First Scare: Dracula (1974)

The one with the excess of close-ups and the perpetually constipated grimace

Ideally, Jack Palance should have been a great choice for the role of Count Dracula. His suitability for the role was so widely acknowledged that Marvel Comics used his likeness for the series Tomb of Dracula years before Dan Curtis cast him in the role. This was the same Dan Curtis who created the TV series Dark Shadows. Add Richard I Am Legend Matheson writing the script, and this movie had the right pedigree to be spectacular. Unfortunately, someone must have given Palance the wrong acting instructions, because from the start to the end of the movie, he only knows how to make one face: that of the unlucky vampire who forgot to add some fiber to his all-blood diet, and is now in urgent need of a laxative.

It's not like Palance is wasted on the role. When he speaks, you believe that he's the right actor. He says his lines in an unnervingly calm, low voice, in the tone of an immortal who has seen everything and can no longer be surprised. His acting choices resemble those of Bela Lugosi in his manner of staring, standing, and carrying himself. However, where Lugosi could own a scene by raising an eyebrow, Palance invariably contorts every muscle on his face, as if the director were pressuring him to choose which emotion to show.

The director himself is no help on this matter, with his strange habit of resorting to a zoom-in to mark every emotional beat. He does make effective use of low angles and the occasional Dutch angle to underline a character's interaction with the realm of the occult, but his overreliance on close-ups becomes a form of self-sabotage against the serious tone he's clearly going for. Matheson's script keeps a tight rein on the pacing of events, an essential skill to have when the audience already knows the plot by heart, and the directing style falls short of what this script deserves.

This time, the reshuffling of characters is less drastic than in previous adaptations, but there's one key detail to pay attention to: the addition of the subplot about the Count's long-dead wife whose likeness he randomly encounters in the present. Coppola would use the same subplot in his 1992 version. This is another way of solving the eternal question about the Count's reason for moving to England: in this case, it's because he's a hopeless romantic. From his dialogues (and bizarrely melodramatic flashbacks) it can be inferred that he'd be happy to remain in his castle if it weren't for the armies that have continuously come to pillage his land and/or murder his wife. If you will just let him keep his wife, he won't have to come to kill you. This version of the Count is no less a seducer than previous ones, but here the story emphasizes his sexual needs instead of Lucy's or Mina's. In fact, the female characters in this version perform the function of hypnotizable MacGuffins rather than people. They're there for the Count to pursue and for Arthur and Van Helsing to chivalrously defend.

It's funny how the space left open by removing Jonathan Harker from the action in London raises Arthur Holmwood to an almost protagonistic position, yet the script keeps him restricted to serving as an appendix of Dr. Van Helsing. They do everything together, go everywhere together, investigate each clue together—you could remove Arthur from this movie and the only change you'd notice would be that Van Helsing would have to recite his infodumps to himself. Even Mina is almost an afterthought: her close friendship with Lucy is more told than shown, and what little autonomy she has in the plot is gone once she's fed Dracula's blood.

Changing Count Dracula from a predator to a heartbroken widower isn't enough to arouse sympathy for this character. There are still good reasons why the common folk who live near his castle shudder at his name. And on a more pragmatic level, the rough, hyperangular features of Jack Palance's face are a bad fit for a romantic lead. But the movie wants to present the Count as a suffering, tragic man who has endured loneliness for too long and just hopes for a second chance at happiness. Again, this is the same angle Coppola would try some years later, but Coppola succeeds at it because his Dracula is legible to us, because his flashback actually does the job of explaining the part of the story we need to understand instead of giving us mere hints as in this movie.

Dracula's manner of death in this version is overacted as all hell. Once the curtains are ripped open to let the sunlight in, the Count staggers and pauses multiple times to make sure you see him pose in pain from all sides. Then he helpfully gets himself in position for Van Helsing to impale him, a process that takes way more camera cuts than it needs. Overall, this movie is not without enjoyable moments, if your idea of enjoyment allows for frequent, abrupt shifts in PoV and a plot structured like a game of cat and mouse.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Kill, Baby, Kill

Mario Bava's gothic classic is a masterclass in designing and executing absolutely top-shelf spooky vibes

Italian horror is hit or miss with me. I know it's essential to the genre, but the '70s stuff—even Suspiria—just doesn't do it for me. But then in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz's daughter, Astrid, states that Kill, Baby, Kill is her favorite horror movie. Of course, this is just Tim Burton spreading the gospel of his favorite filmmakers (which is awesome; the youth need to expand their spooky horizons).

