1428 Elm
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Dracula: In the Shadow of the Nosferatu

By Ken "Manic Exorcism" Rogers

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We return to Dracula’s evil realm and explore the earliest cinematic roles that brought our beloved Vampire from script to screen.

Welcome back, dear reader. It’s so good to see you made it through the night since last time we met. The hours between dusk and dawn can be a little perilous in these parts, as you may have already guessed. I’ll be your guide once more as we  journey a little further into the grey Transylvanian mist and explore the great horrors of Dracula.  In this retrospective we’ll be looking at (and admiring) the imperial performances that forever laid the foundations of Dracula’s presence in our imaginations.

So as we cross the Borgo Pass with cautious steps, we’re going to pass through time and look at the earliest film depiction of our beloved Count.

Transylvanian Transition – Dracula Rises From the Pages

Our images of Dracula are primarily drawn from the movies we all grew up with. It’s fair to say that pop culture has had way too much fun with how they portray the Prince of Darkness. The accent, the cape, the suave air and dashing charisma -but mostly that accent – all immediately spring to mind for most people when they think of Dracula.

But Dracula in the novel is dramatically different from what society has pictured in their heads. He is a  decrepit elderly fiend who keeps the dark countryside of Romania locked beneath his insidious presence. He is nothing short of a demon who feeds off the blood of mortals and revitalizes his youth with every victim. He is dressed all in black and moves with a predator’s stride, like a wolf on the hunt. There’s also something very reptilian about his motions as well, something of a snake luring prey into his fatal grasp. And his cold red eyes hold an ageless malice within their hypnotic stare.

No accent, no flowing cape and certainly not the old-world gentleman we’re accustomed to. He was a monster, the king of monsters, who wove dark enchantments against humanity and manipulated the world’s events to his own will. He was not romanticized, something German film-maker, F. W. Murnau, was very aware of.

If that name rings a bell – which for most horror fans I’m sure it will – it’s because he directed the supernatural masterpiece, Nosferatu. A silent horror film that predates Universal’s Dracula.
And we’re going to follow his menacing shadow.

From Stage to Silent Screams

Seeing how Bram Stoker was employed by the Lyceum Theatre it didn’t take long before his gothic novel was adapted for the stage. An act which spread the vampire’s popularity to a broader audience and chilled its viewers to the bone. Shocked, repulsed and horrified – people couldn’t get enough of the dark masterpiece!

Once it became clear that motion pictures were the way of the future it was a race to see who would get Dracula’s face up on the silver screen first. It’s interesting to note that even during its silent era, Universal was already planning to adapt Dracula into a major motion picture event, but it would be a long sixteen years later before that dream could see the light of the full moon.

In the meantime, Count Dracula would make his cinematic debut overseas, very far away from the sunny hills of Hollywood.  Ambitious film makers out of Europe combined the gothic overtones of Stoker’s novel with their extraordinary visions for art and cinema. What they came up with were shocking images straight out of nightmares.

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Now if you’re thinking Nosferatu  was the first Dracula movie to be made, well, you’d certainly be on the right track, but sadly wrong. F.W. Murnau would release his Dracula movie in 1922, but in 1921 a Dracula movie had already been released, beating Graf Orlok to the punch by just one year.

The 1921 vampiric odyssey was Hungarian made, Dracula’s Death, or Drakula halála, a little film that was Dracula in name alone. In The Road to Dracula, film historian Lokke Heiss, explains how Dracula is a music teacher gone insane and preys on the mental patients in asylums. He claims the movie owes more to The Phantom of the Opera than it does to Bram Stoker’s story.

Very little is known about the movie, and it leaves me pestered with a lot of questions. Some sources say Drakula was a lunatic and it has a lot to do with dreams and madness. Interesting – preying on people through their dreams? So could this have been something akin to an early Freddy Krueger?  It has me very curious to see it to say the least.  Sadly the movie has been lost to us like so many other great films of the past. Maybe someday we’ll get lucky and both this and Lon Chaney’s London After Midnight will be rediscovered and released at long last!

Heiss does mention that even in this very early depiction, Dracula is a monster with fangs and he wears a cape. So it seems the classics just never go out of style.

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