Sometimes They Return: Cemetery Man

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Certain films make such a strong impression that even if you love them, you are rarely drawn to re-watch. It just seems better to sit with the first feeling they gave you – you don’t want a subsequent viewing to rob you of the memory of how they affected you. And sometimes, on top of that, a given film is just hard to find on streaming, even if you wanted to check it out again, such that your remembered first viewing grows in stature over the years: it becomes something treasured, almost mythic, a half glimpsed moment of true magic from long, long ago.

Such it was with today’s film, Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (1994). I’ve previously written on this blog about how I first saw it way back when: In high school, a good friend and I wanted to go see a movie, picked up the local newspaper to see what was playing (as one used to do), and saw a listing for a film with no description, but just an intriguing title. We went to the cinema and there was no poster, and the nameplate outside of the screening room was just sharpie scrawled on an index card. We bought two tickets and assumed we were in for something cheap and terrible, and when we went in, found that we were the only ones in attendance. We figured that with no one else around, we could just crack jokes at something that would be ‘so bad it’s good’ and settled in for a laugh. The film started, and we made a couple of early comments and then quickly shut up – because it was kind of amazing.

Poetic, absurd, artful, and successfully, intentionally funny, this was an unexpected gem, and one of the best cinema experiences I’ve ever had. We’d gone in completely cold, expecting the absolute worst, and were rather blown away by this peculiar Italian horror-comedy that was in turns silly, sexy, dark, and disturbing, with moments of grotesquerie both delightful and off-putting, not to mention a surprising depth and shades of existential profundity. I loved it. And I spent years carrying this memory, especially because in the streaming era, it was really hard to locate. Finally, after about 30 years, Severin restored and released the film on 4K and a clear, crisp print showed up on Shudder that did justice to its craft and artistry, so I was stoked to finally take it in again, and I knew it would be worth writing about. And it was, but not only for the reasons I’d counted on.

Rather, I suppose this is a case of something like “you should never meet your heroes” or maybe “you can never go home again” or some other such pat life advice, as my experience of re-viewing was not quite what I’d hoped for – there were still things to appreciate, but what had so impressed me thirty years ago, didn’t quite do it for me now. There were even elements that actively turned me off. I spent some time thinking about it, and then decided to watch it one more time, and happily then found myself enjoying it much more again. Interesting…

And so that is what I want to write about today – not just the film itself, but how and why it clicked for me so well in the mid-90s, how and why it didn’t when I first re-watched it last week, and what finally, on a third viewing, I found I could still love in it regardless of what could be viewed as significant issues. No matter what, it is clearly a unique piece of work, worthy of appreciation and consideration. So let’s get into it. There’s no way to do this adequately sans spoilers, so you’ve been warned…

Cemetery Man (1994) (A.K.A. Dellamorte Dellamore)

Cemetery Man Poster

Michele Soavi has been mentioned a couple times on this blog before. He was an assistant to Dario Argento and worked with a bunch of other big names in the Italian horror industry in the 80s. You can find him on screen in such masterpieces as Lucio Fulci’s The City of the Living Dead  (1980) or Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985), and of course, his feature directorial debut was one of my favorite slashers of the 80s, the stylish, if sometimes delightfully ridiculous Stagefright (1987) (the killer in the owl mask; Marilyn Monroe playing the sax; the cat jump scare in the back of a car (how did it even get in there?); the theatre director who’s an absolute asshole, but you sympathize with him cause you can see how he can see just how terrible his show is, and he is trying to fix it and can’t, and it just really stings – I love it all!). By 1994, Soave had a few films under his belt and took on this ambitious adaptation of a novel by Tiziano Sclavi, Dellamorte Dellamore, Sclavi being quite well known at the time in Italy for his surreal horror comic, Dylan Dog.

Originally released with the same title as the novel, Cemetery Man follows a worker at a cemetery in a small town in Italy, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) and his nonverbal, simpleminded assistant, Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), as they go about their duties: digging and cleaning graves, changing flowers, and most importantly, shooting in the head the zombies that tend to rise within a week of their original burial. Theirs is an absurd, repetitive, dreary existence and the ennui is strong with them. Dellamorte dispatches the undead that surround him with little more than a shrug and a sigh. And outside the gates of the cemetery, things are little better. The town, Buffalora, beyond the borders of which, he has never ventured, is small, venal, frustratingly bureaucratic and corrupt, with the mayor unconcerned about the dead rising as long as it doesn’t interrupt his campaign for reelection.

Things change for Dellamorte when he sees a beautiful widow (Anna Falchi) attending the funeral of her husband and he immediately falls in love with her. After taking her to visit the cemetery’s ossuary, she is so overcome with passion by the assembled skulls and bones that she also falls for him. They kiss like in a Magritte painting and proceed to have sex on the grave of her beloved husband, who rises and bites her, seemingly leading to her death. Dellamorte keeps her body under watch and when she rises, he shoots her, as is his job. But she just keeps coming back. One night, she returns as a seductive zombie, drawing him to her and sexily taking a chomp out of his shoulder before Gnaghi plants a shovel in her head. Later, she seems to return as the new mayor’s (the other one had died before the election) assistant, who already knows and loves Dellamorte, though she’s never before been to Buffalora or met him. They have a short lived romance, dependent on her belief that he’s impotent, as she has a fear of sex – he has himself chemically castrated, only for her to get over said fear and leave him for the mayor (in a problematic turn of events that we’ll get into later). And finally, she appears as a university student that Dellamorte goes home with. She also tells him that she loves him, but he soon discovers that she is a prostitute and that declaration just made the evening more expensive.

Along the way, Dellamorte goes down a dark path, sliding from a state of poetic melancholy at the beginning, through various romantic ups and downs, not to mention social indignities, to cold blooded acts of murder – some funny, some satisfying, and at least one quite disturbing. He has conversations with Death who tells him to stop killing the dead and that if he doesn’t want people to rise, to go shoot the living in the head to ensure that they won’t. This he does, beginning a vein in the film reminiscent of Kafka or Ionesco wherein it seems impossible for him to be caught, impossible for him to retain responsibility for his own acts, no matter how he tries – the police inspector will never see him for who he is and his crimes are stolen from him. The romantic gloom of the first half of the film is supplanted with an existential hopelessness – nothing has meaning: not life, not death, not love, not sex, not murder. Finally, he and Gnaghi drive away from Buffalora only to learn, as suspected, that there is no world beyond its borders – they are trapped within a snow globe – beautiful and pointless. In an odd turn, Dellamorte and Gnaghi exchange roles, Gnaghi now speaking and Dellamorte responding with Gnaghi’s characteristic grunt, and the film ends – they will return, events will play out again – perhaps a new iteration thereof, but with no meaningful change – nothing ever could.

You could imagine how this impressed me at 16. It is a weird movie to say the least, but one with a wealth of concepts, moods, and images. I’m sure I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but the philosophical vibe washed over me and left me intrigued, puzzled, entertained, and tickled with the idiosyncratic peculiarity of it all.

Plus, it must be said that it is beautiful to look at and also really quite funny, with loads of memorable details: the bus full of scouts that drive off a cliff and of course return as zombies, one of which keeps rubbing sticks between his hands menacingly as if to start an undead campfire, the sex dripping from Anna Falchi’s seductive line, “you know, you’ve got a real nice ossuary,” the scene when Gnaghi, so infatuated with the mayor’s daughter, vomits on her right before her boyfriend shows up on his motorcycle – she exclaims, “he threw up on me,” and the boyfriend responds, “cool – new fad” before she jumps on behind him and they ride away, unconcerned with the regurgitated bile between them, and of course, the sweet, child-like romance Gnaghi later has with her decapitated, reanimated head after she dies in a motorcycle accident. And again, beyond the comedy, I just loved the gory absurdity of it all, the morbid, poetic existentialism found in what I’d expected to be little more than cheap, b-movie detritus.

