Amazon.com Essentials:
When Universal Pictures picked up the movie rights to a
Broadway adaptation of Dracula, they felt secure in handing the
property over to the sinister team of actor Lon Chaney and director
Tod Browning. But Chaney died of cancer, and Universal hired the
Hungarian who had scored a success in the stage play: Béla
Lugosi. The resulting film launched both Lugosi's baroque career and
the horror-movie cycle of the 1930s. It gets off to an atmospheric
start, as we meet Count Dracula in his shadowy castle in Transylvania,
superbly captured by the great cinematographer Karl Freund.
Eventually Dracula and his blood-sucking devotee (Dwight Frye, in one
of the cinema's truly mad performances) meet their match in a
vampire-hunter called Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan). If the later
sections of the film are undeniably stage bound and a tad creaky,
Dracula nevertheless casts a spell, thanks to Lugosi's creepily
lugubrious manner and the eerie silences of Browning's directing
style. (After a mood-enhancing snippet of Swan Lake under the
opening titles, there is no music in the film.) Frankenstein,
which was released a few months later, confirmed the horror craze, and
Universal has been making money (and countless spin-off projects) from
its twin titans of terror ever since. Certainly the role left a
lasting impression on the increasingly addled and drug-addicted
Lugosi, who was never quite able to distance himself from the part
that made him a star. He was buried, at his request, in his black
vampire cape. --Robert Horton
