Listen to them, the children of the night.
What music they make.
Hello. I'm Carla Laemmle.
When my uncle, Carl Laemmle...
founded Universal Pictures in 1915...
one of the first properties he considered for production...
as a silent film...
was Bram Stoker's horror classic Dracula.
Sixteen years later, when Universal finally produced the film...
I had the privilege of speaking the first lines of dialogue...
in the first talking, supernatural thriller.
"Among the rugged peaks that frown down upon the Borgo Pass...
are found crumbling castles of a bygone age."
It was a very small part...
but the fact that I still receive fan mail from all over the world...
is a wonderful testimonial...
to the film's status as an enduring classic.
Join me now as we return...
to the fog-shrouded Borgo Pass...
and take a ride together...
along the road to Dracula.
And just as I was commencing to get drowsy...
it seemed the whole room was filled with mist.
Then I saw two red eyes staring at me...
and a white, livid face came down out of the mist.
I felt his breath on my face.
And then his lips...
Why are we scared by something? Why are we aroused by something?
I'm talking about sexually aroused.
Because in the case of Dracula...
very often the two responses overlap.
Dead. I'm dead.
I don't care. They all frighten me.
- I love to be frightened. - Do you?
Laugh all you like.
I think he's fascinating.
Who wouldn't wanna be like Dracula?
You live forever and don't work, you stay up all night.
Dracula is quite simply the most media-friendly...
fictional personality of the 20th century, if not all time.
People who never read the book...
or saw the movie...
still know exactly who he is.
I am Dracula.
Count Dracula.
Dracula? What's he done to you?
Dracula is our vampire.
I never even heard the name before.
Today, thanks to Universal Studios...
everyone knows the name of Dracula.
Although at first, my uncle, Carl Laemmle...
had serious reservations about horror movies.
Universal eventually filmed Bram Stoker's classic three times.
First, in Tod Browning's famous 1931 film...
starring Bela Lugosi.
Next was the simultaneously produced Spanish-language version...
starring Lupita Tovar and Carlos Villarias.
Some people feel that this was the superior version...
from a technical standpoint.
But you'll have to be the judge.
And then came the romantic 1979 remake with Frank Langella.
I can't imagine how my uncle, a very proper man...
would've reacted to such a sexy Dracula.
But speaking for myself, I would've given anything...
for a "bit" part in that production.
The story of Dracula didn't begin at Universal City.
As a fictional character...
Dracula is more than a hundred years old.
First published in 1897...
Bram Stoker's original novel has been frightening readers ever since.
His centennial was recently celebrated in high style...
at events, exhibitions and conventions...
all over the world.
But perhaps the most revealing exhibition took place...
at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia...
where novelist Bram Stoker's original working notes for Dracula...
were placed on public display for the first time.
What we have here are Stoker's working notes for Dracula.
His earliest notes concern certain elements of plot.
There are particular scenes in the novel...
that Stoker had imagined at its earliest stages...
that survive all the way to the end.
A scene where Jonathan Harker, trapped in Dracula's castle...
is preyed upon by three female vampires...
who are then interrupted by Count Dracula...
barging into the room saying, "This man is mine. I want him."
This was one of Stoker's earliest ideas for Dracula.
Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania...
but he was very well acquainted with the picturesque town of Whitby...
on the North Yorkshire coast...
where a good deal of his novel takes place.
Stoker often vacationed there...
and was most impressed with its ancient, windblown cemetery...
and crumbling gothic abbey.
Whitby is certainly a wonderful place for atmosphere.
It would lend itself to his cinematic treatment...
if we could imagine Stoker thinking of that.
Whitby as a popular port...
and as a shipping port...
had its number of shipwrecks.
Stoker must've been fascinated with the idea...
of having a shipwreck in Dracula.
So he used the shipwreck of a Russian schooner...
called Dimitri as a model for Dracula's arrival...
onto the English coast.
It was in Whitby that Stoker first came across the name of Dracula.
He discovered there was this 15th-century Transylvanian prince...
whose name was Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler...
due to a method of disposing of his enemies...
of which he was particularly fond.
