Hello there! Once again it’s October and that means my favorite holiday is fast approaching. 31 days to Halloween! I’m going to carry on the tradition I started last year by providing reviews/summaries for 31 horror movies, one per day, to give you some suggestions on what to watch on Halloween night.I will review mainstream movies and rare obscure ones. Great films and . . . uh, not so great films. Movies that will scare you and movies that will make you wonder if someone slipped some LSD into your morning coffee. And so without further ado, on with the show!
October 1st - Dracula (1931)
Universal Studio’s 1931 classic, Dracula, ushered in a new era of horror film making, led to the golden age of classic horror and introduced the world to one of the greatest stars the horror genre has ever known, Bela Lugosi. While the movie does have its flaws I think that it’s important to watch it while keeping in mind that no one had seen anything like it before up to that point. To the people who saw it when it initially released this movie was absolutely horrifying.
Originally Dracula was planned to be a lavish, big budget affair, but those plans were scraped due to the death of the legendary Lon Chaney who was originally going to play the count, and the beginning of The Great Depression. Instead they were forced to scale down the production considerably by using the stage play as a blueprint for the film. Tod Browning directed and after considering many actors Bela Lugosi, who was staring in the stage play at the time, was able to secure the part of Dracula after much persuading and taking a smaller paycheck than the other actors.
The basic story is so well known by this point that I don’t think a complete plot summery is necessary so instead some information about the filmmaking. While most fans seem to agree the movies opening is atmospherically spooky, the second half which takes place in London feels static and staged. This is because very little was actually changed from the stage play and scenes were filmed just as they were preformed onstage with very little camera movement.
Some have questioned the quality of Tod Browning’s direction and claim the man responsible for the electrifying first half of the film was his cinematographer Karl Freund, an immigrant from Germany who had been apart of the expressionist film movement there. Looking at some of Freund’s past credits like The Golem and Metropolis it’s easy to see how this is probably true. Still, the second half is not a complete loss, as the film is saved by the amazing performances of Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye.
Very few people think of Dracula as he is depicted in Stroker’s original book; old with pointed ears, a long white mustache and two bushy eyebrows that were almost “meeting over the nose”. When people think of Dracula or he is depicted in the media most people see Bela Lugosi, the definitive screen Dracula. His performance is memorizing from his movements to his slow deliberate line reads, or even just when he’s staring into the camera. He conveys about him an unearthly aura that is both frightening and seductive, one of power and corruption, of hunger and lust. Lugosi would become a household name and while the role would propel him to stardom it would also typecast him for the rest of his life.
Dwight Frye’s Renfield manages to be frightening, pathetic and sympathetic, sometimes all at once and at other times switching from one to the other at a moments notice. When he returns from castle Dracula he’s a raving mad man, obsessed with blood and the coming of his master. While he’s under Dracula’s control occasionally the last bit of humanity within him tries to break free, but always to fruitless results. The scenes where he ascends from the ships hold on The Vesta and the one where he quietly crawls like a spider toward the sill body of a fainted maid, eyes on her throat, are perhaps the most frightening moments of the film. Dwight Frye was a versatile and talented actor, but his performance was so great and the movie was so popular that like Lugosi, he was fated to play similar characters in films like Frankenstein, The Vampire Bat and Dead Men Walk until his untimely death in 1943.
If you haven’t seen Dracula for some time or if you’ve never seen it at all then consider dusting off or renting a copy this Halloween to see where it all started. This is a pivotal movie in film history and as a plus; it’s safe enough to watch with the kids.
Rating – Seven and a half out of ten.
No comments:
Post a Comment