Dracula 1931

The story, and where it came from

Renfield, an English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to settle a lease with Count Dracula. The villagers warn him off, and the Count, in his ruined castle, feeds on him and turns him into a servant. Dracula sails for England, takes a house next to a sanatorium, and sets about the doctor's daughter Mina and her friend Lucy. The Dutch scholar Van Helsing recognises what is going on, and the lovers Mina and John Harker have to survive him. The Count's end is a stake in the heart, with most of it kept off screen.

The film is not taken straight from Bram Stoker's novel of 1897. Its immediate source is the stage play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. Universal paid $40,000 for the rights, by the figure usually quoted. The biographer David J. Skal says what Stoker's widow Florence was really selling was the play. The novel had already been through the courts: she had sued the makers of Nosferatu (1922), who filmed it without asking, and a Berlin court ordered their negative and prints destroyed. Universal, unlike them, paid.

The Count and the camera

Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian actor, played the Count on Broadway in a production that ran for 261 performances before touring. For the film, by most accounts, Universal first wanted Lon Chaney, who died in 1930, and Conrad Veidt was also considered. Lugosi lobbied hard for the part and is reported to have accepted $500 a week for seven weeks, $3,500 in all.

Tod Browning was a silent-film veteran who had worked with Chaney, and he shares the producer's credit with Carl Laemmle Jr. His grip on the shoot is disputed. David Manners, who played Harker, is quoted by Skal as saying that Karl Freund "directed any scene that I was in", and Browning is described as sitting back in the shadows. Freund had photographed The Golem and Metropolis in Germany. The American Society of Cinematographers notes that the elaborate camera moves he was known for are largely absent from the English version, while its lighting picks out Lugosi's eyes. The sanatorium scenes are filmed plainly, in long takes, and are generally believed to have been hurried because the schedule had slipped.

There is almost no music. Over the titles plays an abridgement of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, and the opera house scene carries bits of Wagner and Schubert. Otherwise the film has no score, which was not unusual: early talkies often did without background music. Philip Glass wrote one in 1998.

The Spanish version, shot at night

Studios then made foreign-language versions of their pictures by reshooting them. Universal's Spanish Drácula was directed by George Melford, best known for The Sheik, who spoke no Spanish and worked through an interpreter. It used Browning's sets after the English crew had gone home, with Carlos Villarías as the Count and Lupita Tovar as Eva (Mina).

Critics have compared the two for decades. The longer Spanish version, over 100 minutes against about 75, is often praised for its more varied shots, its camera movement and its sets; Skal has called it the better film. The English film is credited with the stronger performances, above all from Lugosi, Dwight Frye as Renfield and Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing, and Villarías is widely seen as a pale copy of Lugosi. The Spanish film was largely forgotten until a print turned up in the 1970s and a complete one in Cuba. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2015.

The release, and the legends

The date usually given for the Roxy premiere is 12 February 1931, with a general release on the 14th. One account has the Roxy opening set for Friday 13 February and moved to Valentine's Day after Browning objected, saying he was "born superstitious". Sources differ on the exact day. The film is reported to have sold 50,000 tickets in 48 hours and to have earned a profit of about $700,000, by some accounts the largest of Universal's releases that year.

Newspapers said that people fainted in the cinema. That is true as a report and doubtful as evidence: Universal's publicity took the credit, and the story was too useful to check. Retellings add nurses in the lobby; that detail is told as a story, with no contemporary record to back it. What is solid is Lugosi's fate. He played Dracula once more on screen for Universal, as a parody, in 1948. Skal says he became so typecast that he could do almost nothing else. Lugosi himself called it an error to think he suited only horror films.

The success changed the studio. Universal went on to Frankenstein in November 1931, and after it came The Mummy (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). The English film entered the National Film Registry in 2000.

Copyright, trade marks and a face

Three things are easily mixed up. The first is the film. A work of 1931 published with notice and renewed has a US term of 95 years, which on Cornell Library's duration chart means it passes into the public domain on 1 January 2027, and press reports say the same of the Spanish version. Until then it is under copyright, so this page links only to where it can be streamed, rented or bought.

The second is Universal's trade marks, which a film leaving copyright does not touch. The third is the actor's likeness. In Lugosi v. Universal Pictures (1979) the California Supreme Court held that his rights of publicity did not pass to his heirs. California later changed the law, and his estate now licenses his name and image. That is a matter of personality rights, not of copyright, and this page draws no conclusions from it.

Why it matters

It gave the Count his voice and his cape. The accent, the stare and the dress are Lugosi's, from the stage, and they are what people mean by Dracula.

It started a studio line. The film was a hit, and Universal followed it with one monster after another.

It pays for what Nosferatu did not. Universal bought the rights and made the Count legal, and on 1 January 2027 the film itself is due to be free in the United States.