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The Horror of Dracula, 1959. Directed by Terence
Fisher. Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling.
In its own quiet way, this much despised first vampire movie from the Hammer Studios is a watermark and touchstone of the genre. Although their earlier effort, The Curse of Frankenstein, was very successful, it was this movie which put the studio on the map and began making changes in the genre wholesale. This must have been a shock to the audience of the day. Although the stock in trade of the Hammer Horrors was a staunch, upright (uptight?) moral rectitude, they were in the habit of arriving at it from the back end, by demonstrating in lurid detail the fate of those who transgress (they took great delight in outlining those transgressions and in filming the consequences). The formula was already in place in the first movie. The Monster is first encountered by our vampire hunters (Jonathan Harker here does not survive his first encounter with Dracula and his solitary bride) and sends our heroes scrambling in disarray, a secondary female character is corrupted and transformed into a vampire wanton to tempt and seduce our heroes, The Savant (here Peter Cushing as Van Helsing) outlines the means by which The Monster is to be destroyed by demonstrating his methods on the seduced female, a second female character is corrupted by The Monster inciting The Hero (here Michael Gough as Arthur Holmwood) to bold action to defeat The Monster and redeem his lady. This outlines not only the plot of this first movie in the cycle, but almost without variation it outlines all of them. A couple of things are immediately obvious from this. The first is that Hammer's vampire movies are deeply misogynist; women are never able to resist the vampire's advances, even when the vampire in question is female--but men are made of sterner moral fiber. The second thing is that Hammer played faster and looser with the source material than their trans-Atlantic cousins in Hollywood. Dracula, so far as I know, has never been filmed as a reader will find it in Stoker's novel. The third thing is that these movies are awfully cavalier about how many characters they throw into the meat-grinder. Harker, the hero of the book, is casually discarded without being given the chance to become a hero. This is particularly dumb since the movie is set up to be told from his point of view in the entire, but throws this opportunity away, too, and turns it into a clumsy plot device. There are, however, formal particulars here independent of the sub-genre's instantly accumulated detritus. Terence Fisher films this with an eye for menace and atmosphere that is more pervasive than in any of the subsequent sequels and rip-offs and he immediately sets the style not just for the Hammer gothics, but for all of the gothics of the sixties and early seventies. He introduces a richly colored savagery to the horror movie which was not there before and he prefigures the violent direction soon to be taken by cinema of all stripes. Peter Cushing is impeccable as Van Helsing, radiating an Old World charm, a confidence in his rightness, and a genuine concern that good will out. But this is Christopher Lee's movie. Lee is a towering figure as The Count, urbane yet feral, a cultured savage--more physically imposing than any other actor in the role and seemingly possessed by an intractable malevolence. His Dracula is a Monster to be reckoned with and even if no other element in any Dracula movie ever made hews closely to Stoker's novel, make no mistake, Lee's Dracula is Stoker's Dracula. |