But I took it as a sign to head back to Italy for some frights. Kill, Baby, Kill centers on a small town in the Carpathian mountains that is experiencing a rash of unexplained deaths. A doctor is sent to investigate the goings-on, and accompanied by a local medical student, tries to debunk what he fervently believes is just small-town superstition. The townsfolk, on the other hand, are sure that the spirit of a dead girl named Melissa is spurring people to kill themselves.

The plot isn't exactly groundbreaking, but in 1966 the "evil children" genre wasn't in full force quite yet, so it may have been more exciting back then.

What Kill, Baby, Kill does do well is absolutely immaculate production design and overall feeling. It has the vibe of Hammer horror films combined with the strangely formal feeling of a theatrical play.

Nearly every scene could be a frame-worthy spooky still. If you're looking for long, dark shadows that fall down staircases, grubby gravediggers in fog-laden cemeteries, and cobwebs encircling archaic sconces, this film's got you covered in spades. It could almost be one of the "Spooky Ambience — 10 Hour" channels you find on YouTube and leave on the TV during a Halloween party.

The version I found was dubbed in English, which makes it a little harder to evoke as much as spook, but one thing I really liked was the amount of female characters in this—from the local town witch, Ruth (who, oh my God, would Aubrey Plaza play the hell out of in a modern remake) to the hauntingly white spirit of 7-year-old Melissa, the ghost at the center of it all. It's also cool how Bava turns traditional color symbology on its head, using white for evil and black for the force of good.

Overall, not scary but fun to vibe to on a cool, dark fall night. Bonus points for the haunted dolls scattered throughout.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

First Scare: House (1977)

This Japanese cult classic is a psychedelic romp that doesn't so much scare as bewilder

I'm a haunted house aficionado. I love all the tropes—the happy family finding a deal despite a sordid past, the bad smells, the stopped clocks, the distant fathers who can't stop chopping wood. I love it all. If we're being completely honest, The Conjuring is my idea of a perfect scary movie. Spooks, vibes, demons—that's what I'm looking for in horror.

But at this point, finding a haunted house movie from a different culture and time period felt like a must-do. House had always been on my periphery, though I'm not very knowledgeable on Japanese horror (apart from crossover hits like Ringu). Needless to say, I was prepared for some very grim and dark storytelling.

I went in blind, of course, but no one told me that it's technically comedy horror. That's a horse of a different color! House is like someone mixed together a Luis Buñuel film, a Benny Hill short, and an after-school special from the 1970s— complete with schlocky rock soundtrack.

It's known as a beloved as a cult classic in Japan, and I can definitely see how that came to be. I, too, have my cheesy Halloween movie from the past that I adore: It's The Worst Witch, featuring Tim Curry and a young Fairuza Balk.

House was directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, who was approached by Toho studios in the '70s with the instructions to "make a movie like Jaws." It's unclear how he took that direction, exactly, but I will say that he definitely made something unlike anything I've ever seen.

The film follows a group of schoolgirls who travel to visit the reclusive aunt of one of them and spend the night in her huge house in the countryside. It's very clearly haunted, and over the course of the evening, girls disappear and die in mysterious ways—namely through traumatic deaths featuring household items such as:

• Mattresses
• A piano
• A grandfather clock
• Lamps

It's hard to explain just how very weird this movie is. The folks over at Criterion have published an in-depth analysis that goes into why it's a certified classic, but the entire time I watched it, I felt like I was on drugs. Kind of like if Rocky Horror Picture Show was directed by Dario Argento. It's very much a product of its time, I believe—there's some commentary on postwar Japanese life in there, along with growing up. Someone on Letterboxd was like, "this is exactly what a sleepover when you're 12 feels like." And that I totally agree with.

While it definitely won't scary anyone, I recommend that everyone checks out House, if only for the sheer surreal experience of it.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

First Scare: Dracula (1958)

The one sadly afflicted with pink eye

A few years ago, I did the experiment of watching all three film versions of Carrie on one day. It taught me a lot about the minutiae of adaptational choices: what effect it has if a certain dialogue scene is moved to a different moment in the story, what actions need to be condensed if a location is removed, how far an emotional setup needs to be from its eventual payoff. (My verdict is that 2013 has the best Margaret, 1976 has the best Carrie, and 2002 has the best prom massacre.) Watching various adaptations of Dracula is turning out to be a similar learning experience, with Terence Fisher's 1958 film a fascinating example of how drastically you can strip down a story while keeping its core intact.

