The Top 5 Dracula Movies You Need To See Before You’re Undead

It’s always intriguing to consider how the great-grandfather of vampire movies very nearly became a “lost” film. When innovative German genius F.W. Murnau set to concocting a film he subtitled “a symphony of horrors,” he and scenarist Henrik Galeen lifted major story elements from Stoker’s novel while changing the names of the characters. They acknowledged their debt in the credits, but as they hadn’t actually cleared their rights, Stoker’s estate (the author had died in 1912) sued. And won. The movie was ordered destroyed, but several prints were not, and it is on the basis of these copies that we still have this remarkable movie, now almost 100 years old.

Despite the usual complaints latter-day fake film appreciators make against silent cinema — it’s stodgy, it’s silent, it’s old — Nosferatu remains a bracing, startling film. Count Orloff, the vampire played by Max Schreck, has a grotesque, otherworldly look that remains iconic. His introduction, via negative imagery and fast-motion photography that looks rather like stop-motion, remains unique and cunning. The interpolation of German romanticism over Stoker’s puritanical Catholic bent is utterly compelling. The ghost ship sequence, with the undead vampire stalking the prow of the vessel, the beach strewn with crosses; this imagery and more supplied a lexicon of horror from which filmmakers still draw today.

Where to stream Nosferatu

It’s probably an at least slightly inaccurate generalization to say that at the end of the 1930s the horror pictures produced by Universal Pictures were moving from A to B productions. But as director James Whale pivoted from genre (he helmed the first two Frankenstein films, The Invisible Man, and the indelible The Old Dark House in the 30s) and Dracula director Tod Browning got scooped up by MGM, distinctive directors for lower-budgeted horror projects became a non-priority for the House of Laemmle. This nifty Dracula entry, coming almost a decade after Dracula’s Daughter, was felicitous in that it put Robert Siodmak, a German compatriot of Billy Wilder’s who had a genuinely surrealist sensibility, behind the camera.

Yes, the scenario is silly. Dracula comes to the New World — miasma-heavy New Orleans, to be precise —under the alias of “Count Alucard.” Which of course is “Dracula” backwards. Which definitely blew my mind when I was eight, I gotta say. Said Alucard is played by Lon Chaney Jr., a bit more of a lumbering figure than Bela Lugosi. The bat effects aren’t great. Etc. For all that, Siodmak brings a lot of what the captions in EC comics called “fetid” atmosphere to the proceedings. And he works an amour fou thread between Alucard and chief victim Louise Allbritton with genuine conviction, riding it out to a genuinely bleak ending. And lumbering or not, when Chaney is made to float toward his prey, you see one source of inspiration for a kind of shot pioneered by Spike Lee and Ernest Dickerson decades later.

Where to stream Son of Dracula

British Hammer studio’s flagship foray into bloodsucking, sometimes referred to as simply Dracula, announces its lurid intentions right off the bat (get it?) with a shot of blood being splashed on a coffin, for no good reason except to show you this is a color film and that it’s going to have blood in it. Way to go.

In his first time out as Dracula, a role he was to have a rather contentious relationship with, Christopher Lee initially approaches Jonathan Harker (here a stealth vampire hunter rather than mere real-estate agent) with the stiff-walking efficiency of a bureaucrat. A very buxom captive woman played by Valerie Gaunt (aside from blood, the Hammer horrors were fascinated by plunging necklines, and in the ‘70s the necklines tended to disappear after plunging) first pleads for her life, then sinks her teeth in Harker’s neck. She’s interrupted by Lee who’s now in terrifyingly feral vampire mode. An outstanding performance in a film of ruthless dispatch. Stalwart Peter Cushing plays vampire-hunter-in-charge Van Helsing, and co-commands one of the great OVERDONE death scenes in a Dracula movie. Bloodshot eyes! Screaming! Hands turning to ash. Crazed stuff.

Where to stream Horror of Dracula

Belgian director Kumel gets a lot of mileage out of a near-deserted grand hotel looking out on the sea in this determinedly artful tale of polyamory vampirism. Drawing from the legend of Hungarian countess Bathory, and from J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Coleridge, the movie also trucks in 20th century iconography, styling its two initial female vampires after Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks. The frequently empty corridors through which not-quite-honeymooning couple Stefan and Valerie are stalked by a vampire countess recall Resnais’ unstuck-in-time Last Year at Marienbad. Not for nothing is that vampire countess played by Delphine Seyrig, who was the female lead in Resnais’ movie.

The critic Geoffrey O’Brien comments on the tensions in this sparsely populated film as suggesting a vampire movie directed by Fassbinder. But never mind the art — how does this work as a horror movie? Quite well actually. It’s a slow burn for sure, a lot of prowling camera and such. The perverse characterizations add to an all-important “atmosphere of perdition,” in critic Robert Benayoun’s phrase, and once the blood starts to flow, the movie revs into a gear that’s genuinely terrifying. Inspirational dialogue from Seyrig’s character: “Are you out of your mind?…You are out of your mind.”

Where to stream Daughters of Darkness

From the cheesy narration setting up a jump from the 19th to the 20th century to the horn-driven opening credits music, there’s a real sense of trying-too-hard at work here. The concept is implied by the title and is hardly a bad one — resurrect the Count in present-day Swinging London and set him at some inverted flower children. It’s just that the execution is a little square, as they used to say.

After the prologue we kick things off in the present day at a house party where the entertainment is U.S. band Stoneground (whose members would later splinter into the likes of Pablo Cruise and Jefferson Starship). They are permitted by the filmmakers to perform their atrocious “Alligator Man” in its entirety while dancing hippies behave rudely at a prim estate. After this vandalization, hippie layabout clique leader Johnny Alucard (I know, I know) proposes “Something new…yet as old as time” in his lust for kicks: “A date with the devil.” It’s all a scheme to raise Johnny’s uncle Drac, played again by Christopher Lee, who’s mostly silent (long story, part of his odd relationship not just to the role but to Hammer pictures). Fortunately for the forces of good, vivacious Stephanie Beacham is the granddaughter of Cushing’s Van Helsing.

This outing isn’t as orgiastic as the changing times might lead you to hope/expect, particularly if you’re conversant with Beacham’s performance in The Nightcomers. But. The movie’s got a number of assets pushing the parental guidance envelope, including Caroline Munro in a satanic rite of blood-covered cleavage. Marsha Hunt, soul singer (she could put Stoneground under the table) and bride of Soft Machine keyboardist Mike Ratledge also appears to intriguing measure. For the benefit of sentimentalists, this is Cushing and Lee’s first outing together in a Dracula film after 14 years.

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Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to stream Dracula A.D. 1972