Review #218: Dracula (1931)

This review was originally written in October 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #73: Dracula (1931)

Talking pictures were first pioneered in 1927, and within a few years had revolutionized the medium of film. The last few movies I watched were silent films, and it definitely made them feel like they are something old, something out-of-touch with modern media, and that may be a bit unfair when judging them, but I can't really help it considering I was born almost sixty years after the industry had moved on. I guess this is all preamble to say that today's film is not a silent film, and the difference between this and the last few feels like night and day (no pun intended).

Dracula is more or less an adaptation of the same thing that Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror was: it starts off with an estate agent who travels to Transylvania to facilitate the purchase of a new home in London to Count Dracula, who nowadays everybody instantly recognizes as a vampire, but at the time, it was just another name. (Seriously, it's incredibly bizarre to hear him introduce himself as "Count Dracula" and have everyone else in the scene react like he just said a perfectly normal name and title.) When he arrives in London he starts feasting on people left and right, eventually setting his sights on Mina Seward, daughter of a doctor whom Dracula has cozied up to, and it takes some quick thinking from Dr. Van Helsing to figure out what's going on and put an end to the diabolical Count.

So like I said, this feels like a HUGE improvement from even Phantom of the Opera. Yes Dracula is a fairly slow film (and I imagine the next ten or so will similarly be very slow, as it was the style at the time) but the characters all feel fairly well-realized, and the dialogue does a great job in most cases of keeping the viewer up-to-date with the story. There were a few points where I felt like some things were unnecessarily glossed over (I've seen several versions of this story by now and I still don't quite understand how or why Dracula caused such a long-term obsession/control over Renfield, and I assumed that since this is the original film version of this particular story that it would be explained, but no- Dracula makes his deal with Renfield, a couple short disjointed scenes happen where Renfield is acting weird in Dracula's castle, and then he spends the rest of the movie obsessively manic in service of the vampire who seems to care very little for him) so this movie isn't completely blameless in that regard, but overall I enjoyed seeing the characters (particularly Van Helsing) work their way through problems and sort out their various issues and solve problems in a believable way. Everyone seemed pretty competent, and that's a rare thing in horror.

So this movie wasn't perfect, but it was good enough and some of the performances were incredible. Helen Chandler and Edward Van Sloan (Mina and Van Helsing) really stole the show in my opinion.

Overall Rating: 7/10 Bees with Inexplicable Bee-Sized Coffins

Ending Tidbit: The ending to this film seemed VERY abrupt to me, with Van Helsing killing Dracula off-screen and Mina snapping out of her seemingly-unending trance immediately after (and then boom, cut to the production company logo). Apparently there originally was an epilogue narrated by Van Helsing, but it is believed to have been lost over the decades. What a shame!