Thirty Years Later

Everything I’ve written above sounds great, and all of that is there to be found in the film, but that said, I did find myself sadly unsatisfied on the re-watch. First of all, things that had felt deep to me as a teenager, philosophically rich and ghoulishly beautiful, at 45, just seemed, I don’t know, facile? Shallow? Obvious? I didn’t come away feeling like this all revealed some truths of the human condition – but rather, it seemed more than a bit pretentious.

But all of that is fine. I mean it is an unfair standard to expect every film to reveal some profound truth of what it is to be human – that is a pretty high bar, and I wouldn’t judge any other film for not clearing it, and Soavi’s film genuinely deserves credit for actually approaching such an ambitious artistic feat. What really was difficult the second time around was how the philosophical-ness and poetic-ness felt not only slight, but actually ugly when it came to women, or rather, the woman, or even just “She,” which is as far as the film goes in naming Anna Falchi’s embodiment of feminine, sexy, mysterious, eternally unattainable woman-ness.

Dellamorte seems to have no other reason for falling in love with her than that she is beautiful, and she seems to have no reason to fall in love with him except the dictates of the story (to be fair, Rupert Everett is a very attractive man, but her attraction feels more like narrative convenience). While her perpetual return is intriguing, something about it feels uncomfortable: in Dellamorte’s story, there is one woman, without a name, who is all women, who is everywhere, whom he loves, whom he obsesses over, whom he doesn’t really know, and whom he can never truly have – she will always slip away from him, be taken from him; she is a failed promise, a lie, a tease. Life allows no such satisfaction – she exists (occasionally) only to be desired, to be longed for, but she seems to lack essence. She is an empty ideal – not a person – not a character.

And it does get pretty dark. I wrote above of the second half of the film when Dellamorte goes on a bit of an existential killing spree. Much of that is enjoyable – we see him killing people we’d earlier seen be jerks, or we see him kill dispassionately, because nothing matters anyway, but there is one time that he kills emotionally. Late in the film, drunk and despondent after being rejected by the most recent incarnation of “She” (the Mayor’s assistant), Dellamorte is approached by two young, attractive women in a tavern, one of whom is the next incarnation of the object of his desire. He goes home with them, is told that “She” loves him, and proceeds to make love to her. When he discovers that they are prostitutes and that he must pay extra for her declaration of affection, he puts a space heater in her bed, starting a fire that burns their apartment to cinders with them (and one other girl) inside.

It all feels like a Trojan Horse – Rupert Everett has brought so much charm and weary resignation to the role, and we have happily gone along with him on a dark, blackly comic, sweetly grotesque ride, only to end up in this ugly sequence of incel violence – a bitter man, denied the love he feels he deserves, feeling lied to and cheated, murders three young women because his feelings got hurt. It lands like a sucker punch.

Add to that the storyline of the mayor’s assistant (she is initially terrified by sex and feels free to love Dellamorte because the word around town is that he’s impotent (which he’s not) – he goes to a doctor and gets chemically castrated so they can be married – and then she turns up and explains that the mayor has raped her, curing her of her phobia, and she’s now going to marry him instead – you know, a totally normal, realistic reaction for an actual human female), and it’s hard to say that the movie doesn’t feel more than a little misogynistic. Somehow, as a 16 year old boy, so enamored of the glorious weirdness on display, I’d just failed to pick up on it.

Is this a case of changing social mores in the last 30 years (we are certainly more aware and less tolerating of elements of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and such these days) or is it just that I’ve grown up some and now find myself turned off by elements that I must admit I didn’t think about when I was a kid and first watched this movie? Whatever it is, it did sour me a bit on the film this time around.

But Let’s Give It Another Chance, Huh?

For all of the criticisms of the last section, I don’t want to come down too hard on the film (or on my teenage self). In spite of my reservations, there was still a great deal that I enjoyed and appreciated, and I thought I should give it one more try. And I’m glad I did. The first time I saw it, I had no expectations or even had negative ones and was so happily surprised. The second time, I was carrying the nostalgia of that first impression and it was a cold splash of water in the face to confront some problematic elements. And so, I wanted to approach it a third time, more cognizant and clear eyed of what I was going to see.

And I’m happy to report that I kinda loved it again. My criticisms stand – I don’t think there’s much of a way to get around them, but maybe even the most troubling elements can be an important part of the whole. Maybe the point is that the “love” between “She” and Dellamorte is a superficial fantasy – an illusory preoccupation to create a sense of meaning in a clearly meaningless existence. The degree to which She isn’t really a character is just the most prominent example of something that may be true of all of the other secondary players besides Dellamorte and Gnaghi. The degree to which the only significant female character is reduced to a symbol feels disappointing at the very least, but we don’t have to read it as being about gender – she is just the only other “real thing” in Dellamorte’s existence and she isn’t even real either. Nothing in life or death is.

When he murders her (as the college student) and her friends, it feels ugly, but this is a horror movie, after all, and perhaps this moment just brings the weight we should feel regarding all of his murders, but for whatever reason, don’t. We discover that our viewpoint character, the sensitive, charismatic figure at the center of all this hypocrisy and madness, sighing and rolling his eyes at the mendacity and ridiculous hopelessness of the world around him – we discover that he is no better than the rest – he is, in fact, awful. And yet, in the next scene when he shoots a bunch of people at the hospital, I feel we are right back there with him, only having held judgement against him for the moment, and are now feel free to laugh as he coolly murders doctors and nurses. Why was that judgement so short lived? Are we just sold on the lack of meaning, the absence of ramifications for his actions that so frustrates him? Is the movie doing in that moment exactly what it should? Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t want to give up all that I find to value in it just because it also contains parts I respond negatively to.

At the end of the day, this is a fascinating, funny, moving, troubling piece – I don’t think it is like anything else – it is like itself, and if nothing else, that is a thing truly worthy of praise. Furthermore, as written above, it is gorgeously shot, laugh-out-loud hilarious, shocking, and puzzling in a lot of good ways. The performances are uniformly excellent (Everett is so charismatic, Hadji-Lazaro embodies Gnaghi with lovable, quirky commitment – it’s really special, and Falchi, even if one could question the depth of her “characters” in the context of the story, is given a lot to do, and brings a lot of life and play to her four parts). The visuals are creatively striking and beautiful, and the score is a hoot. Finally, the film is thoughtful (even if those thoughts aren’t always the deepest, it is still thinking them) and takes big artistic swings without sacrificing the entertaining pleasures of being a weird, gross little horror movie. How could I not love something like that?

And so that’s that – I didn’t exactly have the experience I’d been looking forward to over the years, but it was interesting and rewarding to re-approach this film I’d treasured, find that it was other than I had remembered, or that perhaps I had changed, and ultimately, to come to terms with it differently. It was a reflective experience and time well spent. Plus, it is still, in many ways, really very cool and weird.

Argento’s Animal Trilogy

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I’ve been wanting to do this post for a long time – I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to finally make it happen. Dario Argento played a significant role in my early forays into the genre. I remember watching Suspiria (1977) for the first time and being so struck by it. I don’t think I’d yet seen such an aesthetic piece before – in horror or in film generally – and to be clear, I don’t mean simply an ‘aesthetically pleasing’ (read: beautiful) film, but rather a film so focused on aesthetics above all else, with all other elements in service to style, to color, light, composition, and sound, and yet still working – not just a hollow, artsy exercise in pretty shots. It was also my introduction to Italian horror: the first time I’d dealt with the characteristic, and at first, puzzling dubbing, and my introduction to the glories of Italian horror scores, specifically Goblin – it made a deep impression.