If you can see behind me, this is from a...
a late 15th-century woodcut...
showing Vlad at lunch with some of his victims behind him.
Stoker was the first to take the legend of Vlad the Impaler...
or Vlad Dracula, and attach it to the vampire.
They haven't really come apart since.
The historical Dracula didn't inspire Stoker to write the book.
There's some confusion about this. He'd already outlined the novel...
when he came across the account of Vlad the Impaler...
and simply used it as a window dressing or atmosphere.
Stoker's novel unfolds through letters, diaries and journals.
Count Dracula, a 500-year-old vampire...
leaves his castle in Transylvania...
in search of new blood in a new country.
Carrying the boxes of native soil...
in which he must rest during the hours of daylight...
Dracula kills the entire crew of the ship...
that transports him to England.
Two young women, Lucy and Mina...
become his victims in turn.
Dracula kills Lucy, transforming her...
into a foul thing of the night...
an undead creature like himself.
Soon, Mina falls under Dracula's spell...
and is terribly endangered.
But thanks to a scientist wise enough...
to believe in the supernatural...
the vampire is finally destroyed...
and Mina is released from her thrall.
Stoker drew on an already established tradition...
of the vampire in literature and folklore...
but did it in such a way that the legend achieved a critical mass.
Unlike the earlier fictional vampires...
Stoker's Dracula was not a romantic character.
He was a decrepit old man who became younger as he drank blood...
but never really became attractive.
He was writing...
of blood and thunder.
A piece of what we would now call sort of exploitation.
It's a first-rate, 19th-century trashy novel.
Above everything, Bram Stoker...
wanted his story dramatized.
He may have been a bit of a frustrated playwright.
Stoker's real career was managing...
London's prestigious Lyceum Theatre.
And he knew exactly who he wanted to play Dracula on stage...
his employer, the great Victorian actor...
Sir Henry Irving.
Henry Irving has a lot to do with the character of Dracula.
A lot of the characters Irving was most famous for playing...
could be considered to be Dracula-like characters.
Roles like Mephistopheles in Faust...
or Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
These were Irving's greatest roles, the ones he was most popular in.
Psychologically complex villains.
Irving would've been perfect for the part.
After all, he already was a boss from hell.
Irving really was a vampire.
He really was a kind of horrible person...
who fed on the energy of others.
They did an interminably long reading of the novel...
at the Lyceum for purposes of copyright.
And Irving was reputed to have walked through the theater...
and intoned "dreadful" and walked out.
And that was stupid of him.
It would've been a very good part...
and he should've done it.
Now, Dracula's more famous than he is.
Bram Stoker died in 1912...
and never saw his story properly dramatized.
But nine years later, the character of Dracula...
made his first screen appearance in a now lost Hungarian film...
called Dracula's Death.
The plot owed almost nothing to Stoker or his book.
But I guess Dracula's movie career had to start somewhere.
In the story, Dracula plays a music teacher...
who has gone crazy and is after some of the patients in the asylum.
So the story plays more like Phantom of the Opera than Dracula.
However, there is this idea...
of a monster loose with fangs and a cape.
The following year, German filmmakers...
got on the Dracula bandwagon with Nosferatu:
A Symphony of Horror.
It remains one of the most frightening movies ever made.
A classic example of German expressionism.
It's so frightening.
For one thing, Dracula is so evil.
He's disgusting, and he's a plague spreader.
He looks like a rat.
There's nothing suave about him.
The Dracula character was called Count Orlok...
and was played by a German stage actor named Max Schreck...
whose name, by happy coincidence...
means "terror" or "fright" in German.
It was his real name, not just a publicity stunt for the film.
He remains to this day the single screen Dracula...
who really embodies the essential repulsiveness...
that Stoker intended.
In the early part of the century...
the laws of copyright were not well understood...
especially with filmmaking.
Prana Films, the very small studio that made Nosferatu...
did not bother nor know to get a copyright from Stoker's widow.
