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Things could have been so different. Had F. W. Murnau's
extraordinary Nosferatu
not run foul of Bram Stoker's widow and a court case that
ordered all copies destroyed, who knows what its influence
on the vampire genre might have been, and just what shape
our conception of the 'typical' vampire might have taken.
But although a couple of copies of Murnau's film escaped
this extraordinary fate, they disappeared from public view
and, with the film unseen in the USA, the way was still
open for someone to make the vampire film that would kick-start
the genre and define the shape of the movie vampire for
years to come. What happened next was, like so much in movie
history, as much down to chance as it was to astute planning.
As
a newly emerging genre, horror had started to do rather
well during the silent era, thanks in the main to one actor:
the remarkable Lon Chaney. Veteran of over 150 films, works
such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923),
The Phantom of the Opera (1925),
The Unknown (1927) and the now tragically lost
London After Midnight (1927) had established
him as the first horror superstar, a man able to transform
his features through a combination of his extraordinary
physicality and his own considerable skill as a make-up
artist. Several of Chaney's key works, including The
Unholy Three (1925), The Unknown
and London After Midnight were directed
by the same man, Tod Browning, who has also built up a reputation
as something of a master of the genre and whose early days
as a carnival performer were thought to have influenced
his sometimes extraordinary sense of the grotesque.
The
ground work was in many ways all prepared. Universal had
purchased the film rights to Stoker's novel (something that
the production company behind Nosferatu
had failed to do), signed Browning very much with Dracula
in mind, and Lon Chaney had been earmarked to play the lead
role. On top of that, Hamilton Deane's stage version of
the novel, which had been further further adapted by Garrett
Fort for its Broadway run, was a smash hit. The public was
aware of the title 'Dracula' by now, and a film version
would surely be a guaranteed winner.
As
it happened, Universal had been sitting on a script for
a film version of Dracula for some fifteen
years, having originally planned it as a silent work, but
the studio's readers - people employed to judge the suitability
of material for film adaptation - had judged Stoker's novel,
the stage adaptation and the film script as being in appalling
taste and wholly inappropriate material for a movie. This
was a time of increasing censorship, with the still voluntary
Production Code drawn up by the M.P.P.D.A. (Motion Pictures
Producers and Distributors of America) soon to be more strictly
enforced.
Adding
to the problem was studio head Carl Laemmle, who, despite
the success of the Chaney films, actually disliked horror
and was not in favour of putting Dracula
into production. But in what must be the one of the most
generous twenty-first birthday presents ever, he gave the
studio to his young nephew to handle, and everything changed.
Laemmle Jnr. was a big horror fan and put the production
of Dracula close to the top of his 'things
to do' list. The film was already in pre-production when
it revealed that Chaney, whose participation in the project
was originally a condition of the funding, was terminally
ill with lung cancer, from which he died a short while later.
With the wheels of production already turning, the studio,
having initially rejected the idea, took a chance on the
actor who had played the role so successfully on the stage,
the Hungarian born Bela Lugosi.
The
film was a smash, and, along with Universal's other major
horror film that year - Frankenstein -
contributed to the studio's only really successful year
during what was a financially punishing time for the film
industry in America, which was still suffering the after
effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Though it is James
Whale's version of Frankenstein that is
now seen as a far superior work, Dracula
nevertheless remains fascinating for a variety of reasons,
not least its towering influence on the development of the
vampire genre, and for establishing Bela Lugosi as one of
the first horror superstars.
But
for genre fans there is an added extra in the shape of a
second version, shot simultaneously by George Melford using
the same scripts and sets, filmed in Spanish and targeted
specifically at the Latin American audience. Though this
was relatively common practice in the days before dubbing
and subtitling became technologically feasible, most such
films were considered seriously inferior to the originals
and are now effectively lost works. Melford's film was different,
however. Featuring the rising Mexican star Lupita Tovar
and the Spanish actor Carlos Villarías as Drácula,
Melford's film proved to be in many ways superior to the
English language version, and in genre terms is some years
ahead of its time.
For
a detailed examination of both films, click the links below.
 |
Dracula
(1931)
Director:
Tod Browning |
 |
Dracula
(1931)
Director:
George Melford |
From
this point onwards, horror was big business for Universal,
and they embarked on a series of genre works that remain
key films of their type to this day. Karl Freund's 1932
The Mummy may lack the noisy effects work
of the recent remake, but it's still way more atmospheric;
James Whale turned to horror comedy for The Old
Dark House the same year, and the following year
later made the ground-breaking The Invisible Man;
Erle C. Kenton created a cult story of the grotesque with
The Island of Lost Souls (1933); sadistic
torture scenes outraged the censors but made a mint for
the studio in Edgar G. Ulmer's supremely loose adaptation
of Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat (1934),
which united their two key genre stars Lugosi and Boris
Karloff; Whale made one of the greatest sequels of all time
with the astonishing Bride of Frankenstein
(1935); and Karloff and Lugosi were teamed up in another
Poe story, The Raven (1935).