Of course, I then went down a rabbit hole on its director, particularly, his most famous works of the 70s and 80s, most of which (with one glaring exception), I’ve written about by now. Eventually, I branched out to other Italian horror directors, and subsequently, to a broader view of international horror than I’d previously taken. For young horror fan me, Suspiria had opened that door, and it will always hold a warm place in my heart, both for its own specific merits and for this role that it served me.

But I’ve always had a significant blind spot with Argento. He’d made a splash at the beginning of the seventies with a series of gialli, stylish Italian crime thrillers, all with animals in the title: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), often referred to as his “animal trilogy,” though they are all narratively unconnected. While I had watched The Bird with the Crystal Plumage long ago, somehow it hadn’t made as deep an impression on me as some of his later work – it was less of a horror piece (though it certainly has elements), and the other two, I still haven’t seen. But about a year ago, I randomly put on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and I just had an absolute blast and knew that I had to finally consider these three works – as a whole and separately.

And so that’s what we’re doing this week – revisiting the first, checking out the next two, and sharing some thoughts on each of them. I don’t know how much I will have to say about each, but I’m sure it will be fascinating to see some of the earliest work of a director who I’ve so enjoyed (of course, beware of spoilers). Also, a new documentary on Argento, Panico (2023) has just shown up on Shudder, so I’d like to watch that as well and see what context it brings.

But First, A Note On Giallo

Discussions of the borders between genres are, I think, often somewhat fruitless, but if I’m going to get into these three movies, I think it makes sense to look at how “giallo” relates to “horror.” Generally, a giallo film is more of a murder mystery thriller than horror, and as I wouldn’t be inclined to include, say most 90s Hollywood thrillers on this blog, it is fair to ask why I feel it’s different if it’s Italian. For me, it is all a matter of style. Beyond specific genre tropes, such as the black gloved killer whose identity isn’t known until the final act or the often lurid sex and violence, I think the giallo is characterized by heightened style – not just stylish, but also cinematically stylized. Weird angles, expressionistic composition, energetic editing, strong use of color, and soundscapes that both seduce and assault the senses, gialli have artistic license to aspire to more than mere realism, and in that I feel there is a kinship with horror. The story may simply be a convoluted murder mystery, but the feeling transports the viewer more wholly, and in this stylish weirdness, there be horror dragons. Also, of course, one can trace direct lines of influence from the giallo to the American slasher of the 80s; so it all connects.

And Second, A Note on Pictures

Writing from the future, having finished the post and gone looking for pictures to illustrate what I’ve described, I find it’s surprisingly hard to do justice to just how good these films look. In some later films (such as Suspiria), Argento shoots in a way that you can take any shot and put it in a frame on the wall, but I feel that’s not the case here. With these three movies, I feel the flashiness is more often in the movement of the camera and the edit, with individual shots incapable of demonstrating how very cool it all is, though I do make some descriptive efforts. So, I’ve done my best in collecting, but it should go without saying that it is worth watching the films themselves.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

As I understand it (and I am not an expert), giallo films had been being made since the early sixties (Wikipedia lists the first as Mario Bava’s The Girl who Knew Too Much in 1963), but Argento’s directorial debut was a huge international hit and really kicked off a boom time for the form. It’s easy to see inspiration in earlier works, notably Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), but by all counts, Argento brought a new modern energy and panache to this horror-adjacent genre. This is a fun, ultra-stylish film – you can feel how it’s the first effort of a young artist out to make their mark. Does everything make sense? Maybe not. Are the female characters uniformly underwritten? Unfortunately, yes. Are there tons of scenes that captivate and titillate and startle and wow? Boy howdy!

The story is typical of what I’ve seen described as “m. gialli” (when the story follows a male protagonist – the tropes differ with a female lead). An outsider, in this case, an American author temporarily living in Rome and about to return to the States, happens to witness a woman being attacked through the window of an art gallery. He rushes to help, but gets stuck in a glass antechamber and can only witness her suffering as he calls and calls for police. Once they arrive, he is pulled into the investigation as both a witness and a suspect, with a shadowy figure occasionally trying to kill him before he gets too close to the truth. Throughout the film, we see the killer strike again and again, always hunting beautiful young women. Finally, the killer is revealed with a surprising (and pretty satisfying twist), leading both the protagonist and the viewer to recontextualize what was actually seen at the beginning of the film (something Argento will return to later, perhaps perfecting the idea in Profondo Rosso (1975)).

While the structure is somewhat rote for the genre, this is a film of tremendous scenes and set pieces, and whenever we get into a kill or a chase, it really pops: As jarring, mysteriously ominous music plays, a young woman lies in bed smoking in her nightgown. She turns off the light and the camera shifts to her point of view. We see the empty doorway to her bedroom as her hand moves the cigarette in and out of frame. Finally, the camera follows her gaze to the bedside table as she stubs out her smoke and then back to the open doorway, now filled with a shadowy figure. Extreme close-up of her open mouth as she screams, zooming out to see her terrified face as a gloved hand stifles her shriek of terror. A series of quick cuts – the knife slicing off her nightdress – her widened eyes – the killer in shadow, cloaked in a shiny black raincoat and hat – light shining off the blade as it trails along her belly – her hand clutching a twisted sheet – blood splashed across a pillow. It is all so propulsive, so musical in its rhythms, done with such relish and flair, and at the same time, it is scary and icky, with a sickly veneer of sexualized violence (it is strictly murder, but it feels pretty rapey).

And the film is full to bursting with such nigh hypnotic sequences. There’s another kill scene where a girl comes home to her building and we first look down on her, framed at the bottom of a triangular stairwell, before we shift to follow her ascent. Mysteriously, the lights go out on the upper floors and she has to light her way with matches that keep going out – it is tense and scary and you know this will not end well, but that does nothing to reduce the delicious suspense as she climbs to her inevitable doom. Or, late in the film, there is a great crane shot where the protagonist is racing to find his girlfriend who’s disappeared and clearly in danger, and suddenly we’re looking at him from above, but then the camera pans up to look out over the wide expanse of the whole city – she is lost in all of this space, all of these buildings and people, and then, finally, we zoom in to one window, far in the distance, where we will soon cut to discover her fate. The crane shot in Tenebre (1982) gets a lot of attention (and rightly so), but this early effort really does the trick.

I was shocked to read that, being his first film, Argento was considered inexperienced and was almost fired during filming. I don’t know what it was like on set, but the final product comes across as the confident work of an artist with a sure eye, and a strong sense of artistic purpose. Also, his father was one of the producers, so it would have been really rough if they’d actually fired him.

Finally, I love so many of the little details that live beyond the scenes of stylish murder. This movie is full of memorable characters, lines, and visual treats. The art in the gallery is fascinating – brutal, alien, and dangerous looking (another element that will resurface in Tenebre). There are so many enjoyable personalities and interactions – Solong, the pimp who has to say “so long” at the end of every sentence so as not to stutter, the effeminate German art dealer who had sold the painting that holds a key to the murderer’s identity, the crazy, cat eating artist (responsible for said painting) who exclaims that now he only paints mystical scenes because he’s “feeling mystical,” and the police lineup which has the lead investigator castigating his men that “Ursula Andres belongs with the transvestites, not the perverts!” It is consistently a deeply funny movie, and it is all of these odd little notes that lift it above simply being a cool looking thriller. It has more life than that. With its more than realistic stylization and its deep undercurrent of weird specificity, there is a pinch of something that feels like horror to me – it’s an easy film to love.