If I was surprised by how much the 1931 film shuffled around the novel's characters, this version goes even further: Renfield and the sanatorium are entirely removed, as is Dracula's journey by ship, while Dr. Seward is reduced to a very minor role. Arthur is now Lucy's brother instead of suitor, and he's married to Mina. The bulk of the action is moved from England to Germany so that trips to and from Transylvania are less impractical. The most consequential change is that Jonathan Harker doesn't visit Castle Dracula as an innocent clerk bringing paperwork, but as a sort of secret agent already tasked with killing the vampire. This means that it's not the Count who lures Jonathan to his land, but Jonathan who takes the initiative to seek the Count. It also means that the Count's evil nature is known all along, so he doesn't get to mingle with human society.

Removing the Count's pretense of being a normal human massively reduces the contact he can have with the rest of the cast, which forces the director to make the most of his very few on-screen appearances. The tradeoff works: this is one of those monster movies where we get to see the monster very rarely, but each time we do, it lands with full impact.

The changes to the whole Jonathan/Mina/Lucy axis help provide a practical solution to the biggest loose thread in the novel: why did Count Dracula want to leave Transylvania in the first place? In this interpretation, Jonathan sneaks into the castle crypt in the first act and kills the Count's bride, who may or may not be desperate to be rid of the vampiric curse. This event gives the Count a clear motivation: you take my bride, I take yours. And that's why he goes after Lucy, who in this version is Jonathan's fiancée.

Jonathan doesn't make it past the first act alive (for which I was thankful, what with actor John Van Eyssen being rather mediocre in the role), so the film promptly shifts to introducing Dr. Van Helsing, who ends up being the true protagonist. As Van Helsing, Peter Cushing does a stellar job. He's helped by the script, which cleverly remolds the novel's crusader/pest exterminator into a detective-esque figure. He's apparently been on Dracula's trail for a while, and he frames his mission in terms of protecting the world from what could become a plague of vampirism.

However, precisely because the story has been stripped down to the basics, this whole talk of a threat to the world sounds incongruous. The action is confined to about half a dozen sets, beyond which the rest of society might as well not exist. Van Helsing does visit a customs officer and an undertaker in the course of his investigation, but those spaces just play their part and are quickly done with. If not for the dialogues, we wouldn't even know that Arthur and Mina are living in Germany instead of England. And the Count doesn't help sell his menace factor either; he's more interested in replacing his dead bride than in going on a biting rampage. The main conflict in this film is a strictly private affair, but the dialogues insist that Dracula sits at the head of a "reign of terror" that must be defeated yet is nowhere to be seen.

So instead of the usual dynamic in a Dracula story of the foreign Other quietly invading the civilized metropolis, here we have the civilized heroes going out into the land of the foreign Other to stamp down the threat it represents. Not a very subtle sentiment for a film produced while the Cold War was getting started (it doesn't escape the viewer that the undertaker's shop where the Count first goes to hide has the last name Marx, of all things).

This version of the vampire doesn't bother with theatrics. No beastly transformation, no fog cloud, no magical stares. His power is raw, brutal hunger (and his female victims welcome his assault with equal hunger). When he finally meets Van Helsing, he doesn't try to control his mind, as in the 1931 movie; here he goes straight for the jugular, and is only thwarted because he lets himself grow overconfident.

For a limited special effects budget, Dracula's death in this movie is impressive. Instead of erupting in flames when exposed to the sun, he simply crumbles down into a pile of ashes. It's very simple, very repulsive, and very effective. Unfortunately, the Technicolor process left many scenes more illuminated than they're implied to be, which makes it look like Dracula is walking outdoors under more sunlight than he should, so the dramatic shock of having the sun hit his face at the end is somewhat less effective. Still, this is a enjoyable watch. It's like going to the doctor's office for a needle jab: just the briefest glimpse of blood, and it's over before you feel any pain.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: The Wild Robot

The new law of the jungle is survival of the kindest

With an eye-catching art style reminiscent of its earlier masterpiece Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, DreamWorks' adaptation of Peter Brown's 2016 novel The Wild Robot gives off a warm aura that soothes and uplifts the weary soul. This is a surprisingly deep story for such a contained scenario: it begins in the near future, when a shipment of domestic helper robots crashes against the rocky coast of a small island, leaving only one surviving robot. The emotional nucleus of the movie concerns the incompatible values between a creature built to serve and the law of the jungle.

