United States, 1931
Directed by Tod Browning
With Bela Lugosi (Dracula), Dwight Frye (Renfield), Edward Van Sloan (Van Hesling), Helen Chandler (Mina), Frances Dade (Lucy), David Manners (John Harker), Herbert Bunston (Seward)

Nine years after German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau shot “Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens – Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror”, which was not officially an adaption of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” because of the opposition of the late writer’s family but very much looked like it, American cinema delivers its own version, allowed to duly credit the source text and ushering the horror genre into the new realm of talkies and thus giving the genre an even wider impact on America’s imagination and cultural consumption.
Deceptively the film of director Tod Browning seems to begin exactly like the book did, promising to be a faithful adaption even though the runtime is barely 75 minutes for a text that can run up to 400 pages, according to the edition you pick. But this is not the story of John Harker: the film instead features Renfield as the solicitor bringing to a wealthy and reclusive aristocrat in Transylvania the papers handing him the ownership of an old mansion in London. The movie character still remains as dumbfounded as his paper counterpart by the stunned and frightened behaviors of the locals, wondering why meeting Count Dracula at his place high in the dark mountains of Transylvania should be considered such an upsetting prospect.
He finds it fast enough, getting attacked only moments after a courteous welcome and a fine supper, but the audience got it even faster: as soon as the coach he has been using leaves the inn where Renfield had to stop the editing abruptly cuts into a kind of sprawling and forbidding crypt, showing caskets getting opened by the dead lying inside, first eerily attractive, white-clothed, pallid women, and then a distinguished man, whose pallor is even more striking and frightening and mien far more daunting. Dracula has stepped inside the frame and would rarely leave it. The film asserts forcefully in a chilling way that even more than his victims’ story, it is the narrative of the powers of the titular character who readily proves how omnipresent and unnerving he is by playing the role of the driver of the carriage bringing Renfield to the castle once his coach left him on a specific spot, the film being far more explicit on this point than the book.
Renfield’s stay in Transylvania is quite short, enough to make him a slave of Dracula while the count seems to have already fully prepared his next moves and the journey by sea to London is as short but still far more dramatic and gruesome, with breathtaking and terrifying images of a storm and a nod to the Expressionist style Murnau so brilliantly used. Once in London, Dracula is immediately cast as a predator ready to wreak havoc, his nefarious presence and powers heralded by bats – a creeping and fitting symbol unfortunately carried by flimsy imitations (special effects are not always great in this production but there are values that remain deeply enjoyable, starting with the entrance hall of Dracula’s castle).
He manages to get in touch as he wished with Seward, the doctor running the psychiatric hospital which is close to Dracula’s new home and where Renfield has been committed after he was discovered raving mad in the ship whose entire crew were massacred. He is introduced to the doctor’s lovely daughter Mina, her fiancé John Harker – the key character of the novel finally shows up – and her best friend the feisty Lucy. Lucy is right away fascinated by the foreigner but she becomes just another of his victims; her case, however, fuels the curiosity of a scientist who has a taste for unorthodox topics and is a friend of Seward’s, Van Hesling. The foreign-born, middle-aged, severe scientist quickly realizes a vampire is on the prowl and vows to do what it takes to protect his acquaintances and especially Mina who seems to be already under Dracula’s spell. The film becomes a stunning clash of wills between Dracula and Van Hesling, with Renfield cropping up to make ominous statements and grim predictions but wobbling in his loyalty to the vampire.
The trouble with editing so heavily the source text is making the narrative hopping from one plot point right to another abruptly and awkwardly: a precious sense of logical continuity and clear transition is sometimes sorely lacking and it is hard to grasp really why Dracula is so keen to meet Mina or how Renfield can keep popping up in the living room of the doctor instead of being in his cell and why his feelings for the vampire can change – in fact things run too hastily and jerkily. Dracula’s defeat lacks the gripping intensity of a fight between a pure evil mind and a resolute mind dedicated to good that a key meeting, or rather a terrific confrontation, between Van Hesling and Dracula brilliantly conveyed.
Sets and their lighting remain impressive, but not really a nod to the Expressionist style of the German film, rather a fresh take on the Gothic style; more broadly, the cinematography crafted by Karl Freund, who also took part to the film’s direction, proves to be amazingly ingenious and even bold, making the titular character an even more formidable and fascinating presence.
It is fitting that the astonishing lack of reflection in a mirror, that is the nonexistence of an image, allows Van Hesling to unmask Dracula as the vampire he is looking for: vampires are not living beings but unreal presence holding the victims in awe as the book emphasized. What makes the film arguably so riveting is the very presence of Dracula, from early in the editing right to the end, inescapable and haunting, played with such a suave and chilling talent by actor Bela Lugosi, so incredibly lighted by Freund (unforgettable are those terrible gimlet eyes centering an eerie bright narrow strip of light which jars with the rest of a face expressing such a strong and quiet malevolence and carefully kept in a far dimmer light) and shot so spectacularly and confidently by Browning. The film is not your best adaptation but it delivers one of the best devils in film history.