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Bram Stoker's Dracula has proven to be one of the most durable literary properties in film. It has provided the cinema with many unforgettable images, from the shadow of Max Shreck's hideous vampire in Nosferatu to Christopher Lee's grotesque disintegration at the conclusion of Horror of Dracula. The lion's share of the imagery we associate with vampire cinema comes from Tod Browning's 1931 adaptation. I mean, there's a breakfast cereal based on the iconography of Dracula, fer Pete's sake!

On the eve of the re-release of the Universal Horror movies on DVD, composer Phillip Glass and the Kronos Quartet have added something that Browning's version of Dracula never had before: a full score. Purists are furious, I would guess--this is only a little different than adding color to a black and white movie. Browning COULD have scored the movie had he so desired. He added a few effective snatches from Swan Lake over the title card and left the rest without music. It wasn't the only horror movie to do without a musical score--James Whale did much the same thing with Frankenstein. Well, the purists are wrong and Browning was wrong (although Whale was right). Dracula needs a score.

The first third of Dracula is unforgettable. Dracula's solicitor comes to Transylvania to deliver into Count Dracula's hands the deed to Carfax Abbey in London. The locals try to persuade him otherwise, but Mr. Renfield is resolved. He meets Dracula's coach at Borgo pass at midnight on Walpurgis Nacht. In the meantime, Dracula and his three brides have roused themselves from deathless slumber. Dracula's coach brings Renfield to Castle Dracula, a crumbling ruin overgrown with cobwebs and crawling with vermin. There, Count Dracula introduces himself. "I am...Dracula," he says in Bela Lugosi's thick Hungarian voice. They have dinner together, during which the Count proclaims, "I never drink--wine," and pauses to listen to the howling of wolves: "Listen to them! Children of the Night. What beautiful music they make!" After the dinner and after their business is transacted, Dracula's brides fall on Renfield, only to be scattered by their master. This prelude is followed by a haunting transition to London aboard the ill-fated Hestia. When it arrives, everyone aboard is dead. The captain has been lashed to the wheel, his throat cut. The only survivor is Mr. Renfield, now hopelessly insane. By now, Dracula has entered into the canon of great horror movies after only twenty minutes. The first act of Dracula provides a smorgasbord of great lines and great images. Lugosi infuses the Count with all the sinister screen presence anyone could ever want. Karl Freund's cinematography creates an otherworldly ambience that seems to be drawn from the darkest European fairy tales.

At this point, however, the movie begins to go disastrously wrong. The menace of the film's first act is dissapated in the second as the movie becomes a drawing room melodrama in which the screenplay's origins in the theater becomes manifest. Dracula is a talky movie. In one scene, for instance, one of the attendants at Dr. Seward's asylum looks out a window and declares: "Look at that wolf running across the lawn!" Browning omits a shot of the wolf. Dracula's unholy communion with Mina happens offscreen, too, despite being one of the most vivid passages in the book. Even Karl Freund's interest in the movie seems to be on the wane, as the sets are well lit and the mise-en-scene is functional at best. And in the third act of the movie, one of the screen's great monsters is given an ignominious death--off-screen, no less--as Van Helsing warns the audience that there are such things.

The new score by Glass and Kronos helps things a bit. It underscores the menace of the film's first act and adds much needed tension to the second and third. But even this can't rescue the film from the tailspin in which it finds itself.

I have this suspicion that the reason that Dracula has been so durable in the movies is because no one has figured out how to do it yet. Oh, the Hammer people made a conditional success, as did Murnau, but neither Horror of Dracula or Nosferatu adapt Stoker's book with any kind of fidelity. Quite the opposite, actually. And yet, a hundred years after it was written, filmmakers still find occasion to assault the citadel of Dracula, only to be repulsed yet again....