happened before we join the film in progress, as Harker comes to Dracula’s castle with full advance knowledge that the count is a vampire. He has arrived not to close a real estate deal but to take on a job as Dracula’s librarian, as a pretext to stake him in his daily slumber. He manages to lethally fuck this up; first he gets fooled by Dracula’s horny wife in a low-cut dress and gets himself bit — here, Dracula intercedes, having himself stepped out to feed on the townsfolk and returning wild-eyed and with mouth spilling blood in one of his best looks in the film. Second, when he awakens near dusk the next day, he races down to the crypt after writing his farewells in his diary, and given the choice between staking the woman vampire or the big guy himself, chooses to take out the woman first. He runs out of time, Dracula wakes up, and that’s all for Mr. Harker.
The film then picks up with our true protagonist, Van Helsing. This is a role Cushing could sleepwalk through, and he probably is — he’s never asked to be anything more on screen than grave and competent, and it hurts the film significantly that so much of the middle of the picture is scene after scene of him being gravely competent while Dracula pulls the strings offscreen around him, mainly manifesting as all the women in the picture refusing to do as they’re told and Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough; third billed, which is a first for this specific character) acting mistrustful and suspicious until Van Helsing finally shows him Harker’s diary and reveals that vampires are indeed real. We go through the general motions of a Dracula picture here: First Lucy is attacked; she uses deception to defeat Van Helsing’s safeguards, and Dracula kills her; she comes back as a vampire and begins attacking children; Van Helsing and Arthur put her down, but Dracula has moved on to Mina; this time they manage to save Mina in the build to the final act.
Two things in particular stand out about the film’s treatment of vampirism before its final act. First, it continues to take the tack that the 1931 picture does with Van Helsing’s knowledge, which the 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula will continue to take: Instead of being a disgraced academic or kook as he is in the Nosferatu films, Van Helsing is a man of science whose belief in vampirism demonstrates his education and progressive work in his field; he knows more than the unlearned and mistrustful Holmwoods and Harkers who surround him, and for this Dracula fears him and regards him as a real foe. Second, the effect of the vampire’s mind control in this film is directly and unsubtly likened to drug use and drug addiction, which is unsurprising for a film made in late 50’s Britain about a series of young women carnally succumbing to an older, foreign man. The film even uses Dracula’s wife as a tool to move Harker’s bite into this territory of forbidden seduction and addiction, rather than having Dracula directly feed on him onscreen. Much has been written elsewhere of the context that this and other Hammer Horror pictures, along with other genre material like it, had in breaking open the film industry in the post-war West, much to the disdain of the censorship boards; these aren’t exploitation films, not by a long shot, but you can see the traditions of that kind of filmmaking developing here.
Or at least you can in the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes of the picture, which is also when you get to see the vampire’s castle — the only interesting bit of set design and production in the whole film, outside of the count’s cool white-lacquered traveling coffin. The biggest problem Dracula (1958) has is the same fundamental problem as the Bela Lugosi version: There’s too much dawdling around inside manor houses as Van Helsing tries and fails to get various doomed characters to do as he tells them in order to save their lives, while Dracula faffs about offscreen. In this rendition we’re even robbed of the one strength of the 1931 film, which is a direct confrontation between the two foes a little over a third of the way in that allows them to speak with one another and set up the conflict for the rest of the picture. Dracula is much smarter about concealing his location and his activities from his hunters here than he was in the earlier film, but unfortunately that means concealing Christopher Lee as well; the only character Dracula has any kind of conversation with in the picture is Jonathan Harker upon his arrival to the castle. The good news is that all of these drawing room and bedroom scenes still feature Peter Cushing, who is a star and who demands attention like one regardless of the underlying material, and this time there’s no bizarre attempt at Renfield popping in to distract from his performance or ruin the vibes.
Once we’re back in Dracula’s castle for the final few minutes of the film — getting there is a bit rushed and handwaved, but there is a good bit where it’s revealed that for a few days Dracula was keeping his coffin in the Holmwood basement right under their noses, which is the level of arrogance you want to see in your vampire count — we get back to the good stuff. Van Helsing corners Dracula back in the original dining room set where Harker and Dracula first met, and they do combat. As this version of Dracula follows the traditions laid down by the Lugosi vampire, we learn that once you beat his mind control all this guy’s really got going for him is super strong hands to strangle you with. (Strangulation is a popular monster movie kill style from this period because you can easily stage it and you don’t need fake blood.) In an interesting move, Dracula opens the fight by throwing a candle, big ornate metal candlestick and all, at Van Helsing to break his guard before dashing in to wrap him up. Van Helsing’s got genre knowledge, however; he plays possum until Dracula releases the choke and goes in for the killing bite, then breaks free by…jabbing him in the ribs…? It feels like this was supposed to be a staking but they couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
Instead, Van Helsing scrambles away, maneuvers the vampire into position next to the long dining room table, and does a cool table run and leap onto the curtains. He tears them down and the light of day floods the room, giving us the best death of any of the vampires covered in this feature so far, including the Eggers Nosferatu. First sunlight hits Drac’s leg, rotting it, desiccating it, and turning it to ancient dust; he tries to drag himself out of the sunbeams, but Van Helsing makes an ersatz cross out of silver candlesticks and forces him back into it, getting his hand next — this is the really standout effect, the best one in the whole movie, gross without going full hokey. Then, without an arm to support him, Dracula falls backwards into the sunbeam and it burns away his head; the technology wasn’t quite there yet in ‘58 to do this the justice you’d see in coming years, but it makes up for it with spirit. There’s a brief cut to Mina and Arthur outside, yadda yadda, love wins, who cares; we just got the payoff to the relationship the film actually cared about.
This one was pretty good! It didn’t pretend to care all that much about the psychodrama or cuckolding stuff that would position Mina or Jonathan as the major foils to the vampire; looking at the 1931 film and deciding to chuck Renfield out the window entirely was a fantastic decision. All the parts where Lee was on screen were excellent, and Cushing managed to liven up the soggy middle act of the picture (something that’s also become a tradition in Dracula films) just by showing up for work. You can see why the fang positioning here — a new pair of teeth that come in over the canines, instead of the beaver-tooth needles of Nosferatu or the simple exaggerated canines of prior film vampires — changed the game; Lee going from reserved to a bloody madman in the opening of the film is incredibly effective, and they’re a big part of it along with the red contact lenses.
Next week, we can’t put it off any longer. The other vampire film from the turn of the millennium: Dracula 2000 (2000).
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