Dracula (released in the United States as Horror of Dracula) is a 1958 British Gothic horror film directed by Terence Fisher and written by Jimmy Sangster, based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. The first in the series of Hammer Horror films starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, the film also features Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing, along with Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, and John Van Eyssen. It was the first vampire movie ever to be shot in colour.
Production began at Bray Studios on 17 November 1957 with an investment of £81,000.* As Count Dracula, Lee fixed the image of the fanged vampire in popular culture. Christopher Frayling writes, "Dracula introduced fangs, red contact lenses, décolletage, ready-prepared wooden stakes and – in the celebrated credits sequence – blood being spattered from off-screen over the Count's coffin." Lee also introduced a dark, brooding sexuality to the character, with Tim Stanley stating, "Lee's sensuality was subversive in that it hinted that women might quite like having their neck chewed on by a stud."
Dracula has received critical acclaim. In 2013, Barry Norman included it among his choice of the 49 best British films. In 2017, a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, and critics for Time Out magazine saw Dracula ranked the 65th best British film ever. Empire magazine ranked Lee's portrayal as Count Dracula the 7th Greatest Horror Movie Character of All Time."The 100 best horror movie characters" . Empire. Retrieved 2 December 2017
Plot
In 1885, librarian Jonathan Harker arrives at Count Dracula's castle near Klausenburg. Inside, he is startled by a young woman who begs for his help. Dracula arrives, greets Harker and accepts his credentials, and gives him a room. Alone, Jonathan writes in his diary, revealing that he is actually a vampire hunter and intends to destroy the Count, who is in truth a centuries-old vampire.
Harker attempts to rescue the unnamed woman but realizes too late that she is also a vampire and gets bitten. Dracula arrives and pulls her away as Harker passes out. Waking up, Harker discovers that an entire day has passed and finds bite marks on his neck. Knowing that he will soon turn, Harker writes a final entry in his journal and hides it. He descends into the castle's crypt to find Dracula and the vampire woman resting in their coffins. Harker quickly stakes the woman, watching as she withers away and dies. He then turns to Dracula's coffin and finds it empty. Dracula, awakened and angry, traps Harker inside the crypt.
Days pass, and Doctor Van Helsing arrives in Klausenburg, looking for his apprentice Harker. He attempts to recruit helpers at an inn but is rebuffed by the fearful locals. The innkeeper's daughter, however, gives him Harker's journal. He travels to Dracula's castle and finds it deserted but comes across the miniature portrait that Harker had of his fiancée Lucy Holmwood, with the photos now gone. Unearthing the crypt, he finds Harker but is horrified to see that his friend is now a vampire and sleeping in Dracula's coffin. Without hesitation, Van Helsing stakes him.
The doctor returns to Karlstadt, where he delivers the news of Harker's death to Arthur Holmwood and his wife Mina, brother and sister-in-law of Lucy, who is ill. Arthur is suspicious of Van Helsing and refuses to let him treat or even examine Lucy. When night falls, Lucy opens the doors to her terrace and lays bare her neck — already, it bears the mark of a vampire bite. Dracula then silently arrives and bites her again.
Mina seeks out Van Helsing's aid in treating Lucy, who begs the maid Gerda to remove his prescribed garlic bouquets and is found dead the next day. Van Helsing turns over Harker's journal to Arthur, who then comes to trust him. Three days after her burial, an undead Lucy lures Gerda's daughter Tania to a graveyard, where Arthur has found Lucy's tomb empty. Van Helsing appears and wards Lucy off with a cross. He explains to Arthur that Lucy was targeted to replace the woman Harker killed. Van Helsing suggests using her to lead them to Dracula, but Arthur refuses, and Van Helsing stakes his sister in her coffin. Arthur takes one final look at Lucy's body and sees her at peace.
Van Helsing and Arthur travel to the border crossing at Ingolstadt to track down Dracula's coffin. Meanwhile, Mina receives a message supposedly from Arthur, but which lures her into an ambush by Dracula. When Arthur returns, he sees that Mina can no longer hold a crucifix without burning her hand - proof that she is becoming a vampire. Arthur and Van Helsing watch the house all night to prevent Dracula from entering and attacking Mina again, but Dracula (having received Mina's permission to do so) slips inside discreetly and bites her again. Van Helsing gives her a blood transfusion from Arthur, but when he asks for a drink afterwards and Gerda explains that Mina forbade her to use the cellar, the two men find Dracula escaping with both his coffin and Mina.
A chase ensues as Dracula attempts to finish Mina's transformation before the sunrise. Van Helsing intervenes while Arthur digs up Mina from a shallow grave. Pursuing Dracula inside the castle, Van Helsing is unable to match the vampire's strength but is able to tear down a heavy curtain and force Dracula back with two candlesticks in the shape of a cross, causing him to crumble and die upon the touch of morning light. Mina recovers and the cross-shaped scar fades from her hand while Dracula's ashes blow away in the morning breeze, leaving only his clothes and ring behind.