For all the cuteness in its visual design, the island is not a safe place: every creature there seeks its own survival, and that pursuit is often bloody. Inasmuch as the island can be said to constitute a society, it's one built on mutual hostility. It's eat or be eaten. And here's where our protagonist, which doesn't need to eat and cannot be eaten, will try to find a place and a purpose.

In the original novel, the author's note explains, "animal instincts are kind of like computer programs." Both computers and animals have certain core routines that they follow automatically. The relevant instincts/programs in dispute here are, on one side, those of the wildlife, organized around relations of competition and predation; and on the other side, those of an obedient machine, designed for relations of altruism. Will the friendly newcomer succumb to the hierarchy of violence, or will the ubiquitous hostility of nature adapt to accommodate a gentler touch?

What ends up happening is that the two types of programs exchange useful routines. Our protagonist, the stranded robot, acquires a new type of relation: responsibility. After accidentally destroying a goose nest, the next logical task is to take care of the only surviving egg. And the closed environment of the island also acquires a new type of relation: openness. The robot's presence and the way it disrupts the usual flow of the circle of life force the various creatures, big and small, to reconsider the roles they've been unthinkingly performing up to that point.

By the rules of the jungle, that egg ought to have perished. But our robot, without realizing it, introduces love into the cold equations of survival. For their part, the animals in the island do have some inborn notion of emotional attachment, but it's restricted to members of their respective species. It ought to be unthinkable for a goose to love a being that is not-a-goose. And yet, the miracle happens. A piece of machinery with no role to play in the food chain becomes a friend, a mother, a leader, a heroine. What until then had been a battlefield of all against all becomes a home.

One has to allow for a certain measure of poetic license in a story like this. The characters that the movie presents as becoming companions forged in adversity include several natural enemies; while witnessing the formation of a cross-species alliance to defend the island, one isn't meant to think too hard about which of those comrades the bear and the fox will need to eat tomorrow.

No, there are more urgent concerns. Our protagonist has owners, and they're eager to recover their property. Scattered hints indicate that this world has undergone a serious climate catastrophe, and the robot helpers are crucial to maintaining the standard of life of what appears to be a very limited human population. On top of that, this particular robot has learned to communicate with animals and earn their cooperation, making those digital memories valuable beyond measure. The threat left unspoken is that the same humankind that let ecological disaster happen at a global scale wouldn't recoil at the chance to turn the animal kingdom into another tool to control.

The movie doesn't lose sight of these macro events while it aims a finely sharpened scalpel at the audience's heart with its poignant interpersonal drama. The anxieties of sudden parenthood and the insecurities of growing up feeling different don't change substantially when your family is composed of a gosling that can't figure out small talk (let alone swimming and flying), a fox that used to try to eat said gosling multiple times, and a helper robot that inadvertently killed the gosling's family. And these messy, profoundly incompatible, woefully unprepared characters manage to create exactly the kind of unbreakable love bonds that can save a community.

All this is clothed in the most exquisite colors digital cinema is capable of. The Wild Robot is not only a hard punch right in the feels; it's a banquet of textures and shapes and deftly timed movement. One is simultaneously overcome with the personal catharsis evoked by the main family plot (complete with tears of bittersweet self-recognition) and a sense of historic good fortune for being alive at a time when such heights of visual artistry can be reached. Combined with its spectacular soundtrack, the experience of watching this movie is, without exaggeration, unforgettable.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart

The start of a new fantasy series set in a world where a pair of separated sisters are at the core of a story of theocratic conflict and ambition.

We start with a pair of sisters, Hakara and Rasha. They have only each other, eking out life in a bay in a devastated land. The elder, Hakara, dives for pearls for the thin living the sisters are eking out in the wake of their parents' death. This precarious existence ends when the black wall comes. The god Kluehnn is remaking, renewing the tired world - a world devastated, according to accounts, by man’s greed and the horrors of the other gods, gods that must be hunted and destroyed. But that remaking of the world necessarily transforms or kills half of the population as an area is remade is a harsh way to remake a world. As the black wall comes for the Bay area, our sisters are separated. Rasha is transformed, and Hakara, still ever professing to try and find her younger sister, finds employment diving not into the ocean, but rather into the earth itself in search of magical gems that could change the world themselves.

And so we are off and running in Andrea Stewart's The Gods Below, first in a new series for her, following her Bone Shard Daughter trilogy.

The story of the two sisters, as they find lives apart and on opposite sides of the Wall, as it were, is where we get the main backbone of the novel. The separate lives of the two sisters slowly converge (after a ten year time jump), as they find themselves not only on opposite sides of a barrier, but also ideologically and theologically on opposite sides as well. It is a slow burn as they struggle through their own lives, growing and changing, and becoming people who are definitely not the close sisters they once were.

