Thanks to this movie Van Helsing was my second action hero after Batman. Chasing down vampires, flinging himself at windows, striking heroic poses with improvised crosses, saving the day...all made an indelible impression. I wanted to be Van Helsing.
None of the rest of it stuck, though, because my older sister watched the movies too and always ordered me out of the room whenever someone was about to get bitten. Christopher Lee never had the same chance with me that Peter Cushing did, the scares never registered, and my sexuality was not imprinted by Hammer's women. How would one put it – that I was left unscarred for life? Hammer should have been a natural for me but, sadly, acquiring that taste has been an uphill slog.
If that's an awkward introduction to the movie, I guess it's a bit of excuse-making. I could argue the impact this movie had on the genre but if I did I'd be passing along half-understood observations from the scholarly works of others.
I should have opened the review the way the movie opens: with blood, bright red and dripping. Dracula has always been a lurid tale...corpses reanimated by evil, victims exsanguinated for thirst, submission to urges for illicit sex. Before 1958, these feverish haunts of the mind had remained matters of suggestion on screen. Hammer made them explicit and gave them color. Before the opening credits have even finished, audiences are jolted with a score blaring simple notes of straight-out alarm, the sight of flowing blood, and an enveloping widescreen image just to make them feel overwhelmed .
The funny thing is that Hammer didn't get there first. Two months prior to Horror of Dracula's release, The Return of Dracula had done the same thing: vivid red blood welling up from what might have been the first explicit closeup of a staking, in a widescreen format. The shot is all the more shocking for the rest of the film having been shot in black and white. Yet it was the Hammer film that is remembered for it, and which has taken its place as a seminal film in the genre, while Return is largely forgotten.
In The Return of Dracula, a contemporary California family welcomes long-estranged relative Bellac Gordal home from Romania, unaware that the real Bellac has been killed and his identity stolen by Dracula to escape capture in his homeland. Cousin Rachel, an older teen, at first takes a sentimental approach to Bellac, but he remains reclusive even as he moves into the family home. Soon he vampirizes Rachel's friend Jenny and has designs on Rachel herself. It's a good movie, with fine production values and acting, competent low-key direction, and lovely if unimaginative photography. Its story is directly modeled on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, and in tone plays more like film noir than horror. That's why it failed where Hammer succeeded: while there's nothing at all wrong with Return, it did nothing to challenge viewers. They'd seen it before. This Dracula didn't even have the taboo factor as his feedings were strictly asexual – that is, family friendly.
Released practically simultaneously, the two Dracula films could not have made a stronger contrast.
The difference? Christopher Lee. Christopher fuckin' Lee! Women do love their bad boys, and Lee was the baddest. Casting the Count as a handsome romantic idol had already been a standard set by Lugosi, but Lugosi's Dracula had been charming, urbane, witty. Not Lee. Lee was hate in a cape. When we first meet, he's at the top of a staircase with us looking up at him, and after descends the camera gets a good intimate shot from inches away – still looking up. That is to say, him looking down at us where we belong. For his guest Jonathon Harker, Dracula manages a chilly civility, but the facade doesn't last past his second appearance minutes later when he's crossed by one of his vampirized women. Suddenly he's snarling like a beast – there's a table between them that he had set for Harker's meal, and instead of running around it Lee leaps upon it and pounces on her from it. That same snarl lurks beneath the surface of his sneer when he takes his bedded victims: another easy conquest, and his contempt is as naked as his lust. Chris Lee has a scant few minute of screen time, and no dialogue whatsoever beyond his introduction, but the indelible impression he makes with those few minutes make his presence felt throughout.
Dracula is only half the equation. The women are the other half. In previous cinema the women of Dracula put up an agreeably pious struggle against their own desire for him, or showed no desire at all if the film were restrained (timid) enough. Hammer changed all that. These women are eagerly complicit in their own ostensible demise. Yet, it's a demise that would see them live on unshackled from society's mores. It's an interesting move, but more immediately it caught audiences breathless: no more faux objections, no pretending that sex is undesirable or that the vampire really just wants to feed. Fuck no, he wants to feast.
Had Chris Lee never made another movie, he would still have been a rock star for Dracula.
The first time we see Dracula take a new conquest, before his arrival she behaves like a teen girl about to sneak out the bedroom window to meet the date her parents disapprove of or a wife hiding the fact she's about to join the lover she's cheating with. She's so breathless with anticipation that she almost blows her pretense of calm before the unsuspecting members of her family as she rushes them out of her bedroom, throws open the veranda doors, and arranges herself on the bed. In this movie Dracula's women are not victims. This time the women eat him up.
That's led to a theory among some that Dracula is actually the hero of the film, and Van Helsing the villain trying to stamp out the sexual liberation of womankind in the name of all that's Holy and patriarchal. I don't entirely buy that, but it's a strong case worth considering. Under that reading, Dracula is a cypher rather than a character, and so cannot be judged as a character: he has no motive, he simply is - a force of nature one either denies or accommodates. I can hear poor Arthur Holmwood arguing with Van Helsing - “But the female orgasm is a myth, everyone knows that!” If Van Helsing seems kindly and concerned, well, that's often the demeanor of unwanted help...”Love the sinner, hate the sin” and all that. Surrender your own identity to society, we know what's best for you. Let's not let the men slide on social morality either – if your sweetie threatens to enjoy her sexuality, men, who better to brutally stamp that out than you who love them most? Pick up that stake, Arthur Holmwood, and run her through. You're saving her immortal soul.