Ok, so that is The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the only one of these that I’ve previously seen. Now for something new…

Cat O’Nine Tails (1971)

Well, that was…fine. I mean, it is a well-crafted investigative thriller, but whereas the style of “Bird” elevated it to something akin to horror, this really feels of a different genre and I wouldn’t be writing about it on this blog if not for this project. But, I don’t want to be negative about it off the bat because this movie has a lot of cool stuff – it just feels further from “horror.”

The initial premise is promising: A blind man (a former journalist who’s lost his sight and now lives with his precocious granddaughter, writing crossword puzzles) overhears a violent attack, and with the help of said granddaughter, begins investigating a series of murders, before they inevitably become targets themselves. Along the way, he ropes in a sighted reporter as they follow the nine leads (hence the title) that branch out from these killings revolving around an experimental genetic clinic.

While my initial paragraph comes off as lukewarm at best, there is great verve and craft on display here: interesting shots, tight, exciting edits (particularly some bits where we rapidly cut back and forth between times and locations before finally settling on a new context – a trick I recently appreciated Ti West using in X (2022) ), a great, groovy, occasionally jazzily discordant score from Ennio Morricone (who did the music for all three of the “Animal Trilogy”), and of course the film-making really comes to life whenever a character loses theirs. If there is a murder scene, a chase, or some other moment of violence, the movie just gets fresh energy and there are choices that surely wow.

I particularly enjoyed an early railway station murder – a man has come for a mysterious rendezvous. We shift between an objective view of him as he tries to find the one he’s meant to meet among the crowd on the platform, and the subjective perspective of the killer, clearly looking out from behind a column, back and forth and back and forth between the intended victim on one side and the oncoming train coming from the other, with one jump cut to an extreme close-up of the killer’s iris, filled with homicidal urgency. Finally, that subjective view looks back to the victim, who glances up, recognizes the one he’s come to meet and begins to walk forward before the hands of the killer come into view of this POV shot, pushing the victim onto the tracks. Quick cuts to his head slammed against the front of the train, a paparazzo catching the photo, the victim’s body spinning, pulled by the power of the locomotive, a woman bringing her hands to her head as she screams, a close up of a man’s mouth, shouting, and finally, a wide view of the gathered crowd, the murderer having disappeared into the chaos. It is really engaging work.

But, as I said, this one, for all of its flashes of high style, feels less stylized, feels more like a “normal” thriller. For me, one element that contributes to this is a shift of protagonist. Initially, it had seemed that the blind witness (played by the always enjoyable Karl Malden), would be the main lead – another “outsider” who everyone discounts due to his disability, who is enjoying getting back on the horse of chasing down a story, but you always have doubts that he should really be putting himself and his granddaughter at risk. As with many an investigative m – gialli lead, such as the writer in “Bird” or the musician in Profondo Rosso (1975), the blind crossword writer and this little girl are unlikely, but surprisingly effective detectives – a good team. But relatively early on, he goes to an active journalist (James Franciscus) with his discoveries, and they start working together, and it’s not long before the film shifts to primarily follow the new guy – young, square jawed, masculine, effective, and more than a bit obvious – and I was disappointed in the change. Malden is still around until the end, but there’s a long stretch in the middle where he seems to disappear from the story, and instead we just see an investigator investigating an investigation. While it is all still carried out well, this was to the film’s detriment.

I guess they just didn’t want to let Karl Malden enjoy this glass of post coital milk with Catherine Spaak.

By the end, we get a killer reveal that makes sense, but won’t blow any minds, and a great, intense moment of the killer’s death – and as I said, it’s all fine. I consistently enjoyed watching the story unfold, though I wouldn’t really consider this even particularly horror adjacent. My read is that Argento put a lot of creativity and effort into making a splash with “Bird”; it was a hit and he was cleared to direct more movies, and the next was very capably made – the work of a solid craftsman with a good eye and some pizzazz – but probably wouldn’t have made a name for him if it had come first. Still, it is interesting to see in terms of a larger career trajectory, and it has me curious what I’ll find in the third film.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)

Wow – what an opening! Argento starts his third movie with an electric sequence of pure style and intrigue – setting a tone, introducing character and context, and pulling the viewer into a sense of weird mystery. We cut between instruments being played – close ups on the skins of a drum as the sticks bang down in slow motion, looking down the neck and even out the inside of a guitar before a hand starts to strum – and one of the men playing them, the drummer, Roberto, as he goes about his life, more and more aware that he’s being followed by a mysterious, dark figure. As he plays, Roberto is bedeviled by a small flying insect – in his face, his hair, his eyes, flitting around his head – he tries to get it when it settles on one of the drums, but too late. Sometimes the music of the band dominates the soundscape and sometimes we cut to near silence – an isolated shot of a beating heart with a heartbeat, once with the title card and once without, and then back to Roberto being tailed by the dark figure. Finally, the insect settles on the bottom cymbal and you can see Roberto, eager, hoping it won’t move for a few seconds, and then it’s time: the cymbals crash, the fly is dead. Roberto has a look of relief and satisfaction.

By the end of this scene (about 4 minutes long), I was charged – hooked and excited to see where this was going to go – and immediately we’re off to the races as one night after a recording session, when Roberto is walking home alone, he realizes the man is watching from the shadows and decides to follow and confront him. This becomes a chase through arched piazzas, full of movement and light and shadows and bold camera placements, striking angles, and a play of framing and focus. Finally, he follows the man into an old, abandoned, dilapidated theatre and catches his arm. The man pulls a switchblade, there’s a struggle, and Roberto seems to accidentally stab his stalker, who falls into the orchestra pit as floodlights fill the room and another figure in a creepy, plastic baby doll mask photographs Roberto in what looks like an act of murder. And then the lights are off, the figure is gone and Roberto is on his own to deal with this apparent crime which has so clearly and mysteriously been staged (in a theatre no less).

Great set up – so far, I love everything about the movie – suspenseful, intriguing, and so very over-the-top cool. But then, I’m sorry to say it doesn’t last. On Wikipedia, I read a quote from a contemporary review of “Four Flies” from Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, that the film works “when the camera is moving and no one is talking,” and I think he nailed it. Argento pulls off some spectacular scenes here, and the passion for a great shot and a great edit is clear, but the story never really cohered for me, and furthermore (as this is a horror blog), though it sets up some atmosphere early on, and there are a couple of moments that feel like horror, most of the investigatory angle of the movie apparently isn’t interested in maintaining that vibe. What’s more, the investigation felt frustrating as we are fed red herring after red herring, and in the end, the explanation of what is going on feels like it comes completely out of left field, while leaving big questions unresolved. Now, I don’t need to understand everything, but for me, it just didn’t feel like it worked. And then the final moments are just so wildly abrupt that I couldn’t help but laugh. I mean, it was kind of fun, but I wasn’t sure if it was the tone this story wanted to end on.

So, I think this one might mainly be recommended for completionists – if you really want to track Argento’s development as a director, you will find a great deal to enjoy, but if you are just casually looking for a satisfying movie, you may come away disappointed.

That said, there are pieces in here that I certainly appreciated, and even some that I loved. As is often the case, there was enjoyable specificity of character that brought a sense of life to it all, raising the film above its mystery procedural roots. For example, as he is being tormented by the unknown blackmailer who doesn’t even ask for anything, but just seems to be trying to torment him, Roberto turns for help to his friend, “God” (short for Godfrey), a big scruffy hippy type who lives in a shack next to a polluted stream, wears rags, and eats raw fish. God brings onto the case his associate, “The Professor,” a well-spoken tramp with a bible verse for every occasion, and Arrosio, a flamingly gay private detective on an 83 case losing streak who is sure that this will be the one he finally solves. It is odd to say the least. But also oddly lovable. Perhaps they kill the tone, but these roles bring something fresh and surprising to the film – and while Arrosio’s gayness reads as caricature from a contemporary perspective, he isn’t fobbed off as a joke – he does effectively figure out the mystery (though he doesn’t live long enough to reveal that information), so that’s something for representation I guess (beyond that, it is interesting to note how there are explicitly queer characters in almost all of Argento’s early films – I read somewhere that he was trying to show a more modern world – the one that he inhabited – and that this was an integral element of that).