Murnau used the novel without clearing the rights...
and eventually got involved in a big lawsuit...
and the film literally had to be pulled from the market.
With two movies already to his credit...
Dracula decided to give the theater another try.
In 1924, the British actor/ manager Hamilton Deane...
added the first authorized dramatization of Dracula...
to his popular travelling repertory.
Film historian and former actor Ivan Butler...
was a member of Deane's company.
He had to cut it down...
for expense, for one thing.
And it's such a vast, rambling novel.
It's a sort of skeleton of the original.
It was Hamilton Deane who really created the modern image of Dracula.
He took his inspiration not from Irving's Shakespearean villains...
but from a much lower end of the theater.
Essentially, his Dracula is a kind of vaudeville...
or music hall magician.
The suave trickster in evening clothes...
who knows how to work a crowd.
Well, they came to London, of course...
and those dreadful notices they had, we all know.
They were very depressed. Somebody came up to him and said...
"What are you worrying about? Have you looked outside?"
They were halfway around the block, queuing for it.
Several actors performed the role of Dracula for Deane...
including Raymond Huntley...
who played the part thousands of times...
in England and America...
and still holds the all-time record...
for sheer number of performances.
Ivan Butler worked with a noted actor...
W.E. Halloway.
He was an older man.
Very, very gaunt looking.
Very deep-set eyes and everything...
and a good voice.
It seemed to work better...
more like the real Dracula, in a way.
He always seemed to me to have something...
that the young ones lacked.
There was no sort of sex attraction...
in those days.
Dracula came for one thing only... his evening drink.
You had the bat coming in through the French windows...
at the end of the second act.
The assistant stage manager was standing on a stool...
with a fishing rod...
and about two foot of bat.
He was floating it around outside like that.
It banged into the window.
Smoke came and everything.
Then Dracula appeared out of the mist.
One day, I don't know why, but the string...
attached to the fishing rod broke.
The bat sailed right through the window...
right across the stage, floated down...
and landed in the floats, the two green eyes on the outside.
And then, of course, Dracula himself had to appear.
Must have been difficult to explain.
Possibly bewildered the audience. Are there two bats or two Draculas?
The stage production was corny, but it was a crowd pleaser...
and it was full of startling special effects...
and loud noises, flash bombs and swirling fog...
and a trick coffin for Dracula...
that was essentially a magician's disappearing cabinet.
Dracula got in.
There was a false bottom under the boards...
where he would pull a string and the boards would open.
Dracula would fall down into the base of the coffin...
and the false earth would all fly out into smoke like that.
It would look as if he disappeared into dust.
Given Dracula's success in London...
it was only a matter of time before Broadway beckoned.
The producer, Horace Liveright, wanted changes...
and hired the playwright journalist John L. Balderston...
to improve the product.
One day Horace Liveright, who was a New York producer...
was taken to see Dracula.
But he was concerned...
over the Britishness of the language...
and a lot of idiomatic stuff nobody in New York would understand.
So we asked my father if he would rewrite it.
In the 1920s, the only kind of vampires...
American audiences knew about...
were vamps like Theda Bara.
For the Broadway version of Dracula...
Horace Liveright wanted a male vamp...
an exotic foreigner with an air of mystery and sex appeal.
The budget was pretty tight.
They had cast all the parts except for the count...
and they were out of money.
So they couldn't hire a name actor to do the count.
Liveright found exactly what he was looking for...
in an expatriate Hungarian actor...
named Bela Lugosi.
Bela Lugosi was an expatriate from Hungary...
who was escaping all kinds of political unrest...
in his native land, and actually landed in New Orleans.
Without any skills in English at all...
made his way to New York...
learning many of his early parts phonetically, amazingly.
So when they were casting for the perfect person to play Dracula...
Lugosi managed to have both the old-world charm...
and a certain mysterious, seductive quality.
He had that thick accent. He had the eyes.
He had a series of gestures which to us now look rather hokey.
But women fainted...
and grown men grew nervous.
My father's performance in Dracula...
brought him to the attention of, in particular...
the female portion of the audience.
