Dracula (1958)

Terence Fisher's Dracula arrives from 1958 with the tidy confidence of a Hammer production that knows exactly what it is selling: Technicolor blood, Christopher Lee's height, and Peter Cushing's jaw. Jonathan Harker is rewritten from solicitor to vampire hunter, Renfield and Quincey Morris are excised, and the voyage of the Demeter is reduced to a short hearse ride across Central Europe. This is adaptation as renovation, and the results are lean and effective. The film was the first vampire picture shot in colour, a technical novelty that has aged better than most of its contemporaries.

What the picture does have is appetite. Fisher stated plainly that his contribution to the myth was the sexual current running beneath it, and Lee plays the Count with an erotic melancholy he called the loneliness of evil. Women here exist to be bitten, to open terrace doors, to remove the garlic that might save them. Mina's weakness is diagnosed as an unsatisfied marriage. This is not a feminist reading imposed from outside. It is the film's own text, offered without apology or instruction. Lucy is staked by her brother. Nobody convenes a seminar about it.

For the purposes of contemporary classification, the picture is barren ground. The cast is uniformly white, in the manner of British repertory casting of the period. There is no racial argument, no environmental lament, no critique of the aristocracy beyond the incidental fact that the vampire happens to be a count. Class functions as set decoration and nothing more. The film wants to frighten, and it manages this through restraint, fog, and the three-note motif James Bernard built from the syllables of the title. There is no sermon and no invitation to better ourselves. It is a relic, and a bracing one, from an era when a horror film felt no obligation to be good for us.