And then there are a couple scenes that would shine in any horror movie, in which Argento allows himself to depart from straight realism and approach something more surreal, more expressive. The best example here features a character who has figured out what is happening and arranges to meet the killer in a crowded park on a sunny afternoon. She sits on a bench as children play and scream in an adjacent playground, young lovers kiss among the trees, cheerful music blares from loudspeakers, and everywhere there is bustling life and safety. Then the sound cuts out for a moment and the music is gone. We hear the children, but don’t see them. Suddenly, she is all alone – the park seems deserted. She is no longer safe. She gets up and starts for the exit, but in the next shot, it is abruptly night time and she knows she’s being followed by someone unseen.

Over the course of about 90 seconds, she seems to have stumbled from the world of the living, surrounded by the hubbub and security of the crowd, of day, into an underworld of shadow and threat. She runs through the paths of the park, the looming trees on either side become endless, winding corridors and it feels like a knife wielding maniac could leap out at any moment. She runs round a corner, and now she’s no longer among trees, but flanked on either side by stone walls, cobwebs connecting them that she must claw through. The way grows more and more narrow as, more and more desperate with fear, she claws herself forward. We alternate between her panting and grunting as she lurches towards freedom and life, and a silent POV shot of the killer trailing her slowly but surely. Finally, he hear her death screams and see her hand scratching down a wall as she meets her end. It is an absolute nightmare – and it doesn’t really make a lick of sense, but I think that’s part of why it works so well. The director is free to follow the star of the moment, unburdened by narrative demands. It’s when the story returns to the narrative that it falters.

So yeah, I’m happy I watched it. There are surely details worth seeing. But I can’t say it’s my favorite thing by Argento.

Summing Up

Ok, so I have now watched the “Animal Trilogy” and first off, I think it’s obvious why the only one I’d seen before was the first – The Bird with the Crystal Plumage really stands out among the three as special – in craft, in creativity, in style, and in its connection to the horror genre. The next two titles were made the following year and perhaps it was just too much too soon, but through them both, Argento’s talent and passion are still evident, and if one is interested in his work, I think it’s worth seeking them out. As I understand, after this, he turned to TV for a little while and also made a period comedy, The Five Days (1973) before returning to giallo (and horror) with what some consider his best film, Profondo Rosso (1975) (AKA Deep Red) (one of these days, I will finally write about it as well). While Profondo Rosso is obviously superior to these first three (a subjective opinion, but one I expect many would share), I think one can also see the seeds of creative choices he would make there in these “Animal” films. I’m happy to have finally seen them and I’m curious to know more.

So, that said, I have one more assignment for myself this week. As I wrote at the beginning, a documentary on Argento’s oeuvre has just dropped on Shudder, so before I sign off, I’m going to give it a watch and report back on anything of interest, particularly that which pertains to these first three films…

Dario Argento – Panico (2023)

Well, I’m glad I watched that, but I’m not sure how much to go into. It is a very personal piece of work – most of the interviews are with family or long-time collaborators who feel like family – his ex-wife, some of his daughters, his sister, Claudio Simonetti (of Goblin), and Michele Soavi, Lamberto Bava, and Luigi Cozzi (all three of whom worked under Argento as an assistant, and also directed films that he produced), with just three directors, Guillermo del Toro, Gaspar Noé, and Nicolas Winding Refn, speaking about how they were influenced by Argento’s work (an interesting collection – they are three strikingly different directors, though a possible through line between them is how visual they all are).

It is a very intimate portrait, as interested in his life as a father, a lover, a brother, or a son, as it is in his life as a film maker, but one quality that comes across loud and clear is the extent to which the work was always treated as art. And I don’t mean that in a pretentious way – he was not (he’s still alive, so I should be using a different tense, but generally I’m speaking of the early career, namely the Animal Trilogy) claiming to make some “elevated work,” ashamed to be associated with the genre in which he found a home. Rather, he was making entertaining thrillers or horror films, but respecting them as art and therefore all the more demanding of himself and his team in their execution. This is obvious in the technical prowess on display (apparently, on “Bird” the reason he was almost fired was that one of the producers thought he was doing too much weird stuff with the camera – I think time has proved that guy wrong), but it was no less true in the writing, the storytelling, the choice of subject matter. Over the course of his career, he has returned time and time again to dark themes and brutality out of a need to express something specific of himself on celluloid (in, again, an entertaining thriller, as opposed to some kind of heavy drama). And sometimes, very private elements make their way onto the screen, such as Trauma (1993) in which his daughter, Asia Argento plays a character suffering from anorexia, who was directly based on Asia’s half-sister. Or in the case of our three films today, apparently Four Flies on Grey Velvet at least in part prompted the dissolution of his first marriage as his wife at the time was, shall we say, nonplussed to see the degree to which the protagonist and his wife were so directly based on Dario and herself (if you watch the movie, you’ll understand why she might find that objectionable).

It’s easy to say, “Oh Argento – he’s so stylish and visual and makes things that look cool,” but watching Panico, he really comes across as a cinematic artist who is doing everything in his power to dig deep and make work that is significant, meaningful, personal, powerful – but in his case, that is work where a killer’s hands get lacerated as he falls down an elevator shaft, a woman is decapitated in a slow motion car accident, art objects can be deadly, and black gloved hands are always capable of reaching out of the shadows, blade in hand. We respect work that makes us cry – we can recognize the artistic value in drama – why not work that makes us tremble? Why should sadness be held above terror – or as Argento would have it in one interview, “panic”? Now, it is obvious that Argento is not alone in this, but I think that so often, genre is still undervalued and standout work from horror or thrillers, or even lighter fare like romantic comedies is overlooked (horror can ask so much of a performer and comedy is really hard). This documentary merely underlines the extent to which this genre director deserves to be considered through the lens of artistic merit.

I must admit that the second two films, while interesting to me as a completionist, and while they included many great elements, didn’t exactly blow me away (at least not like “Bird” or much of his stellar run from Profundo Rosso (1975) to Opera (1987). But after watching something of the life behind the scenes, perhaps I appreciate them a bit more. They are straightforward mystery thrillers, but they were made with a real drive to innovation, to expression, to doing something bigger, better, more. And the experience of making these surely contributed to building the foundation that made his best work possible.

—

And so there we have the “Animal Trilogy.” It’s been gratifying to explore these three. All have something to recommend them, and as an early glimpse of a director I’ve long enjoyed and respected, it has been illuminating. How good it is that I finally took up this particular homework assignment and checked them out. Thanks for coming along. If you’re interested in watching any or all of them, as of the time of writing, I found The Bird with the Crystal Plumage on Shudder, Cat O’Nine Tails on Tubi, and Four Flies on Grey Velvet on Plex.

A Sleazy, Sweaty, Brutal Masterpiece – Maniac (1980)

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I like a bit of variety on this here blog, and after last post’s discussion of three classy, classic Dracula films, I thought it would be good to go in a completely different direction and take on something cheap and grotty. I’m no gore hound per se and I’m not the kind of horror fan who is constantly hunting for the roughest stuff I can handle, but I do really appreciate when something works – when the effect actually gets to me – when the horror of a piece can linger in my mind and my mood. Today’s film is clearly one of those. Filmed to the brim with top notch suspense sequences, viscerally disturbing violence, and gritty, dangerous atmosphere, and furthermore grounded by a totally committed, unhinged, and scary central performance from Joe Spinell, William Lustig’s Maniac is really one to watch… if you’re up for it – and, to be fair, not everyone will be.