They loved his performance.
They must've found something of a sexual overtone in it.
He became an idol.
The very night Dracula opened on Broadway...
Universal had a representative in the audience.
As I mentioned earlier, Carl Laemmle...
wasn't a big fan of horror pictures...
even though Universal had made a fortune on films...
like Lon Chaney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame...
and The Phantom of the Opera.
It was my cousin, Carl Laemmle Jr...
who really wanted to produce Dracula.
Like me, he had grown up with the opportunity...
to actually watch Lon Chaney filming his famous horror roles...
for Universal.
He loved creepy stories and everything macabre.
Lon Chaney was his first choice to play Dracula.
I have no idea what Chaney would've done if he played Dracula.
I'm sure he would've done...
I'm sure Chaney would've had much more elaborate makeup.
He was into the makeup aspect of it.
He was The Man of 1000 Faces. He was always changing his look.
I don't think he would've gone with the light makeup...
with the dark lips.
In the case of London After Midnight...
he did all these pointy teeth...
and this permanent grin and these pulled-down eyelids...
which, I think, is a classic makeup.
I have no clue. I would love to see...
what Chaney's version of Dracula would've been.
Chaney died of cancer in 1930.
A number of other actors were considered other than Lugosi.
My father, to his great surprise...
was not the first choice...
when Universal Studios began casting for the lead...
in the motion picture version of Dracula...
even though my father had successfully played the part...
hundreds of times on Broadway and throughout the United States.
Actually, he had to fight for the role.
Next to Bela Lugosi, the film's most memorable performer...
was Dwight Frye as the unfortunate Mr. Renfield.
He was such a gentleman when I fell into his lap...
in the opening scene.
You'd never dream he'd end up eating spiders...
and developing an appetite for even worse.
Rats. Rats!
Thousands!
Millions of them!
I don't really think he was surprised...
by the roles he began to play when he got to Hollywood...
because he'd had such a variety of roles...
in New York on Broadway...
from comedies to musicals...
to serious drama...
to crooks and all kinds of characters.
By the time he was 30...
he was an experienced character actor.
Renfield was probably the most multi-faceted character in the film.
He's sane at times, he's mad at times...
he's vampirish at times.
Also on hand from the Broadway production...
was Edward Van Sloan...
repeating the role of Professor Van Helsing.
Here's part of his screen test.
I was looking in the mirror.
Its reflection covers the whole room.
But I cannot see you!
Dracula was directed by Tod Browning...
the famous mystery man of silent movies...
who had directed many of Lon Chaney's most successful films.
Browning always had some trouble...
adapting his style of shooting to a sound film.
When you see Browning work with Dracula, for example...
there are long sequences in the film which are silent.
I think that Browning uses some of the silence...
to create a mood...
which in some areas of Dracula is quite effective.
It may have been he was frightened by dealing with dialogue.
It may have been he was frightened by the mechanics...
of the sound equipment.
Tod Browning had been a very successful silent film director.
He always specialized in stories about outsiders.
Dracula is very much like that.
He's a fantastic alien invader who cannot live within the world...
but can only prey upon it, like a parasite.
And Dracula may be the ultimate Tod Browning outsider.
So it's not surprising Dracula was Browning's most successful film.
In terms of responsibility for a visual style of Dracula...
we know the cameraman, Karl Freund, was behind the camera...
the great German photographer who pioneered...
so much moving camera in Germany in the late '20s.
It's very easy for people to say any value in Dracula...
is due to Freund, who is a great cameraman.
There's the anecdotal report of one of the actors, David Manners...
who couldn't remember Browning's presence on the set well...
but did recall Freund as being very outspoken.
The beginning of Dracula uses a lot of mobile camera setups.
We have some tracking shots.
We have a feeling that we're almost watching...
a German expressionist film that has come over to Hollywood.
These tracking shots give us a feeling...
like we're being pushed against our will...
to go to different areas of the castle.
There are things like...
broken-down, withered mansions with huge cobwebs...
and, for some reason, armadillos running around...
and bats floating overhead.
