I’ve seen hundreds of horror films. And I’ve seen more Dracula films than I can either count or name. But until recently, I had no idea that this version of the oft-filmed tale existed. This Dracula is so lost to the digital history of cinema that when I searched for it on IMDb, I had trouble locating its page. I have a hard time understanding why.
Perhaps Dracula has been adapted for the silver screen so many times that there is a sense of fatigue surrounding the character. Certainly, once a viewer latches on to a particular film as their favorite, only a morbid fascination with the character would compel one to dig through the continuously growing pile of Dracula films looking for a hidden gem. But that’s precisely what this Dracula is.
From 1979, this Dracula is an adaptation of both Bram Stoker’s novel and a stage play that ran on Broadway. Reprising his role from the play is Frank Langella as Dracula — a tall, rugged charmer with a gigantic mane of David Copperfield hair. Alas, the 1970s. Director John Badham helmed a film that is quite a compression of the novel, but it’s also very lean. I can only guess that this leanness is a result of the film using a stage play as part of its source material. The necessities of film and stage require that a story with the scope and breadth of a novel has to be trimmed down to fit very real budgetary and physical constraints. The play, being a successful production, probably got the bulk of that work out of the way, leaving the film free to breathe back out a bit on what the play sucked inwards. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Dracula (1979)”
According to the IMDb page for Insidious, Leigh Whannell kept a list of horror movie clichés handy while he was writing the screenplay. He didn’t want his project to slip into the same predictable traps that mar so much horror cinema. With that list staring him in the face day in and day out, presumably, Insidious would turn out to be a film that was totally fresh, one that even audience members with hundreds of hours invested in the genre would find enjoyable. That is a very laudable goal, and a bit of a risk. Just because a film is formulaic does not mean it is a bad film. In its most basic sense, it just means the film will feel familiar to many people watching it. And as we all know, people like the familiar. As much as we like to pretend humanity is a collection of adventurous people, the opposite is in fact true. That’s why tourists eat at the same restaurants they have back home. It’s why popular music at times can sound like the same song done over and over again by a hundred different groups. And that’s why sequels, remakes, and carbon copies of previous successes make money at the box office. It’s just the way things are.