For some reason, Hammer films have always eluded me. I enjoy vampires, I loved Bram Stoker’s book, having written on it in high school. This marks the beginning of my Hammer journey.
Synopsis:
Jonathan Harker rouses the ire of Count Dracula after he accepts a job at the vampire’s castle under false pretenses. Harker’s friend, Dr. Van Helsing, then embarks on a hunt for the predatory villain when he targets Harker’s loved ones.
IMDb: 7.2
Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
Tagline: Every night he rises from his coffin-bed silently to seek the soft flesh, the warm blood he needs to keep himself alive!
One thing I noticed is that Jonathan Harker is a vampire hunter, sent to kill Dracula here, and not proposing the real estate transaction. Well, and the fact that he dies is a bit shocking as well. With the current film Last Voyage of the Demeter in cinemas, I am reminded that this whole sequence is missing from this film as well. Apparently, budget and time constrictions removed this subplot from the film, as well as leaving out Renfield, another film that just left cinemas ironically, and Quincey Morris, because the subplot of Lucy and the men trying to marry her were dropped completely. These budgetary and time constraints also factored into doing away with Dracula’s shape shifting abilities, as well as trying to ground the film in reality.
I don’t mind the changes, as seeing the book regurgitated word for word on screen is never a good idea. I get the fact that things had to be trimmed for time and money, and these subplots, while fun and quirky aspects of the novel, really do little to advance the plot. I particularly love the sailing of the Demeter subplot, and the suitors to Lucy are very entertaining and funny, but once again, are they necessary? They are not.
I enjoy the red eyes of Dracula, as well as the beautiful young vampire that Harker stakes in the early minutes of the film who turns into an old woman in the coffin. I also enjoy the performance by Christopher Lee as the Count himself as well as Peter Cushing’s take on Van Helsing, a different version completely from Anthony Hopkin’s quirky, elderly take on the character.
I feel bad for also pointing out that Lucy was such a sexual, flirtatious woman in Coppola’s version, and yet here, she is plain jane, and such a minor character. I feel that Coppola’s film was much more sexual, whereas the 1958 version was the one that claimed to be more sexual in nature than any prior version. I get that in the 35 years between the two films, the sexuality level in films has changed, and that risqué is a word who’s meaning also changes over the years based on the conservative or progressive nature of people’s attitudes.
The film is but 82 minutes, although apparently there are other versions of the film out there that add or subtract certain scenes, one of which has a great effect from what I have read, that saw Christopher Lee peeling the skin off of his face. The runtime passes by very quickly, as the plot points just seem to fly by at such a rapid pace, that one might wonder if they would have been suited to split the film into two parts, much like It or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, just to squeeze everything in. While not necessary, I just feel like character development suffers as a result the cuts.
I am glad this movie exists, for one can see the influence that the film not only has on the character, but the gothic nature of cinema in the coming years as the Italians pretty much take over for the British in terms of European horror film mastery in the following decades. I more than enjoyed it and am excitedly looking forward to the sequels which follow.