Hell, I'm starting to convince myself the theory has merit. Still, I can't adopt it without major reservations. In vampire fiction one has to actually die in order to live forever. That can be taken as spot on to the above theory because Western mores do tend to treat sexually active women as dead to society, but in Dracula the vampire's loved ones become dead to the women in return. Freedom in this tale isn't just freedom from stricture, it's freedom from conscience, from feelings of love or compassion or empathy. Sexuality shouldn't be a matter of one or the other – sex or love. The metaphor has worth but it has its limitations too.
Besides, I'm biased in wishing to see Van Helsing as a hero. It's the more simplistic reading, I admit, less challenging, but it makes me happy. Chris Lee gives the movie its edge but I'd contend that Horror of Dracula could not have worked with Lee alone. Peter Cushing provides Dracula's polar opposite in sentiment and is his equal in presence. They need each other or the tale is lopsided. As Van Helsings go, I think Cushing is my favorite...not the most accurate to the novel (that would be Frank Finlay in the 1977 BBC version) but the most even-handed, the most empathetic, and arguably the most effortlessly personable of them all. Unlike some this VH refuses to railroad his allies, and is unfailingly kind to those watching helplessly as their loved ones succumb to forces beyond them. Cushing, who can be one cold bastard when he plays a villain, has big puppy dog eyes fixed in that skeletal visage of his. When he feels pain, you can't help but feel it with him.
Michael Gough also must be mentioned, and that's a surprise because he's the one with the unenviable task of playing Holmwood. Holmwood typically is one of the young paramours watching his intended slip away. He's young, strapping, forthright...and that's all there is to him. He's usually considered a complete drip. Actually, in most adaptations he doesn't make any impression at all, so the ones that leave the worst impression are the only ones that are memorable.
But not this time. Holmwood is always the last character to be convinced that vampires are real, and the last on board with killing Dracula. Most often he has to be bullied a bit to see the light. Horror of Dracula gives us a Holmwood who is credibly disbelieving at first but who has the initiative and intelligence to investigate on his own without having to be dragged every petulant step of the way. Gough does a superb job with the role, making wholly dimensional (and wholly sympathetic) a demanding character arc. If there has been another Holmwood half so compelling it isn't coming to mind.
Universal was very protective of its own Dracula and kept Hammer wary enough to make sure their production couldn't be mistaken as a copy. That meant changes to the script, which streamlines the tale to a great degree, but also the whole look and atmosphere. Gone are the ruins and cobwebs, the chiaroscuro shadows, the forbidding crags of the Carpathian Mountains, the old-world solemnity of moneyed English estates...and the fog, that wonderful mysterious fog that cloaks so much. I miss all of that. No doubt it's the foremost reason that it's taken me so long to give the movie its due, I was looking at what was missing rather than what was offered.
Changing things up led to some alterations I've struggled with a little. There's no Renfield, but with the swift pace of the telling his absence isn't noticed. OTOH I can't help notice that the interior of Dracula's castle is a cheery, well-lit place, clean, far from an air of menace or mystery...nor does it convey Dracula as a being of enduring immortality. Likewise his home locale is a minor complaint first in that it's apparently in a valley rather than the usual remote height (contradicting those great intro shots of the Count seen as superior), and that his home nation is but a few hours ride from his European target. It reduces his menace for me in subliminal ways as h is no longer quite the alien invading from a remove. In fact, he's practically domestic. They're all good neighbors!
It's only conjecture, but I think perhaps all this is another reason why Horror of Dracula made such a splash. It's been said that the cobwebs and Gothic cliches of the Golden Era of Universal monsters had become risible. Certainly the Abbot & Costello flicks didn't help. I can't agree, though, when you had Mario Bava and the Italians making such affecting use of the same imagery beginning with I Vampiri only the year before. It even translated well to color under Bava's masterful guidance. Dracula, though, that's another thing. Dracula has baggage, carries expectations. When you see the cliches in a Dracula movie, they're comforting. They feel like home. You can kick back and chuckle at every wolf howl, scurrying spider, every familiar line, you can turn to the people with you and do a Lugosi impression for a laugh. Horror of Dracula denied audiences of the day that comfort zone. It must have been thrilling.
Mentioned before, this is the first Dracula in color. That means blood, of course, but just as important it means flesh at its warmest and most alluring. When Dracula gets an eyeful of invitingly soft decolletage, so do we. For all the lack of Gothic atmosphere, I find myself mesmerized by the stained glass windows of all things. Don't know why. There's a shot near the finale when the windows themselves are hidden from view yet their colors softly bathe a wall with the promise of sunrise to vanquish the vampire. I couldn't tell you why, but I'm taken with that shot. The entire movie is subtly lit and photographed, never overstated or lurid.
I finally got my chance to play Van Helsing too, on the stage in two different productions (Franklin High School and Artists' Repertory Theater, both using the same terrible script). Cushing remained firmly in mind as our high school drama teacher (and the play's director) had to tell me not to strike action poses wielding the crucifix. I don't know which is the more absurd, me striking action poses or (atheist) me running around thrusting crosses in people's faces. Even more ironic if Van Helsing's mission in life is really to save women from their own sexual autonomy – not my values at all. Got to do the poster art though someone else added the lettering. And I had already fallen in love with Dana Cooper, our Mina, and managed not to skewer her on the actual splintery wooden stake I was handed in lieu of the collapsible prop I was supposed to hit her with. That's another strange story, and it hasn't ended yet...but that high school production is a cherished memory.
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