In fact, Browning and the Universal Dracula...
are sort of responsible for almost all the iconography...
that we associate with horror films.
Long capes, sweeping staircases...
mold and decay, lots of cobwebs, spiders and bats.
Everything that has now become the Saturday morning thing...
that kids associate with horror films all comes from Dracula.
Originally, Dracula had been planned as a lavish, big-budget production...
that would've been based primarily on Stoker's novel.
But in the wake of the stock market crash...
and the onset of the Great Depression...
the studio really had to cut back.
They ended up basing the film...
largely on the stage play for simple reasons of economy.
Today it may seem difficult to imagine audiences...
really being frightened by a film like Dracula.
But they really were.
It was the first time Hollywood had presented...
this kind of a supernatural story...
that didn't have a logical explanation tacked on at the end.
And audiences were really creeped out...
by this atmosphere of weird decadence.
They'd never seen anything like it.
Among other things, there were a lot of theaters...
in different parts of the world that were still not equipped...
with sound equipment for the audiences to hear the movie.
And as a result, sound films like Dracula were released...
in silent versions so that those theaters not equipped...
with sound equipment could actually see the film.
That was another way of getting over language barriers...
in the early talking era.
The adoption of English-speaking talkies...
posed a real problem for the Latin American markets...
which wanted to hear talking films spoken in their own language.
Dubbing was still not an efficient and known commodity.
Those studios that had the biggest interest in that market...
turned to doing secondary productions...
of their major films in Spanish versions for that market.
Dracula was one of these pictures.
The Spanish version of Dracula, directed by George Melford...
was produced by Paul Kohner...
an ambitious young protégé of my uncle.
His overall enthusiasm for the film...
may have had something to do with his feelings...
for his leading lady, the beautiful Mexican ingenue...
Lupita Tovar.
The cast for the English version...
would come in the morning.
Started shooting at 8:00.
And the Spanish cast would come in the evening.
We shot all night long till next morning...
because we used exactly the same sets.
Apparently, what happened was...
the initial crew, Browning's crew, would shoot these sequences.
The second crew, the Spanish crew, would look at them...
and say to themselves, "We can do better than that."
And they would go and they would do better.
Something so incredible...
I mistrust my own judgement.
I don't think anybody's going to give any acting awards...
to Carlos Villarias.
But overall, the Spanish film is a real delight for film buffs.
It's kind of like discovering fascinating, new rooms...
in a familiar old house.
And it's full of these wonderful optical effects and visuals...
that really seem ahead of their time.
What we do see in the Spanish version...
is, among other things, a much more artistic...
and much more innovative use of camera movement...
in those early talkies, and that's not what we get...
in the Lugosi version at all.
The camera movements are far more fluid, there's far more of them.
It's a more lively film to watch unfold before your eyes...
than the Lugosi film.
One only wishes that Lugosi had been directed in like fashion...
as the Spanish version.
Dracula did sensational box office.
The result, in part, of Universal's...
atmospheric and imaginative promotion.
One of the most inventive designs...
of posters was Lugosi...
arms upraised, clawing at the air...
behind a spider web in which various heads...
of his female victims were ensnared...
in the strands of the web like some sort of bizarre insects.
So you have a whole bunch of different poster designs...
that sought to emphasize both the mystery...
and the underlying sexual content of this film.
It was a very unique film in that sense.
Children are another category that found strong interest in Dracula.
There was even a group of sociologists that studied...
movie responses to the various films of the early '30s.
And often, children would mention among their favorite movies...
ones they liked to act out at home was Dracula.
I remember early on being taken to other movies that he had made...
with some of my friends and classmates and whatnot.
They would always be frightened and hide behind the seats.
I would never be frightened, because that was my father.
That's who I'd see.
I remember when I was very young, I would try to imitate...
my father as Dracula, and I have some home movies that show that.
So he showed me how he did it.
Certainly, more than any other performer...
Bela Lugosi showed the world for all time...
how a vampire was supposed to look, how a vampire was supposed to act...
and how a vampire was supposed to talk.
