Year Of The Vampire: All Bloodsuckers Bow Before Bela Lugosi’s Dracula – /Film

"Dracula" brought the genre to itself, or at least brought it stateside to theHollywood studio system.While he may not be the father of all film vampires (that would beCount Orlok, who died in the morning sun in Germany), Lugosi's version of Dracula popularized them like never before.A common rule of vampire movies, including this one,is that killing the head vamp will either free the people they've turned orwipe out every other bloodsucker. If this "Dracula" didn't exist, the same mass extinction of vampires might occur within film history.

Browning's film and Lugosi's performance codified the image of Count Dracula in a black cape, with slicked-back hair and a penchant for heavy pauses and vampire vords, stemming from the actor's real-life Hungarian accent. This image has long since passed into the realm of caricature, but only because Lugosi was there at the start and left such an indelible bite mark with it.

Even Mina mimics and mocks the Count's accent right alongside his first appearance, quoting him and saying, "It reminds me of the broken battlements of my own castle in Transylvania." Yet this only lays bare the xenophobic side of the Dracula legend, which is predicated on the idea of a foreigner whohoards gold and moves along the wall like a lizard suddenly making his way to civilized London.

Back in Transylvania, the Count's castle is indeed crumbling and there are creatures and cobwebs everywhere. Even armadillos come crawling out of the woodwork. Yet in contrast to Orlok's animalistic qualities, Count Dracula himself carries a suave, aristocratic bearing, in keeping with the figure of Lord Ruthven from the first published vampire story, John William Polidori's 1819 tale, "The Vampyre."

As Mina giggles about Dracula's accent, her friend Lucy Weston (Francis Dade) tells her, "Laugh all you like. I think he's fascinating." Filmgoers felt the same way. They soaked up Lugosi's Dracula and he became a part of the culture at large, not just in vampire movies butin Halloween costumes, breakfast cereal (Count Chocula), and even "Sesame Street" Muppets (Count von Count).

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Year Of The Vampire: All Bloodsuckers Bow Before Bela Lugosi's Dracula - /Film