In addition to the two sisters, we get three other points of view as well. One pair are a set of characters who are related but have rather different paths. Mullayne is an inventor, a creator, and an adventurer. He is determined to penetrate the depths of the earth to find the realm of the other, lost Gods, in an effort to find a cure for his terminally ill beloved, Imeah. Love drives Mullayne to follow his research, even when it is a path no one has gone in centuries, and may kill him and his entire team in the process.

And then there is Sheuan. Mull is her cousin, but while Mull and his companions are descending into the depths of the earth like Arne Saknusseum, Sheuan is trying to keep her family with some semblance of power and strength. Her clan is ready to slip and fall from the ranks of the nobles, and that would be a disaster. Her mother has put all of her efforts into trying to put Sheuan into a position to be a savior for the clan. With such pressure, Sheuan soon finds herself borrowing ideas and equipment from her absent cousin in order to try and keep her family afloat. While Mull might want to use his masking technology to delve into the earth, Sheuan has other ideas in mind.

The last point of view, used sparingly, is hundreds of years in the past of all of these otherwise contemporaneous points of view. And it is a god, Nioanen. By the time we get our first point of view for Nioanen, we’ve already had a number of chapters setting up the theological setup of the novel - man despoiled the earth, one god, Kluehnn rose to fight the avaricious fellow deities who were oppressing humanity in the bargain. It is Kluehnn who protects and helps humanity, all other deities are evil and to be opposed and fought. So Nionaen’s point of view, when it first appears, is our first in text direct opposition to this narrative, and gives us concrete information that the story Kluehnn has been putting out may be only one side of the story. Or worse, that he is fact, been lying to humanity for centuries.

In addition to the plotting and characters, we get a rich world to explore and develop here. Using the various points of view immerses into a world where the world broke... and now is slowly being rejuvenated, but at a cost and by methods that are not clear. Although the novel isn’t a mystery per se, there are plenty of questions that are slowly revealed for the reader about the true nature of the world, how and why it broke, and what is happening now. This is a world rich in magic, a world of competing clans, grasping nobles, devotees of the god, and much more.

There is some lovely language, Stewart’s talent for word choice and phrasing I noticed in the Bone Shard Daughter series is in full effect here as well. Her word choice and phrases are evocative, emotive and often pluck at the heart. Even more than the plotting, worldbuilding and strong characters that the novel offers, the way that this novel evokes emotion, and feeling with her word choice, as well as describing and evoking all of the above, really stands out. There are painful choices and hard bargains throughout the novel, and Stewart’s writing puts a light on the difficult choices the characters are faced with, and makes the reader really feel the pressure and consequences of those decisions.

The novel that comes to mind that pairs with The Gods Below is Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller. Like that novel, this novel explores theological frameworks, and internecine politics on a human level that have origins and reflects with the gods and their concerns. There are in fact, Godkillers in The Gods Below, and how those conflicts play out in both novels help distinguish them together in epic fantasy. Godkiller is significantly darker in tone and content, much more in the grimdark mold of fantasy than, ultimately, The Gods Below is.

Overall, this is the first novel in the story, and the stopping point here has some reveals, there really isn’t a resolution for readers who want to get off here. I am invested enough, particularly in the story of Hakara and Rasha, to see where Stewart intends to go with the next novel in the series. I do note, though, that this is a case where the series name, The Hollow Covenant, does in fact constitute as a bit of a spoiler. While it is easy to guess that Kluehnn is not all they're cracked up to be as a protector of humanity and restorer of the world, it does tip the hand even before one opens the book.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Strong pair of primary characters with a excellent story and characterization
• Excellent and vividly evocative writing
• Interesting and well developed worldbuilding
• Really strong cover art by Lauren Panepinto

Reference: Stewart, Andrea, The Gods Below  [Orbit, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

First Scare: Dracula (1931)

The one with the intense stares

Tod Browning's Dracula is derived from a 1924 stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and it shows. It keeps several of the hallmarks of a traditional theater script: lengthy infodumps via dialogue; time jumps that relegate some plot developments (especially the violent ones) to the implicit space between scenes; extended, continuous use of the same set for several consecutive conversations; and a marked preference for telling over showing. I understand that Western theater has a long tradition of keeping the violence offstage; what I cannot understand is how, when you translate the stage play into a movie, you produce what eventually becomes the most memorable, most revered, most iconic interpretation of The vampire without showing me one single instance of biting.

