Dracula (1931) Restored (2015)

A new cut of Dracula (1931) by some internet guy from FanEdit.org. The pacing just better in this version; I prefer it to the original.

Dracula is a very good movie, and if you haven't seen it, I recommend it! I've also seen Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1958), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Of those, Nosferatu the Vampyre is head and shoulders above the rest, followed by Shadow of the Vampire. Maybe Nosferatu is good if you listen to it with a good score and the right color grading, I don't know.

Renfield is on a carriage in the middle of Europe. Everybody around him is a superstitious peasant, and he just wants to get his business done.

Renfield and the Romanian innkeeper

Look at the differences in their clothes and manner. They're suffering from a little cross-cultural miscommunication. The innkeeper is jovial, laughing and smiling, because he is sure that Renfield is just misunderstanding him -- nobody could actually want to go to the Borgo Pass on Walpurgis Night! Also, Renfield is his customer, more wealthy and worldly. Renfield, for his part, is a little bemused by the innkeeper, and certain that, if he just keeps repeating himself loudly and slowly, he'll get his way, and everything will be alright. He feels like he understands the innkeeper perfectly.

The innkeeper realizes he has not made himself clear to Renfield. This is gonna be a long fuckin post if I keep adding pictures at this rate

All I'm doing is saying the stuff going on on screen. I'm not sure if that's interesting to you, the reader, or not. But I think it's good enough that it's worth recording.

Renfield takes off; somehow he has convinced the carriage driver to take him. Then we move to the castle. Dracula doesn't hold many cards close to its chest. These guys are vampires. They sleep in coffins and they eat blood.

Look at that hand... Nggg...

It's funny watching this movie in 2024 and hearing characters in it use the name "Dracula" casually. Nowadays the name is ruined, and Dracula's ethnic background is no longer resonant. Nowadays it's just not plausible that civilization is threatened by a decaying eastern European nobleman. It's perfectly plausible that civilization is threatened by a decaying eastern American nobleman. So maybe he'd be named "Kennedy".

The movie is about a decadent foreigner who clashes with modernity. We fail in our initial struggles with him because we do not take the ancient, esoteric, spiritual, foreign threat seriously. Renfield, who is our surrogate in the opening scenes, is no superstitious peasant, he doesn't believe in vampires, come on, for him it's a matter of business!

He's a sexless little modernist, sensibly dressed, who points at things with his cane. Just like us.

Meanwhile, Dracula is sexy, personally charismatic, dramatic, dressed way the hell up all day every day, intense, emotional, romantic.

Nggg...

And his wives, of whom he has first three and then four.

Nggg...

These are sexy bad people. They feel things, real things, deep hungers, impossible longing, more pain than a man could endure in a single lifetime.

Here's another generational obstacle to our appreciation of Dracula. I, at least, don't think of my elders as sexier, more romantic, or more emotional than my own generation. We generally think of ourselves as more liberated than them. Whereas Bram Stoker is writing for and about social reactionaries who disapproved of the libertinism of the prior generation.

(Remember, when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, he wasn't writing a period piece about a far-off and irrelevant situation; he was writing a story set here and now for him, thus 1890s London, dealing with contemporary concerns.)

In the book, Dracula is ugly and ratlike. (An antisemitic stereotype?) For all that he still fucks. You can't, don't want to, say no to a man with that much power and personal magnetism.

Back to the movie. Renfield has a spooky carriage ride to the castle. The carriage driver is Dracula himself, in disguise. For the second time we see Renfield lose his cool, as for the second time he angrily shouts at a carriage driver for going too quickly. Of course there's no driver, just a bat flying between the horses.

And he's freaked out by the state of the castle, once he gets in. The driver vanishes and takes Renfield's bags with him. The castle itself is wrecked, filthy, covered in vermin.

A good establishing shot of the interior of the castle

 There's a cool, creepy, disorienting series of shots here. After the establishing shot, in which you can see some shadows dance in the back window, we see three bats (obviously the wives) fluttering there.

 

Bats in the window. Unfortunately the bat puppets didn't age well.

Pull in on Renfield looking at the bats and around the hall.

Renfield looking about, a tighter shot

 Cut to Dracula walking down the stairs with a lit candle.

Dracula walking down

Check out his precise position. He's just to the right of the central pillar, quite near to Renfield. If he had walked down the stairs to get to this point, we would have seen him in a prior shot. We would have had audio cues added to the mix, shoes on stone or something. There just wasn't time for him to get there. It's eerie, jarring, literally impossible. You might not understand what you're seeing, but you'll sure get a little bit weirded out watching it, you'll feel some alarms going off even so.

Turn around Renfield! Turn around!!!

 Bela Lugosi's performance here is pretty bizarre. He never goes for the obvious line read. He is slow, alternating between stiff and graceful. His intonations and stresses make no sense for any real person to say. Obviously it works!

Renfield turns around and his face is awful

Renfield is surprised by and afraid of everything he's just seen, but as soon as Dracula introduces himself, he calms right down. Why? Everything is still just as creepy! Don't calm down, Renfield! Stay suspicious!

He says he thought he had come to the wrong place. It should be obvious that this is still the wrong place, that nothing here is right. He mentions his bags, for the second time. He'll bring them up at least two more times, he really cares about those bags.

This is all the characterization pre-vamp Renfield gets. He's focused on business and his own property. He's concerned about his bags, but he's not concerned about the wild animals running amok, the creepy aura of his client, or the warnings of the Romanians.

Why is just hearing "I am Count Dracula" so reassuring to Renfield? Because the count is rich, and Renfield is here to do business. He's back in his element, as far as he knows, whatever else is going on.

Dracula: "I bid you -- welcome"

Let's say a bit about Dracula's outfit. It's super formal. It's probably a bit dated -- we don't see anybody else wearing a medallion like that, and his vest is cut a little differently from the other members of high society. But he's not dressed like a clown, nor an alien. He's dressed like somebody really rich, with great taste, wearing clothes he bought a decade ago. It's too bad everybody remembers Bela Lugosi's Dracula as a hammy and overdressed caricature, because here, he's real and believable.

Ok, we're over a thousand words and we're only 10 minutes into the movie, so I'll call it here for now and write more posts about the movie later. The big topics for the rest of the movie -- gender, insanity, and science. Catch you then.