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.

***

It is the most famous and best remembered of all Bram Stoker adaptations, and yet the 1931 “Dracula” is also the film that ventures furthest from its source material. The film has been criticized over the years for straying so far from Stoker’s classic novel (it instead depends mostly on the popular stage play of the 1920s), and yet these critics ignore the simple fact that on its own, the movie works. Oh, it more than works: it became a milestone, one of the most important movies in film history, kicking off an entire era of screen horror, leaving us with images that are forever burned in the pop culture subconscious.

Consider that in 1931, there were no supernatural horror movies being made. All thrillers at the time were given cheap finales to explain away the mystery. Not so “Dracula,” which stated quite boldly that the title character is indeed a blood-sucking, undying, mist-and-bat-turning-into, creature-of-the-night vampire. Audiences, of course, loved it, and quickly Universal worked overtime to follow their smash hit with a string of genre films that would later be hailed as a golden age, the era of the Universal Monsters. (And, let’s not forget, other studios were falling over themselves trying to duplicate Universal’s success.)

Excerpt from EFilmCritic David Cornelius located HERE