Friday's Old Fashioned: Dracula (1931)

“In hindsight, the horror genre may have been waiting for silence to end,” my main man David Thomson once wrote regarding the original 1931 “Dracula,” “it wasn't just the wind in the trees, the wolves howling in the distance, or the women screaming in their sleep, it was (Bela) Lugosi’s forbidding welcome, ‘I am Drac-u-la.’” Indeed, while Murnau’s silent “Nosferatu” (1922) might be the definitive Dracula movie despite not officially nor technically being a Dracula movie at all, in watching director Tod Browning’s 1931 talkie, or cinematographer Karl Freund’s 1931 talkie, there’s some debate on who was its true auteur, for the first time since whenever I watched it after reading Roger Ebert’s entry on it for his Great Movies series, what stood out to me most was the sound. Or more precisely, what stood out to me was, as what’s-their-names, Simon and Garfunkel, might have put it, the sounds of silence. 

Philip Glass recorded an after-the-fact musical score in 1988, but it’s hard to imagine. A musical score would take the piss outta the whole thing! Those early talkies can feel strange to a modern audience, all the dead air between sentences, but that dead air is effective in “Dracula,” seeming to hold the fear and the terror in the air that much longer, leaving you at the mercy of creaking coffin lids, and waiting for Lugosi to finish his sentence, already, the way you wait for some unnamed horror movie killer to just gut the person with the fish hook. “By regressing to an archaic, almost presentational style of filmmaking,” the indispensable classic movie blogger Nitrate Diva writes, “Dracula is no mere movie. It is a ritual, a summoning, almost a séance.” 

That’s true, I think, up to a point. “Dracula” was based on a play, remember, and the further it goes, the more those stage roots show as it turns overly talky and, in the process, leeches its own sense of terror, all while failing to truly bring home the potent idea of the undead finding release with a conclusion that is way too rushed. Still, when “Dracula” cooks, it cooks, like it does in the scene The Nitrate Diva discusses at length, the one on a foggy London Street in which Dracula pushes a frightened flower girl behind a pillar, presumably to drink her blood. It’s a simple shot, the camera never moves, and it doesn’t have to, the Transylvanian Count simply enters the frame and then removes the two of them from it, the primordial nature of the image mirroring the primordial nature of the moment, one that nearly a century later still made me shudder.