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Page 1 of 2 This is the one that started it all. There had been monster movies before, there had been vampire movies, Dracula itself had, in essence, been filmed before, but this is the one that broke new ground for a genre, altered the landscape of cinema and indelibly stamped the face of a culture. To this day, seventy seven years and counting, when someone slowly intones “I vahnt…to sahck…your blahd” you recognize the voice and know the character being invoked (though it should be noted that Dracula never says it). There are only a handful of figures in popular culture as instantly recognizable as Bela Lugosi’s Dracula: Sherlock Holmes, Darth Vader, Bugs Bunny…Karloff’s creature, of course, perhaps a couple of others. It’s hard to even imagine a pre-Lugosi world, so integral is the vampire myth to the psyche of the new millennium, so inseparable is Lugosi’s interpretation of that myth.
 | Imagine, if you will, a world shockingly different from ours: There is no internet, no satellite, no cable, no TV. Elvis, James Brown, and the Beatles never happened. World War II never happened. No one has walked on the moon. Black people can’t vote. There has never been a Charles Manson or a Son of Sam or a Jeffrey Dahmer. The economy is a blasted wasteland ravaged by the Great Depression. Movies are in their toddler stage; they’ve only just learned to talk. Into this moment in time comes a seductive nightmare for the masses, a romance of terror and bloodlust, a magic spell the likes of which no one had ever seen before…the Dracula of Bela Lugosi.
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Sitting in this darkened movie house in 1931 there’s a good chance you would have never seen a vampire movie before or a scary movie at all. You don’t have an entire history of cinema as context; it is the first time you’ve ever seen a hand slowly, ever so slowly open a coffin from inside. When this happens there is no sound at all, it occurs in dead silence. If you’re a woman you have a vivid dream living in front of you of a dark man in your bedroom at night hungrily bending over you. He’s a man like no one else you know in your life. He doesn’t look like anyone you know, he doesn’t behave like anyone you’ve ever met, he doesn’t move like anyone you’ve ever seen and he sure as hell doesn’t talk like anyone you’ve ever heard. What you do know or what you learn in the course of the evening is that he’s there to suck your blood and steal your soul.
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| Scientists say we don’t dream in color, that the color is added in by memory. If so it makes the immediacy of this dream all the more palpable. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake Overture, a spell casting piece of music if there ever was one, ushers us into our nightmare like Charon carrying us across the river Styx. One haunting image after another floats across our consciousness: a horse and carriage with no driver, a massive, black, shadow castle like a mountain of death in the dusk, three strange women, lovely, silent, with their dark and unknowable needs; a young man looking up from the hold of a ship with his mind visibly unhinged, a black and white sunset so beautiful and haunting it is like the eye of God closing and of course, the dark man with the hypnotic eyes and the liquid voice who walks through webs and does not touch them. A young woman waits patiently for the dark man to come and he does and after he does the young woman herself is a creature of the night. A battle for the soul of another young woman is engaged so quietly, so subtly, that the antagonists don’t seem to realize they’re in a battle until the struggle has already grown desperate. This chess match of light and dark is swift and ruthless, a fight with wit and wisdom against a monstrous ego, an awesome hunger, grown over five hundred years. In the end, Mind wins, as it always does in twentieth century art. The end is anticlimactic compared to the dream that has gone before it. Everything, everything is in silence. Even when the actors talk there is no music in the background, no filler providing texture. Only the words that are said, only the squeak of a bat, only the grate of a wagon wheel rolling along a mountain road…
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