When last I saw a horror movie from Hammer, it was Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee starring in The Mummy. Lee was the mummy in question, and I noted at the time that it was something of a shame that Lee, given his deep baritone voice, was playing a silent character. As it is, the starts of Hammer’s Dracula and Frankenstein franchises were also available through my Hulu subscription, so why not find one that allowed Lee to, you know, actually talk?
I opted for Horror of Dracula to start to see how well a movie about a killer vampire lord could take advantage of one actor’s voice and height in ways that the Bela Lugosi classic couldn’t.
The story of Dracula, are related by Bram Stoker’s novel, is somewhat familiar. A solicitor named Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to do a real estate deal for some old nobleman. Said nobleman, Count Dracula, is looking to acquire property in London and he soon moves there after locking Harker up with his undead brides because Dracula is a vampire, and from there, Harker, his friends, and old Professor Van Helsing need to put Dracula down before Dracula does to Harker’s innocent fiancee Mina what the vampire has already done to a number of other women, including Mina’s best friend Lucy, and make her into another monster.
And…this movie doesn’t really do that. It opens with Harker (John Van Eyssen) moving to Transylvania to take a job as Dracula’s librarian. This Jonathan is engaged to Lucy (Carol Marsh), who herself is the sister of Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough), and Arthur is married to Mina (Melissa Stribling). Heck, Arthur and Mina have a daughter of maybe eight or nine years old. In point of fact, Jonathan is fully aware of what Dracula (Lee) really is and intends to put the old Count and his one vampire bride (Valerie Gaunt) down forever. It doesn’t work as Jonathan only manages to destroy the bride before Dracula wakes up, leaving the disposal of the Count to Jonathan’s friend Van Helsing (Cushing). So, it looks like whoever made this movie simply took all the character names, scrambled them around a bit, and then made up a story that’s a little bit different from what it was before.
I’m rather fine with that. Whether it was done for copyright reasons or to simply set their Dracula apart from other, more famous versions, it keeps the audience on their toes. It also changes the count’s motivation a bit. Dracula doesn’t go to London and doesn’t seem inclined to do so until after Jonathan has successfully killed the vampire woman (and Jonathan himself has turned by the time Van Helsing arrives), but he’s going specifically to turn the women of the men after him. That means Lucy first, and when she’s disposed of, going for Mina since Van Helsing appears to be flying solo the entire time.
Titled simple Dracula in Britain, this movie does do a few things that set it apart and in one case changed the vampire genre quite a bit. For one thing, Van Helsing is not a doddering old man. Cushing does have a rather severe face, but he does a little bit of light stunt work here and there, showing he can move a bit when he needs to. Many of the vampire effects, like geysers of blood when staked and red contact lenses when hungry, still come around, but the biggest may be the simplest: this is a sexy Dracula.
True, Lugosi wasn’t a hideous troll the way, say, the title character in Nosferatu was, but Lee’s Dracula is someone the women seem…really excited to stick a neck out for. Lucy, pre-transformation, walks around in something of a sheer nightie getting herself ready for his visit through her balcony window. This movie probably didn’t invent the idea that vampire feeding was the same as sex, but it probably didn’t look quite so much like it did before either. True, it’s still 1958, but it’s still a lot closer than earlier movies could have gone with. Plus, arguably, Dracula only really acts to replace an undead bride when his previous one is taken out by hunters. He’s not an innocent, but he also seems like someone who would have never dreamed about going to England if Van Helsing and Harker had just left him alone.
Moody, gothic, and with a lot of bright red, this movie did more to take advantage of Lee’s strengths as a performer than The Mummy did, so now I’m a little curious how that Curse of Frankenstein came out. Good thing Hulu seems to have that one too.
Grade: A-
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