Maniac (1980)

On paper, this doesn’t necessarily seem like a film that might top a lot of lists: following a creepy weirdo with mommy issues around NYC as he hunts down young women, kills them, scalps them, and nails their hair onto his collection of mannequins. Writing about it, I have to look up synonyms for “skeezy.” It’s the sort of movie that might make you want to take a shower afterwards (but maybe you’ll feel vulnerable there – at the very least, you may want to open a packet of moist towelettes). Ugly and mean, with an uncomfortable conflation of sexual desire and violent impulse, as well as a really downbeat ending – this is a “feel-bad movie,” and I kinda love it.

Made during the first big slasher boom (though I don’t think I’d actually call this a slasher), Lustig’s film turns the still gelling conventions of the sub-genre on their head by focusing entirely on the killer himself rather than his victims, such that the real horror of the piece is more in its character study of its pitiable, if no less frightening, protagonist, Frank Zito, as embodied (and largely written) by character actor, Joe Spinell. There are wonderfully executed chase and kill scenes here that would shine in any early eighties slasher, but while they are really scary, their horror pales in comparison to just spending an hour and a half inside of Frank’s fevered mind. This situates the film closer to a work like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) or Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel, American Psycho, but whereas both of those examples follow a central killer who is at least outwardly cold and in control, Frank Zito is hot and tortured, and Spinell keeps his performance’s engine solidly in the red for most of the film.

Really, it seems like it shouldn’t work so well. The performance should come off as over-the-top and melodramatic. Frank’s backstory (growing up with a sex worker mother who alternatingly neglected and abused him resulting in his compulsion to prey on attractive women for their sexuality as he gibbers and mutters – a fevered exchange between the traumatized child he was, the mother who maltreated him, the adult killer he’s become, his victims, and the mother he has recreated and asserted control over via the bloody wigged mannequins he surrounds himself with) should come off as at best facile, and at worst, offensively reductive in its armchair psychology rooted in misogynistic tropes. The plotting should come off as nonsensical and unrealistic. This feels like it shouldn’t rise above being a run of the mill, grungy, cheap little body count movie, memorable primarily for its squalor (and, to be clear, there can be value in films such as those, but I think there is so much more here).

But this is one of the reasons I really do love this genre. All of those accusations are basically true, and it is still a great film: intense, moving, uncomfortable, and wholly worthwhile. Though it seems to have been made largely in an exploitation mode, all involved mainly just trying to put something together that would be shocking, exciting, and sell tickets, the talent and total commitment of the creative team just shines through, resulting in a scary, disturbing, rough art object. Lustig put all he had, financially and otherwise, into getting his first non-pornographic feature off the ground, and it shows. Spinell was a great character actor (who also co-wrote and developed the piece, investing all of his salary from Cruising in it as well), but he’d never had the chance to lead a film before, and his work here is so emotionally grounded even while he plays for the cheap seats. Tom Savini had no budget to speak of for the effects, but everything is set up to be filmed so perfectly, making simple “right out of the kit” solutions (as I’ve seen him describe them in an interview) land with visceral power. At every turn, the love and passion and talent and hunger that went into this ugly little picture is just so abundantly clear. This all yields a commitment to the material that elevates it far above what it could have been, without adding a hint of pretension.

The film begins in typical fashion with a cold open kill scene – a young couple sleeping on the beach are murdered by a giant, looming figure that has been watching them while hiding among the reeds. The girl is dispatched quickly with a scream and a slit throat, but when her boyfriend returns with more firewood, his death takes time – garroted and held aloft by the killer, the camera focusing on his feet as his body jerks and twitches and finally falls limp, blood pouring down from above as the wire cuts through flesh. It is effectively savage, but could fit in many other films of the era, but then in the next shot, the film reveals its uniqueness as we cut to the main character, Frank (recognizably the killer from the first scene), waking up in bed as if from a nightmare. He is drenched in sweat and panting in misery and fear. Was this a dream or a memory? Did he actually kill them? The title card announces “Maniac” and we get a gist of how we are going to spend the rest of the run time. As the opening credits roll, we are shown something of his living situation. His cramped room features a candle lit shrine to a photo of a woman (his mother, as we will come to understand) and is otherwise filled with objects of art – some merely abstract and some disturbing, but the one that catches out attention is the mannequin revealed to be lying in the bed behind him, with what looks like a bloody wig nailed onto her head. This guy is clearly not well.

Shortly thereafter, we see Frank go upstairs with a street prostitute one trick away from making her rent and calling it a night, and what follows is so awkward and naturalistic as to initially feel sad and sweet, though always with the edge of fear – we can only assume he is actually a killer and she is in great danger. She seems nice and genuine – warm with him, but also clearly just doing her job and trying to upsell him out of economic need. He is clearly uncomfortable with physical intimacy, but also plainly wants it, at first asking her to model for him and leave her clothes on before finally getting more physical. The scene takes its time as she tenderly coaxes him out of his shell until he is capable of participating more fully, and it is strangely affecting, but at the same time, the tension is so thick; we know how strange he is – even if he isn’t actually a killer (and he probably is), he is quite off.

Thus, it’s not terribly surprising, but still shocking and awful when he rolls on top, grabs her by the neck and starts squeezing the life out of her, the camera largely zoomed in on his flushed, murderous visage, the sweat pouring down his face, until her body stills and his expression changes from rage to sorrow before he has to run to the bathroom to vomit. He is so dangerous, so scary, and at the same time, he does not seem to take any pleasure in his activities – he acts out an unwanted compulsion – he is a long suffering victim of his own impulses as well as a perpetrator of horrific acts. But of course, the viewer’s sympathies are tempered by the fact that he returns from the bathroom with a razor blade and proceeds to scalp the poor, dead woman.

Much of the film is relatively low on plot after that – we see many more scenes of Frank hunting and killing and suffering and fighting with himself (as he speaks for the myriad voices that fill his head). But for all that it reiterates a similar scenario, I don’t feel it wears out its welcome or becomes repetitive. Also, it is surprising how much it never feels exploitative – the victims are primarily women (he kills men too, but only when they get in the way), and the violence is certainly gendered, but the filming is never leering and the violence doesn’t feel sexualized. In each instance, I find myself really caring about the given victim or victims, honestly more than in many a slasher flick wherein they can so often feel two dimensional and disposable. Here, we aren’t given much in the way of background information, but I do believe in each of these women, filmed as actual humans and not objects, sexual or otherwise – I worry for them – and I hold my breath, waiting for the possibility that this time he won’t do what he always does, that this time he won’t succeed – he is, after all, not some mythical embodiment of evil, but just an overweight, middle aged guy with mental health issues.

And the play of identification is a really interesting aspect of the film that sets it apart from the pack. Though Frank generally dominates our point of view, we meet each of his (potential) victims as authentic people with depth and nuance and lives, and we temporarily live and fear vicariously through them. At no point do I ever root for Frank or cheer his violence (as might happen in something like a Friday the 13th or a Halloween film where the masked killer is the main draw). There are drawn out sequences of one young woman or another encountering his threat (sometimes understanding the danger she’s in and sometimes not until it is way too late) wherein Lustig teases audience expectation so expertly: Why is that door cracked? Is Frank there? No. Ok. Is he coming now? Yes, but he doesn’t see her. But does he and he’s just waiting for a better moment to strike? Maybe – but where is he now – the room is empty. Will he get her in the bath? No, but he’s still got to be in the apartment, right? I think so, but I don’t see him – he could be anywhere. She lowers her head to splash water on her face and oh no – he’s going to be in the mirror standing behind her, isn’t he? And, Bang! He appears and brings the scene to its nigh inevitable conclusion. Most famously, there is a standout chase scene in the subway that could hold its own against any other in any thriller, but the movie is full of similarly well-crafted scares. And all of those scares are so much more effective because Lustig lets us feel for those in danger before they are dispatched and we must once again accompany the killer back into his apartment and his mind and his fevered madness.

