THE CINEMATIC (UN)LIFE OF COUNT DRACULA
1922-1979
Part II: “Bela Lugosi’s (Un)Dead”

Now, before discussing the Count’s screen presence any further, I should first say something about Dracula, the play, since most of the films, beginning with 1931’s Dracula, used the stage adaptation as the basis for their scripts; which is why most of the Dracula films are seemingly so far off the mark—they are, after all, adaptations of an adaptation.

1924-1927.
Florence Stoker agrees to the purchase of the dramatic rights of the property by actor/manager Hamilton Deane. According to David J. Skal, it is to Deane’s credit that the “modern” image of Dracula—that of the charismatic and seductive nobleman, as opposed to the ancient and repulsive Count of the novel—must go.
In order to scale down the novel so as to make it viable as a stage play, Deane had to reinterpret the character, drawing inspiration from the literary image of the vampire from over a century before, notably, the dashing, very sociable, and aristocratic figure, as portrayed in such stories as John Polidori’s The Vampyre. (Lord Ruthven, the titular bloodsucker, bears an uncanny resemblance to Polidori’s one-time friend, Lord Byron; the story itself was based on Byron’s unfinished “Fragment of a Novel.”)
Other liberties were also taken for the play, among them, the bizarre transformation of the Quincey P. Morris character, who is instead, a woman (!) in this version.

Opening in Derby in June 1924, and touring for three years before landing in London’s Little Theatre on Valentine’s Day, Dracula left the critics cold, but stirred the blood of the English theatre-going public to frenzied heights.
So popular was the play that publisher/producer Horace Liveright bought the American stage rights and had the script completely re-written, presumably to better suit an American audience.
Even more alterations were made for its debut across the pond: Lucy and Mina collapse into one character, Lucy Seward, who is the daughter of Dr. John Seward! Meanwhile, the novel’s other suitors, Arthur Holmwood and Quincey P. Morris, disappear altogether.
Initially offering the lead to the most popular of the English stage Draculas, Raymond Huntley, Liveright was turned down by the 22-year-old actor.

Thus was the quirk of casting fate that brought Hungarian expatriate Bela Ferenc Dezso Blasko, better known to us as Bela Lugosi, into the spotlight, giving him his big break and catching him in the gilded cage that would forever hold him in its not-so-tender trap. (I wonder how the actor would have felt though, had he known that he would be immortalized not only in photos and celluloid, but in song as well, in Bauhaus’ classic “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”)
Though Lugosi spoke only a smattering of English, he learned his lines phonetically, thus adding to the bizarre inflections he would subsequently become famous for. Repeat after me: “I vant to dreenk your blahd!”
After initial stagings in Hartford and New Haven, the American production of Dracula opened at the Fulton Theater in New York on October 5, 1927, going on to be a major hit for Liveright and company.

In Part III of “The Cinematic (Un)Life of Count Dracula” (to be found elsewhere in the Archive), we take a look at Universal’s two film adaptations from 1931.
The article above is a slightly altered portion of the second part of the previously published Blood, Love and Rhetoric series of articles written in 1997, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

(Bela Lugosi image courtesy of ilcancello.com; “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” 12” single sleeve art courtesy of lofatal-eterea.blogspot.com.)

THE CINEMATIC (UN)LIFE OF COUNT DRACULA
1922-1979
Part I: “A Symphony of Shudders”

July 13 1929
The Film Society has finally caved in to reason and handed the copy of that blasted film to me.
Just when I begin to think that everything Abraham worked so hard for is safe and out of the hands of profiteering criminals, yet another copy surfaces. Irritable piece of filth.
Blast Murnau and his colleagues!
I have consigned this particular copy to the furnace and even now am watching it burn. Seeing the tiny sparks floating up from the flames is doing me a world of good. The smoke though, reminds me of how that cadaverous thing met its demise.
I still recall how that monster looked. A repulsive, man-sized rodent! Revolting.
And the Society had the gall… the unabashed audacity, to invite me to its screening, even after all the fuss and bother of my legal entanglements with Prana-Film.
The film isn’t even any good at all. They changed the ending, for pity’s sake!
Sunlight, indeed.
What would have been so difficult about a Bowie knife?
Ridiculous.


1922.
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s classic silent film, Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens, is released.
For the purposes of this article, three important points to take note of.

One: the film is a thinly-veiled (and unauthorized) reworking of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, merely changing character names (Dracula becomes Graf Orlock; Lucy Westenra becomes Annie Harding; Van Helsing becomes Bulwar), locales (London becomes Bremen), and time periods (1893 winds back to 1838).
Florence Stoker’s campaign to have every single copy of the film destroyed is legendary.
Several times, beginning in July 1925, when all the copies owned by the Deutsch-Amerikansch Film Union were reportedly destroyed, Stoker’s widow came close to her goal.
But always, when it seemed that the film had finally been obliterated, the existence of another copy would come to her attention, and her protests would begin anew. This crusade was to continue till her death in 1937.
In the end though, what managed to escape her attention was a talkie that surfaced in 1930. Entitled Die Zwolfte Stunde (The Twelfth Hour), it was later discovered to be none other than Murnau’s Nosferatu, with a music-and-effects track added onto it.
Of this particular turn of events, writer Denis Gifford has said, “Nosferatu is the classic example of art saved from destruction by piracy.”


Two: visually, Graf Orlock’s bald, rat-like countenance has served as inspiration for everything from Tobe Hooper’s TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, to a whole clan of vampires in White Wolf’s role playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade, to the Reapers in Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II.

Three: Orlock’s death—disintegrated by the rays of the rising sun—appears nowhere in Stoker’s novel; neither does traditional folklore say that a vampire is affected by the sun in this manner.
Death by sunlight is a purely cinematic invention that has since filtered into vampiric lore, becoming an invaluable (and to some, indispensable) addition to the body of myth that has accreted around the nocturnal creature.
Think how different vampires would be today, if Florence Stoker had succeeded in her campaign.
No “death by disco” climax in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn; no FX-laden Chris Sarandon death scene in Tom Holland’s Fright Night; no fiery ends for the down-and-dirty deadheads of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark; and the entire premise of David Slade’s 30 Days of Night would be meaningless.
Which just goes to prove that film is a powerful medium, rearranging the public’s perception of facts, fallacies, and fables.


Nosferatu was to be merely the first of a whole slew of films that would be based on Stoker’s novel, the stage adaptation, or simply feature a character named Dracula, whether or not he resembled Stoker’s character.
And just to illustrate the depths that crass exploitation can go, there have also been films that have had “Dracula” in their titles, but did not even have a character with that name appearing in the film itself.
Case in point: Blood of Dracula, which was about a hypnotized girl developing a taste for blood. No Count whatsoever.

Parting shot: Reviews of Blade II, 30 Days of Night, and Shadow of the Vampire (which presents a fictionalized look at the filming of Nosferatu) can be found in the Archive.

In Part II of “The Cinematic (Un)Life of Count Dracula” (also to be found elsewhere in the Archive), we take a look at the stage adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula, to get a better understanding of the film adaptations from 1931 onwards.
The article above is a slightly altered portion of the second part of the previously published Blood, Love and Rhetoric series of articles written in 1997, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The opening diary entry is of course, a fiction of mine.
Much love and thanx to Karen, for inviting me into the sandbox where this piece of writing (and so many others) first got to play.

(Nosferatu OS’s courtesy of impawards.com; image courtesy of greencine.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)