The 1931 Universal Pictures adaptation ofDraculawas a total game-changer for the world of horror, but it isn’t necessarily the greatest representation of the original novel. That’s not to say the film is bad! It has incredible atmosphere, is beautifully shot, and features the most iconic take on the character in history withBela Lugosi’stitular performance. This on-screen iteration has arguably had the biggest influence on the character of Dracula out of any other in history – it just had to break a decent amount ofBram Stoker’sideas to do so. While the Lugosi Dracula model is a fun one to work off of, it’s a shame that we don’t see more films in the vein of its source material. Regardless of its unfaithful nature, the1931 film remains a classicand brings more than enough to the table to make it, perhaps, the essentialDraculatake.
Draculawas released in 1931 and directed byTod Browning. While not the first adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel (that would beNosferatu), this was the first to have been made legally and with the permission of his family estate. It was also the first to have utilized sound technology! This alone would have made Browning’s work an important release in the character’s canon, but it soon becomes an afterthought when it comes to the film’s influential aspects.Draculastars Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire, and, despite being instantly iconic, the character is drastically different from the novel’s version of the character. This remains the same for the1931 Spanish language adaptation, a film shot on the same sets as Browning’s, but with a different cast, crew, and director. Universal was not looking to put Stoker’s original vision on the screen for either their English or Spanish productions ofDracula. This new take was their confident foot forward.
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Bela Lugosi Put His Own Stamp on Dracula
When you think of iconic performances that forever set the stage for those to come, Bela Lugosi as Dracula is always one of the first that comes to mind. Many actors have donned the vampire teeth and cape since, including folks likeGary Oldman,Christopher Lee, and nowNicolas Cage, but all point back to Lugosi’s take. Here, like in the novel, Dracula is a smooth-yet-sinister vampire that lures his victims in with charm, then makes them his prey when they don’t see it coming. That stuff, Stoker put to page. The biggest differences are with the character’s actual presentation. Lugosi’s Dracula is a clean-cut man who looks to be in his mid-40s, sporting a long, black cape, with his similarly black hair slicked back on top of his head. In the book, the Count is described as an older man who rocks a white mustache, the latter of which hasn’t made its way into many of the adaptations. Dracula is also described as getting younger as the novel goes on, with the blood of his victims allowing him to age in reverse, whereas Lugosi’s version looks the same from beginning to end. Lugosi also gave Dracula a Romanian accent, yet, in the novel, the vampire’s accent is only described as being strange.
The Count is also a pretty different character in terms of his personality and history. Stoker’s Dracula had a history of being a violent warrior, similar to the character’s biggest influence,Vlad the Impaler. He has a fascination with war and his people’s legacy with it, bringing it up with many different characters throughout the story. Universal mostly abandoned that aspect of the character. Of course, you can’t have a vampire movie without at least the implication of violence, but Dracula’s attacks and killings all occur off-screen. It was the early ’30s – horror movies hardly showed any violence at all until the ’50s and ’60s – so the film is extremely tame in that aspect. With most of the violence being off-screen, Legosi’s Dracula is primarily shown as smooth and charming, and while his predatory nature is obvious, it runs beneath the surface.
The film’s supporting cast is fairly faithful to Stoker’s novel, depending on the character at play. Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) is a well-adapted character, essentially being the wise old man who is knowledgeable of vampires and the Count’s history. Certain characters like John Harker (David Manners), Mina Seward (Helen Chandler), and Lucy Weston (Frances Dade) all bear names that are slightly altered from their novelistic counterparts. Mina, in particular, is incredibly important to the novel’s plot and figuring out Dracula’s schemes, as opposed to her underwritten and mostly underutilized film counterpart. Renfield (Dwight Frye), Dracula’s servant, is also fairly close to the novel. In both versions, Renfield is the fly and spider-eating servant of Dracula. He’s housed in an asylum and doing his master’s wishes from there. That being said, in the film, Renfield takes Jonathan Harker’s place of traveling to Dracula’s castle on business, acting as the film’s first victim.
‘Dracula’ Abandons Many of the Novel’s Major Plot Points
Understandably, when adapting a novel, a filmmaker is going to have to make some changes. The written form generously provides room for as much plot as the author wants to tackle. Movies, on the other hand, are generally anywhere from 80 minutes to a little over three hours, which provides a bit less wiggle room. In the case ofDracula, Bram Stoker’s original novel is a sprawling 400-plus pages, which varies depending on the edition. Meanwhile, the 1931 film runs a measly 75-minutes long. A lot of the book’s plot points had to be altered or cut out to deliver a movie of proper length. Aside from the book being told from the perspective of diary entries (a highly unconventional method for a movie in any decade), the film acts as just about the leanest version of its source material imaginable.
The novel features a fantastically eerie segment aboard a ship at sea, in which the ship’s crew disappears one by one at the hand of the Count. While it would have been fun to see a chilly Universal monster movie play on this stretch of the book, it didn’t make the cut. The film also has a much simpler finale than the novel’s, in which the protagonists travel to Dracula’s castle, slay his wives, and band together to take on the Count. In the movie, Harker searches for Mina, while Van Helsing faces off with the vampire. It would have been interesting to see the film stretched out a bit longer to have a more satisfying climax, but, as it stands, it works pretty well.
Universal’sDraculachanged the game for horror movies forever. It kicked off the Universal Monsters franchise, spawned several sequels, and was so popular that the image of Lugosi’s Dracula became instantly cemented into the character’s being. There have been a number of adaptations since then that have more closely adapted Stoker’s novel, namely Francis Ford Coppola’sBram Stoker’s Draculaand the 1977BBC-producedCount Dracula. If you’re a huge fan of Stoker’s work, as you should be, then worry not – there are more than enough Dracula films out there to make up for the 1931 film’s omissions! That said,Draculais a fantastic movie in and of itself, acting not only as a cut-and-dry image of the original novel, but also as one of the greatest classic monster movies of all time.
