Nosferatu (1922) Director: F.W. Murnau Orlok: Max Schreck To sum up: F.W. Murnau illegally adapted Dracula, changing the names (Harker becomes Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), Mina becomes Ellen (Greta Schroeder), Dracula becomes Orlok) and location (1890s London becomes 1838 Wisborg, Germany) while adding an apocalyptic plague element missing entirely from the novel. This fooled nobody, […]
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Dracula 3000 (2004) Director: Darrell James Roodt Dracula: Langley Kirkwood A Warning to the Curious: This is the worst film I have watched for this project. By far. Compared to this movie, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula is Unforgiven. IMDB users have rated it the 37th worst film of all time. It is not “so bad […]
Dracula (1931) Director: Tod Browning Dracula: Bela Lugosi Is it possible for a film to be simultaneously iconic and bad? Not “iconic for being bad” but plain old iconic — establishing the rules for cinematic Draculas to respond to or rebel against for the next century. In the first act of Dracula, Browning (and cinematographer […]
Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary (2002) Director: Guy Maddin Dracula: Zhang Wei-Qiang This Guy Maddin film, originally intended for Canadian TV but given a theatrical release thanks to its rapturous critical reception, is simultaneously by far the most audacious and nearly the most textually faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel. Foregrounding the novel’s subtexts of immigration […]
Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966) Director: William Beaudine Dracula: John Carradine And now for something completely different. This perfunctory, sleepwalking movie should not be as terrible as it is. Indeed, the premise and even the plot are sound: Dracula is in the Old West, and a recently reformed Billy the Kid, jealous of the […]
Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) Director: Terence Fisher Dracula: Christopher Lee Oh Hammer how you vex us. The studio’s best director, Terence Fisher, takes on another story of good and evil, of God and Satan, of art and budgeting. Unable to afford both Lee and Cushing, Hammer recruited Andrew Keir (the future definitive Professor Quatermass) […]
Dracula 3D Director: Dario Argento Dracula: Thomas Kretschmann It may seem like special pleading that I give the universally-panned Argento Dracula a pass while kicking the box-office-smash Coppola Dracula in the fangs. The differences, however, are significant. First and foremost, of course, Argento subverts Coppola by having his Mina’s love for Dracula be the result […]
Dracula (2006) Director: Bill Eagles Dracula: Marc Warren When you give me a secret history behind the story of Dracula, it makes it very hard for me to hate on your movie’s flaws. This ITV-WGBH production casts Arthur Holmwood (!) as the prime mover of the action. Discovering the death sentence that is his congenital syphilis, […]
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Director: Francis Ford Coppola Dracula: Gary Oldman Whatever happened to Francis Ford Coppola? It beggars the imagination that the director who made five masterpieces in ten years (Patton, The Conversation, Godfather I and II, Apocalypse Now) also made this chemical fire of a film. Even the uneven Eighties Coppola was better than this, […]
Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968) Director: Freddie Francis Dracula: Christopher Lee A peculiar blend of apathy and attention makes this perhaps the most frustrating of the Hammer Draculas. Anthony Hinds (writing as “John Elder”) cares so little about the script that he doesn’t even bother to name Ewan Hooper’s weak Renfielded priest, and […]