Additional Features
In 1999, Universal commissioned Philip Glass to compose a new score for Tod Browning's landmark horror classic
Dracula, a common enough practice for silent films but unheard of for sound pictures. In some respects,
Dracula lends itself to the treatment: only two pieces of music are heard in the otherwise scoreless original, and long passages are effectively silent but for sound effects and the hiss of early sound recording. During these moments, Glass's lovely score, performed by the Kronos Quartet, lays a foundation of dread and doom on the picture with arpeggios and chantlike melodies. The music carpets the film like a silent movie score, loosening Browning's often stiff style, smoothing over transitions, and filling in static shots with a fullness of sound. During the dialogue, however, the music fights the words, the crisp, precise sounds of modern digital recording colliding with the warm, often muddy 1931 analog soundtrack. At its best, it enriches and enlivens the sometimes stodgy classic, while at its worst it merely distracts.
--Sean Axmaker
Amazon.com Essential Video
When Universal Pictures picked up the movie rights to a Broadway adaptation of
Dracula, they felt secure in handing the property over to the sinister team of actor Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning. But Chaney died of cancer, and Universal hired the Hungarian who had scored a success in the stage play: Béla Lugosi. The resulting film launched both Lugosi's baroque career and the horror-movie cycle of the 1930s. It gets off to an atmospheric start, as we meet Count Dracula in his shadowy castle in Transylvania, superbly captured by the great cinematographer Karl Freund. Eventually Dracula and his blood-sucking devotee (Dwight Frye, in one of the cinema's truly mad performances) meet their match in a vampire-hunter called Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan). If the later sections of the film are undeniably stage bound and a tad creaky, Dracula nevertheless casts a spell, thanks to Lugosi's creepily lugubrious manner and the eerie silences of Browning's directing style. (After a mood-enhancing snippet of
Swan Lake under the opening titles, there is no music in the film.)
Frankenstein, which was released a few months later, confirmed the horror craze, and Universal has been making money (and countless spin-off projects) from its twin titans of terror ever since. Certainly the role left a lasting impression on the increasingly addled and drug-addicted Lugosi, who was never quite able to distance himself from the part that made him a star. He was buried, at his request, in his black vampire cape.
--Robert Horton