And that is not a pleasant place to be for him or for us. Past that, one feature separating Frank Zito from many a slasher killer is how deeply uncool he is. We endure him and even pity him, but I don’t think we are ever meant to like what he’s doing, and the film never endorses his violence. He is not some kind of aspirational anti-hero and his post-Norman Bates, proto-incel motivations and madness do not feel like they speak with an authorial voice. Sure, the whole “pathetic, misogynist killer obsessed with mommy” thing feels particularly skuzzy and played out, and I can’t say that I enjoy it, but honestly – it does feel rather realistic and therefore, so much scarier. I don’t believe that the shadows contain many masked killers with “the devil’s eyes,” but it goes without saying that the world is filled up with unhappy, emotionally and psychologically screwed up men who will target and hurt women to assuage their own pathologies. Frank really could be around the next corner.

Also interestingly, we don’t really know just how deep his insanity goes, and as his is the perspective we mostly see the world of the film through (as Ellis did about ten years later with his novel), I read it all as through the eyes of an unreliable narrator – though that is never really confirmed. We begin with a moment that could either be a memory or a dream. There is one scare with his mother rising from her grave that clearly didn’t really happen, as well as a horror set piece finale that must be taking place in his head. On top of that, there is a whole act of the movie that feels like it might be wholly, or at least significantly, imagined.

One day in the park, Frank notices a photographer snap his photo and he follows her home. She, Anna (Caroline Munro), is in the middle of developing said photograph when he rings her bell and introduces himself. She never asks how he found her home, but in a very friendly manner, she invites this stranger in to examine and discuss her photography, seemingly delighted to have the company. Over the course of the next half hour, interspersed with more scenes of murder (including a model friend of Anna’s), their relationship grows and deepens. In a strange little movie, this is perhaps the strangest part, and I think it is key.

Whenever Frank meets with Anna, he is so much more together – he dresses well; he looks clean; he isn’t constantly breathing hard and talking to himself; he is, if not charming, then at least a seemingly pretty “normal” guy, and it really appears that she enjoys spending time with him – perhaps romantically, or perhaps just as a friend, but regardless of the exact nature of the relationship, these scenes show that Frank can relate – he can be a person – he can control himself and there is some kind of hope for a “normal” satisfying life, free from his compulsive, miserable killing (a hope that will inevitably be dashed on the rocks). It is all kind of – nice – which is more than a little bizarre.

So bizarre that one could just chalk it up to bad writing, simply an entirely unbelievable turn of events – but I don’t. Though the film never outright explains this one way or another, for me, the whole Anna relationship, a significant portion of the movie, tells me that all is not as it seems. Either she isn’t real – or at least she isn’t really the way we see her. No one could be that nice to this creepy stranger – no one could be that available, always willing to drop whatever she’s doing any time he calls on her. No one would ask if a guy they’ve just met has a picture of his mother with him and not find it a little odd that he apparently always does in the pocket of his jacket. She seems like a fantasy – everything to him that his mother never was. So maybe she isn’t real…. Or, maybe she is real and the killings all happen in his mind – the clammy madman, bathed in perspiration and grunting insanely is his true inner life, while on the surface, he appears to be a totally “normal” person, passing through society undetected every day. Is that a more frightening scenario? This doubt in my mind as I view it is never resolved and it lingers after the film is done.

Unsurprisingly, Maniac came in for no small degree of criticism on release, often seen by film reviewers as a vile, irresponsible, reprehensible film, a symbol of how our culture had degraded itself. Gene Siskel, for example, announced in his televised review that it was one of only two films he had ever walked out of (after only thirty minutes), he and his partner, Roger Ebert, no friends to the slasher film in the eighties. While I can understand a person being put off by content like this (and I can easily accept that someone wouldn’t want to spend this time with Frank, wouldn’t want to be in a position of having to pity such a monster, or to be reminded of how commonplace, and thus terrifying, this kind of gendered violence can be), to so flatly dismiss its admittedly queasy artistic value is short sighted at the least, and not worthy of serious criticism.

That said, it is sometimes a rough watch and is clearly not for everybody. But if you are ready for its unpleasantness, Lustig and company will take you on a real horror ride – sometimes enjoyably scary and suspenseful, sometimes sickly and uncanny. You will be confronted with ugliness and tragedy and pain, but also, strangely enough, I think it’s always evident how much, for its creators, this low budget gem was a true labor of love into which they poured their whole hearts. In that, there is beauty, just as in the depth of the film’s grotesque abattoir, there still resides something of humanity.

Three Universal Draculas

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Is there a character in the horror landscape that looms as large as Dracula? My whole life, from long before I was at all into horror, I’ve known him. Simple plastic Halloween masks, Scooby Doo cartoons, funny characters that reference him (the Count on Sesame Street, Count Floyd on SCTV, Count Chocula on cereal boxes), The Monster Squad – he was everywhere. And he was one of the only characters so omnipresent as to warrant an indefinite article – you might see a little kid on Halloween with a widows peak, a medallion, and a cape, and if you ask who or what they are, there was a good chance they might say “a Dracula” – like being a tiger or a princess – he wasn’t just a particular vampire from a particular story – he was his own thing – on one level, synonymous with “vampire,” but also having totally specific traits and markers – and of course all of those characteristics were based on one and only one portrayal, and it wasn’t Christopher Lee (though he’s great), Gary Oldman (I love his performance, but it hadn’t been filmed yet when I was little), or Udo Kier (no way I would have watched Blood for Dracula as a child – too obscure and not exactly kid appropriate – Kier’s most famous line being “The blood of these whores is killing me” after vomiting blood into a bathtub for what feels like 15 minutes because none of the nubile Italian girls he’s feeding on are virgins); of course it was all Bela Lugosi.

So I thought this week, it would be an interesting project to dip back into the 1931 root of this image, this icon (of course the true origins begin much earlier than that). But first I had to reckon with my own expectations of his eponymous film. The last time I watched it was in the late 90s and at the time, while I could kind of appreciate its historical significance, I don’t think I particularly enjoyed it. I remembered it being slow and stately. I remembered it had been made before scoring talkies became common and that the absence of music made it really drag. I remembered, if anything, that some things looked cool, but that it hadn’t blown me away – at least not like the other Universal monster movies I’d seen from the likes of James Whale (Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and The Old Dark House – all favorites of mine); other films I’d seen from its director, Tod Browning, such as Freaks (1932) or, more recently, The Unknown (1927); or Murnau’s granddaddy of vampire cinema, Nosferatu (1922).

So, yeah, I didn’t come to it this time particularly as a fan, but I did come with interest. Furthermore, I thought it could add perspective to look at Browning’s film in comparison with a couple of other Draculas with which it shares strong similarities, specifically, George Melford’s Dracula (1931) which was filmed in Spanish for the Latin American market at night, based on the same script, on the same sets, using many of the same shots, and generally with the same costumes as Browning’s, and also John Badham’s Dracula (1979), starring Frank Langella in the titular role. All three films came from the same studio – Universal Pictures, and all three were based on the same source material, by which I don’t mean Bram Stoker’s novel, though of course that’s there, but rather Hamilton Dean and John Balderston’s drawing room thriller theatrical adaptation first produced in England in 1922 (and actually licensed by Stoker’s widow, Florence, unlike Nosferatu), revived on Broadway in 1927 (starring Bela Lugosi), and further revived on Broadway in 1977 (starring Frank Langella).