Cast
Production
Concept
As Christopher Lee remarked in an interview in Leonard Wolf's A Dream of Dracula: "I was always against the whole tie and tails rendition. Surely it is the height of the ridiculous for a vampire to step out of the shadows wearing white tie, tails, patent leather shoes and a full cloak". Lee said that he never watched any other performances of Dracula until well after making his films, and that when he got the first [Dracula] role with little time to prepare he "had to hurry off to read the book...[and] played it fresh, with no knowledge of previous performances."Michael Bibby, Lauren M. E. Goodlad (2007) "Goth: Undead Subculture", p.298
In the same interview, Lee said the following about Dracula: "He had also to have an erotic element about him (and not because he sank his teeth into women)... It's a mysterious matter and has something to do with the physical appeal of the person who's draining your life. It's like being a sexual blood donor... Women are attracted to men for any of hundreds of reasons. One of them is a response to the demand to give oneself, and what greater evidence of giving is there than your blood flowing literally from your own bloodstream? It's the complete abandonment of a woman to the power of a man."Roxana Stuart (1997): "Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th Century Stage", p.239
Lee believed he had discovered something in the character that hadn't been done before: "And also because I had read the book and I had perhaps discovered something in the character which other people hadn't or hadn't noticed or hadn't decided to present, and that is that the character is heroic, erotic and romantic."“Listen Back To A 1990 Interview With Actor Christopher Lee” . NPR. Retrieved 18 July 2021 He also saw a certain tragedy in Dracula and tried to inject it into playing him: "I've always tried to put an element of sadness, which I've termed the loneliness of evil, into his character. Dracula doesn't want to live, but he's got to! He doesn't want to go on existing as the undead, but he has no choice."John L. Flynn (1992) Cinematic vampires: the living dead on film and television p.86
Lee also felt that it was important to stay faithful to Stoker's novel and was frustrated with his Hammer Dracula films: "The stories as I've had them given to me have had almost no relation to the book...which is my reiterated complaint." "My one great regret has always been that I have never been able to present the Count exactly as Bram Stoker described him in every way. This was always due to poor scripts and a lack of imagination on the part of people who never seemed to understand the full potential of the story."Robert W. Pohle Jr., Douglas C. Hart, Rita Pohle Baldwin (2017): The Christopher Lee Film Encyclopedia, p.120
Writing When Hammer asked for an adaptation of Stoker's novel, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster decided to streamline it to fit it into less than ninety minutes of screen time, and shooting on a low budget within the confines of Bray Studios and its surrounding estate. Working under these limitations, Sangster posited that Jonathan Harker travels to Dracula's castle intending to destroy Dracula (not to complete a real estate transaction, as in the novel) and gets killed, made Arthur Holmwood into Mina's husband and Lucy into Harker's fiancée and Arthur's sister. The characters Renfield and Quincey Morris were dropped completely. The subplot of the harrowing voyage of the ship that carries Dracula and his coffins to England was also abandoned and is replaced in the film by a short hearse ride because all of the action takes place in a relatively small area of Central Europe. The character of Van Helsing also differed from the figure in the original novel. Cushing explained the transformation: "The Curse of Frankenstein became this enormous success, and there I was when I was a younger man, and audiences got used to me looking like that. And I said, 'Now look here, what do we do with Van Helsing? I mean, do you cast a little old man with a beard who speaks Double Dutch or me? It's silly to make me up like that. Why don't you get someone who looks like him?' So we all decided, well, let's forget that and play him as I am, as I was then."Mark A. Miller, David J. Hogan (2020): Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Horror Cinema, second edition
Dracula's ability to transform [into wolf, bat or mist] was dropped for the sake of realism - according to Sangster: "I thought that the idea of being able to change into a bat or a wolf or anything like that made the film seem more like a fairy tale than it needed to be. I tried to ground the script to some extent to reality."
Terence Fisher believed: "My greatest contribution to the Dracula myth was to bring out the underlying sexual element in the story. He [Dracula] is basically sexual. At the moment he bites it is the culmination of a sexual experience." According to Fisher, “Dracula preyed upon the sexual frustrations of his woman victims. The (Holmwood) marriage was one in which she [Mina] was not sexually satisfied and that was her weakness as far as Dracula’s approach to her was concerned.”Peter Hutchings (2001) Terence Fisher In the scene where Mina returns after a night with Dracula, Fisher's directions to the actress were frank and unambiguous: "When she arrived back after having been away all night she said it all in one close-up at the door. She'd been done the whole night through, please! I remember Melissa [Stribling] saying 'Terry, how should I play the scene?' So I told her, 'Listen, you should imagine you have had one whale of a sexual night, the one of your whole sexual experience. Give me that in your face!'"
According to producer Anthony Hinds when it came to casting Dracula "it never occurred to any of us to use anyone else but Chris Lee". For his role in Horror of Dracula Lee earned £750. Speaking of filming and doing his take on the character, Lee recalled that he "tried to make the character all that he was in the book—heroic, romantic, erotic, fascinating, and dynamic."
Filming Shooting began at Bray Studios on 11 November 1957. Principal photography came to an end on Christmas Eve 1957. Special effects work continued, with the film finally wrapping on 3 January 1958.