Following
the success of Bride of Frankenstein, a
sequel to their other big 1931 film was inevitable, and
Dracula's Daughter was planned as a big
budget production with Lugosi reviving his role as Dracula
and Whale as director. But following the press outrage and
censorship backlash in the UK that accompanied the release
of The Raven, and with the once voluntary
Production Code - a series of overly moralistic and limiting
guidelines on what could or could not be shown in feature
films - of the 1930s now being enforced, Universal scaled
back their horror production - Dracula's Daughter
was demoted from major production to low budget B picture,
and went ahead without the involvement of either Lugosi
or Whale. But the spirit of Whale's subversiveness remained,
and the film was the first in the genre to wander from Stoker's
text and draw on Le Fanu's Carmilla for part of
its inspiration - one scene has such strong lesbian overtones
that it now seems extraordinary that the film made it to
cinemas unmolested.
For
a detailed examination of this film,
click the link below.
But
for Universal horror, this was close to the end of the golden
age. Financial problems saw the departure of the Leammle
clan, and with it the driving force behind the studio's
success in this genre. Horror production ground to a complete
halt for three years, and it was to be the second sequel
to Universal's other big franchise, Frankenstein,
that would kick things off again. 1939's Son of
Frankenstein was successful enough to reawaken
studio interest in the horror genre, but from here on their
production was divided between sequels to their earlier
successes (The Invisible Man Returns, The
Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Curse,
etc.) and one-off attempts to recreate those golden years.
These included some extraordinary titles, such as The
Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), Calling
Dr. Death (1943), Captive Wild Woman
(1943) and the bafflingly named Pillow of Death
(1945). Only one of these one-offs was to strike gold, the
1941 The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney Jnr.,
son of the man originally marked to play the film Dracula.
Even then this monster was never to have his own specific
sequels, always being lumped in with other Universal favourites
in film such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
(1943) and House of Frankenstein (1944).
It
was presumably the success of Son of Frankenstein,
coupled with the genre popularity of Lon Chaney Jnr. (who
also appeared in Universal franchise sequels such as 1942's
Ghost of Frankenstein and The Mummy's
Tomb) that prompted a second sequel to Dracula
in the shape of 1943's Son of Dracula,
featuring Chaney as the publicity-announced "all new
Dracula." As it turned out, Son of Dracula
was no simple hack sequel, but an unexpectedly well thought-out
and stylish take on the vampire tale, and in a year that
saw five other Universal horror releases, this was without
question the classiest.
For
a detailed examination of the film, click the link below.
By
1944 the ideas were really running out, and Universal were
reduced to throwing several of their classic monsters into
the same film in the hope that the audience would see three
monsters as representing three times the value, instead
of the act of desperation it increasingly became (take note,
Stephen Sommers). Dracula was to make just two more appearances
for Universal during this period, and they were both in
just such films: 1944's House of Frankenstein
and 1945's House of Dracula both featured
John Carradine as Dracula, but sharing screen and narrative
space with Lawrence Talbot (aka The Wolf Man), the Frankenstein
monster, a possessed scientist and the inevitable hunchbacked
assistant, he was no longer the driving force behind the
story, and his days as a Universal screen monster were numbered.
For
a detailed examination of the film, click the link below.
In
the end Universal's monster movies became victim to this
throw-it-all-in-and-hope approach, a viewing public now
over-familiar with the characters, and circumstance. In
1945 the Second World War came to an end and the public
taste for horror films, after very real loss, suffering
and horror of the war, had waned. 1946 saw just two Universal
horror releases, both of them forgettable, and the horror
cycle that had given birth to so many memorable creatures
and films came to an end.
The
final nail in the coffin, so to speak, came in 1948 with
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,
in which the then popular comedy duo were spooked by, and
subsequently made fun of, some of Universal's most famous
monsters, including Dracula, played for only the second
time in his career by Bela Lugosi. If the public were no
longer taking these monsters that seriously, here they were
encouraged to laugh at them, and though this film was actually
rather well made, with decent production design and make-up,
the increasingly poor follow-ups were not, and Dracula,
along with his compatriots, became a figure of fun, Lugosi's
Hungarian accent already becoming a genre cliché.
No longer was there any mileage in presenting them as creatures
to be in any way scared of. It was to be another ten years
before a small but enterprising British studio was to discover
that Dracula, far from being dead, was very much still a
force to be reckoned with. |