I have chartered a ship...
to take us to England.
We will be leaving...
tomorrow evening.
I don't think Lugosi's face was as fascinating as Karloff's.
In fact, I think Karloff would've made a good Dracula as well.
But that whole Hungarian accent...
and the way that he spoke...
and the weird rhythm of his speech and everything...
I think is what people remember about Dracula.
He felt very strongly that...
in Dracula he had created a character...
that was quite different and far more powerful...
than the way he's described in Bram Stoker's novel.
And thereafter...
he would always be regarded as the Dracula...
and Dracula and Bela Lugosi would become synonymous.
Lugosi had a magic all his own.
He was the kind of man...
who when he walked into a room, even if it was a crowded room...
and nobody knew who he was, everybody would look and stare...
and turn around and say, "Well, who is that?"
He had that kind of a personality.
Especially in the horror film...
where characters can be so larger than life...
Lugosi probably seems to be about the darkest personality...
the larger-than-life personality beyond any others...
I know of in the horror film, possibly in the cinema at large.
Many fine actors have played Dracula in recent years...
and almost all of them play against the Lugosi characterization.
But paradoxically and I guess inevitably...
they end up only bringing Lugosi to mind.
Because somehow, we can't help but make that comparison in our minds.
Because of the success of the motion picture Dracula...
he became so associated with that part...
that a lot of people regard him as Dracula...
even though Dracula is a fictional person.
It changed his life.
He was pretty much typecast after that.
And when interviewed, he would say that...
Dracula is a blessing and a curse, and Dracula never dies.
And really, that's what happened. He carried that role to his death.
And I think going back and seeing these films...
is like a mini-time capsule.
It's also that way with collectors. We grew up loving these films.
We weren't there on the set in 1931...
but we want to be there so very much...
that we watch these films over and over.
We wish to own a prop from them, or perhaps own a poster from them.
If there is a holy grail of Dracula collectibles...
the Transylvanian Shroud of Turin...
it would have to be Bela Lugosi's original Dracula cape.
My father had several different capes.
Some were heavier material, some were lighter...
depending upon where he was going to use it.
I had one cape left...
and my mother told me this was the cape that he had worn...
in the motion picture Dracula.
I've had it independently verified that it's from the film.
So it is one of America's rarest pieces of film history.
I really treasure it.
My mother and myself had him buried in one of his capes.
Not that he'd ever expressed that wish, but we thought it would be appropriate.
Most modern audiences have seen Dracula...
but it's certainly not the Universal version with Lugosi.
That's the image we carry of Dracula, of vampires.
It's Universal's Dracula. It's Bela Lugosi.
Dracula's become one of the great media superstars of all time.
There's a line from Macbeth, a play Stoker was very familiar with.
"And yet, who would've thought the old man...
to have had so much blood in him?"
When Dracula was first released...
it was accompanied by a final curtain speech...
read by the character of Professor Van Helsing.
If memory serves, the good professor held up his hand and said...
"Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen.
Just a word before you go.
We hope the memories of Dracula...
won't give you bad dreams.
So just a word of reassurance.
When you get home tonight and the lights are turned out...
and you're afraid to look behind the curtains...
and you dread to see a face appear at the window...
well, just pull yourself together...
and remember, after all..."
"There are such things."
There are such things.
There are such things.
I am... Dracula.
A moment ago I stumbled upon a most amazing phenomenon.
Something so incredible I mistrust my own judgement.
Look.
Dracula. The very mention of the name
brings to mind things so evil, so fantastic, so degrading
you wonder if it isn' all a dream, a nightmare.
Rats... Rats... Rats!
Thousands, millions of them!
But no, this is no dream.
This is Dracula,
the original, terrifying story of a maniac, and a man who lived after death -
lived on human blood, took the form of a vampire bat
and lured innocent girls to a fate truly worse than death!
Dracula?
Oh, what's he done to you, dear? Tell me.
He came to me.
He opened a vein in his arm... and he made me drink.
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