It goes without saying that Bela Lugosi carries this movie on his shoulders. Despite the excessive wordiness of the script, the obviously fake bat puppets, the lack of a music soundtrack, and the scattered, ill-advised attempts at humor, it only takes one look at the titular vampire's intense gaze to fall under his spell. When he's not engaged in the social pantomime of small talk, in a strenuous but futile effort to pass as a hot-blooded, cheerful human, his presence fills the screen with an unblinking, commanding aura of evil. Wikipedia tells me that almost a dozen actors were considered for the role, but now that I've seen the movie, the possibility of giving the Count any other face strikes me as inconceivable.

Fancy clothes and impeccable haircut aside, this version of the vampire is still very close to Nosferatu, an almost irrational monster guided by the hunting instinct, without the sentimental appeal that later reinventions would add to the archetype to create a more relatable figure, desperate to find love but cursed to see people only as food. When his character is free from the need to pretend to be a normal human, Lugosi puts on the face of a predator, giving his victims not the natural recognition of a fellow person but the hungry stare of a beast preparing to jump. He delivers a terrific performance, which anticipates later occurrences of the single-minded, uncaring killer that can be found in Alien or The Terminator.

The liberties taken with the source material are a double-edged sword. For one part, the early scenes about a real estate lawyer visiting the Count's castle are given to Renfield instead of Jonathan Harker, a change that strengthens the causal cohesion between the first and second acts. Also, Dr. Seward, who is in charge of the hospital where Renfield ends up locked in, is rewritten to be Mina's father instead of Lucy's suitor, which gives the Count a convenient reason to get close to Mina. The downside is that the role of Jonathan Harker is greatly diminished, Mina is reduced to sexy lamp status, and Lucy's death and subsequent undeath lose the weight they should have in the plot. There isn't even a scene to purify Lucy's corpse; she's simply forgotten halfway through the movie.

From our position in this century, accustomed to hundreds of variations on the vampire mythos, it would seem easy to forgive such misfires; there's always another version out there with its own aesthetic, its own vision, its own reinterpretation of the story. But in 1931, Dracula was yet to enter the public domain. The choices made by Universal Pictures did more than express artistic freedom: they set canon. There's an entire period in the history of horror during which Universal's Dracula was the only authorized Count on screen. Just like the present generation only knows Ian McKellen's version of Gandalf, and will forever think of Gandalf in that image, there was a generation whose idea of the Count was shaped by Bela Lugosi's acting style. It's the kind of first-mover advantage that forces every subsequent moviemaker to make their art as a response to it.

The irony is that Nosferatu came first, however illegally, which makes Universal's Dracula, for all its intentions of defining the character on its own terms, a response. Whereas Orlok is a cadaveric nightmare heralded by pestilence, Lugosi's Count comes across as a dusty relic of the Ancien Régime, a ruler over the human heart who repays obedience with madness. Both are corrupted, bloodthirsty abominations, but Lugosi's version knows the tricks of a stage magician, most notably the dramatic effect of a well-timed fog machine. Moreover, Nosferatu is silent, while Dracula lets Lugosi make full use of his heavy Hungarian accent to leverage the audience's learned Orientalism. Orlok feels like the fearsome Other because he's a walking corpse; Lugosi's Count feels like the fearsome Other because he's a foreigner with weird tastes.

My notion of the vampire was shaped by the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and Coppola's reinvention of Bram Stoker's material (plus smatterings of The Munsters Today, Forever Knight, Count Duckula, Drak Pack, and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School). Somehow I never came into relevant contact with Dark Shadows, Salem's Lot, Hellsing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castlevania, True Blood, or The Vampire Diaries. I did meet Blade, Underground, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Twilight, although at an age too late for them to influence my personal mythology. (Namely: if you ask me to think of vampires, the thing about sunlight that hurts them is not the UV light, they are not at war with werewolves, they have no connection with Biblical characters, and they Do. Not. Sparkle.) I don't view vampires as tragic figures or forbidden seducers; I view them as the perfect symbol for the parasitic nature of aristocracy.

Alas, I am a child of my time. This version of Dracula didn't particularly frighten me. Some of the scenes where the Count uses his mind control powers straddle the very thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and the uneven editing kills all sense of dramatic momentum in the last third. Worst of all, in consonance with the theatrical conventions of its time, but absurdly for a big classic of horror, we're not allowed to see the Count die. I feel sorry for the masterful lead actor who was dragged into this less than expertly made movie.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.