“I am Dracula — and I welcome you to my house.”

Joel’s Rating: 5 out of 5 wooden stakes!

Joel’s Review: For the fact that it has been a huge subgenre of horror with a lot of movies made over the years, I’m not the biggest fan of vampire films. Oh sure, as a kid I ate them up, along with the Count Chocula cereal and watching all the monster cartoons back then, but as an adult, vampires just aren’t my monster of choice. I like to revisit this one once in a while though.

It comes from a time where outright gore, sexuality, and any number of other things could not be done for general audiences, so ‘horror’ sometimes ended up being more goofy. But Hammer films, a British company, sought to push the boundaries, staying within what was considered acceptable but trying to honestly scare audiences. Compared to modern horror, these movies are pretty tame, but some of them do a lot with atmosphere and tense situations.

Hammer tackled the Frankenstein’s monster first, and then turned their attention to Dracula (they had some success adapting Edgar Allen Poe stories to the screen as well). And they could not use anything that the Universal film did that was not in the original novel, so some details and part of the narrative changed for this film (as Universal had done as well).

The film moves a bit slowly and is talky at times (kind of how British horror was at the time), but Dracula has some very fine moments. Like I said before, the atmosphere of this movie is thick and tension mounts. I love a movie that moves directly towards the climax without a lot of fluff or scenes that could easily be edited out with little effect on the overall story. This Dracula moves things along.

The biggest thing going for it, though, is the acting. Christopher Lee plays the Count and he is imposing and intimidating, dominating nearly every scene he is in. Since Lee was also a fairly tall actor, he physically stands over the other members of the cast. Peter Cushing is our Van Helsing and does his usual good job. This Van Helsing is smart and knowledgeable, but you can see the frustration as he fails to counter the Count on several occasions. Michael Gough is also here as the father of the woman that Harker was to marry. Everyone involved does their part beautifully.

I mentioned before that some details are changed around in the story, and that adds to it for me. I’m familiar with both the 1933 Dracula as well as the novel, so it is fun to have enough changed that I didn’t always know what was next (and also not remembering from when I watched this years ago). Harker and Van Helsing are not just drawn into the mystery here, they are both aware of vampires, aware of Dracula, and are on a quest to deal with him. But this Count is cunning and a bit cruel, taunting his hunters by targeting their friends and family and then leaving the victims where his hunters will find them.

The movie really plays up the seductive side of the Dracula mythos, as well. With the female characters, there is a definite suggestion that, at least to them, the attacks are pleasurable and something they look forward too once the first bite has taken place. Of course, these kinds of movies would really, really amp that up over the next decade or so (some vampire movies nearly crossed the line into soft core porn by the 70s and I think this movie started that trend).

The final scenes of the movie are pretty fast. I have to hand it to Cushing and Lee for taking what could have been an anticlimactic ending and making it into something worth watching based on the sheer intensity of their expressions and body language. It’s my favorite Drac vs Van Helsing meeting of any vampire film I’ve ever watched. And when you consider the time period when it was released, the ending shots had to be pretty effective to audiences that had never seen anything quite like it.

I admit, anyone who doesn’t like a slow build in a film, the expositional scenes, or are just spoiled with modern horror and the ‘shock every five minutes’ film making, this may not be as exciting for you. But if you appreciate the old horror or monster films and don’t mind the slower stuff, this movie has a good payoff. Highly recommended!

Note: This film was titled ‘Horror of Dracula’ for American audiences to differentiate it from the Universal ‘Dracula’ made in 1933.