Far from identical, all three do share much of the same structure, as well as a lot of dialogue and character choices and therefore, I feel looking at them next to each other helps bring their respective qualities into starker contrast. Primarily I will be examining the two films from 1931 as one of them has really left a shadow over the last century of culture and awareness of the other is helpful in understanding why. At the end, I plan to discuss the 1979 film just a bit – it’s fine, and is a historical-cinematic curiosity with some praiseworthy elements, but ultimately, I don’t feel it’s had the same kind of impact.

Night and Day: The Two 1931 Draculas

Given how much they share in common (sets, costumes, props, animals, shots, source text), it is striking how different these movies are, really playing differently, with different pacing, a different style, and ultimately a different lasting effect. Browning filmed during the day with his cast and crew and apparently, Melford got to watch Browning’s dailies, recreating what he liked and adjusting what he felt he could improve on before shooting with his cast at night. This resulted in two films with many of the same strengths as well as many of the same technical limitations, but they really do diverge strikingly – it is fascinating to compare them.

Interestingly, on first viewing, I enjoyed Melford’s film much more. It is more dynamic, more naturalistic, and benefits from greater narrative flow and a lively energy. Nevertheless, it is Browning’s film which has really stayed with since I watched them both last week, and which I expect will continue to linger in my memory. In a way, each excels where the other falters.

This is from Browning’s film, but the castle is the same in both.

In both cases, as was done for the play, the story has been greatly condensed (it was not a short book), and characters, settings, and events have been reduced to bare essentials, mostly playing out on the grounds of Dr. Seward’s Sanatorium where Renfield is a patient, Mina is Seward’s daughter, and the mysterious count has just moved in next door. This is, of course, after a brief first act in which Renfield travels to Transylvania to meet the Count and arrange for his land purchases in England, and it must be said that the production design is uniformly gorgeous. Kicking off Carl Laemmle Jr.’s cycle of gothic horror films for Universal, it is all spooky, decrepit castles, cobwebs, dark shadows, dramatic lighting, and incongruously placed animals (the castle features possums and armadillos, neither of which were native to Transylvania – I’ve read that the possums were used because censors at the time didn’t approve of rats, and it was assumed that most viewers outside the American southwest had never seen an armadillo and that they just look weird enough to live in a vampire’s castle).

Generally, throughout the post, the English version will be on the left and the Spanish on the right.

Off the bat (whoops), there are differences. While there was notable moving cinematography in Browning’s version, Melford utilized a far more mobile camera and found some very striking shots. Still, though it was more static (and this does affect its pacing), Browning filmed every moment as if intentionally creating an icon, resulting in lasting images that really have staying power. He also absolutely benefitted from Lugosi. Carlos Villarias, who played the Count in the Spanish language version is more active, more natural, and somehow therefore sadly more silly. He plays it big, and is fully committed, but somehow doesn’t rise above being a guy in a cape. On the other hand, Lugosi brings a weight and a weirdness that just lands. Every moment he is on screen, he’s magnetic, holding the eye with a kind of fascination. I think there’s a clear difference in the first few times we see both actors: freshly risen for the night from the coffin, as the coach driver, and staring through magnetic eyes. Villarias does his best, but Lugosi is a special effect that never fails to wow.

The coachman

Still, while his Dracula doesn’t bring the same power, Melford found striking ways to film certain moments. Below, on the left, you can see Lugosi’s Dracula staring down Renfield with his hypnotic gaze. The shot is relatively straight on, with Browning highlighting the eyes with focused hard lighting. On the right, you can see how Melford handles the same moment – a tight close up at a sharper angle – it’s a great shot and very effective, but for my money, Lugosi’s performance delivers the scene – we feel his hunger in the moment, his unsettling urgency to have his business matters dealt with before he takes this man for himself.

Which brings us to our two Renfields. Dwight Fry (in English) and Pablo Alvarez Rubio (in Spanish) are both highlights of their respective films, but they play the character in quite different ways, embodying first his cautious fear and, later, his madness quite contrastingly. Again, there is an issue of naturalism, with Rubio bringing a far more manic, unhinged performance that feels more like a gibbering lunatic and Fry delivering something a bit more stagey, more stylized, but no less effective. Fry’s performance feels quite chosen, quite controlled, even mannered, but when he goes mad, it is all the more chilling. Also, while Rubio feels more “realistic,” I think Fry brings a greater degree of nuance to these first interactions with the vampire in question. There is a tautness to their scenes, a sustained tension. Renfield has come such a long way to find such a strange man in such a creepy place, and he constantly seems to cycle between unsettled, temporarily comforted, fascinated by his charming, off-putting host, and totally weirded out by him. Is it terror or possibly attraction? Either way, it’s richer than Rubio’s well played, but less intriguing histrionics.

On the differences between the films, there are a few illustrative moments after Dracula has left Renfield for the night and the vampiric brides come for him. First of all, I think Melford clearly wins the composition here (there’s a benefit in going second). Whereas Browning has the three ethereal ladies simply enter a doorway and come for him, Melford sets up the shot such that we see them first lurking in the doorway in the distance as a terrified Renfield enters the foreground looking for a means of escape, the audience seeing their approach while, oblivious in his fear, he does not. It is a great, creepy moment.

I had trouble catching a still that does justice to Melford’s shot – in this one, you can barely see Renfield in the lower right corner. Trust me, it works when it’s moving.
Here is the Spanish version moving.

But then, Browning delivers a significant moment from the book lacking in the Spanish version. In Melford’s film, we see the brides bend to feast on the poor man, but in Browning’s the Count returns and sends them away, taking Renfield for himself.

As noted on the Shudder docuseries, Queer For Fear, this moment in the novel seems to have been particularly significant to Stoker, and in his original manuscript, he’d repeated the line, “This man is mine!” over and over again. It’s easy and obvious to conflate the vampire’s predation with sexuality – the hunger for another’s body, the ‘taking’ of the victim, and while the Spanish version restricts Dracula’s diet to one of lovely ladies, Browning shows us a figure with a less exclusive thirst. One could approach this with a simple queer reading, but for me it goes deeper – he is more and less than human and beyond such taboos and/or identifications. This kind of pansexual lust for blood and body was present in core texts such as Stoker’s Dracula and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and it comes down, perhaps through this iconic moment, to later works, such as the novels of Anne Rice or films like The Hunger (1983).

So why does Melford excise the moment? Is it just that he is streamlining the scene and felt having Dracula return, stop the brides in their tracks and feed himself slowed things down? It’s possible – Browning’s scene is certainly slow and silent (both films suffer from the fact that scoring talkies had not yet become standard and there is a lot of silence in both – but it feels more present somehow in Browning’s film). Did he just want to give the brides something more to do? They are cool and mysterious, and it’s a shame we see so little of them. Is it instead a hunch that something that might be read as gay coded wouldn’t play so well in a more machismo oriented market? Who knows? But the absence is notable.

In either case, the next time we see him aboard the Vesta (I have no idea why it was changed from “The Demeter”), Renfield has gone round the bend, respectively with Rubio’s howling, maniacal cackle, or with Dwight Fry’s slow, haunting, vibrato laugh. Again, Rubio feels more like a real crazy person (or what you might expect from the representation of a “real crazy person” in the 30s – mental illness not being well understood yet – as if it is now), but Fry’s laugh is one of the best things in either movie, or any other movie from the decade for that matter. Troubled and troubling, it resonates with an eerie off-ness – suffering and threatening in equal measure. It really is something special.

Also, the image of the dead captain, strapped to the wheel is chilling. Again, this is Browning’s shot, but it repeats in Melford’s film.

And so, Dracula comes to England and high society. This, I think is one of the lasting influences of Bela’s performance, and of the presentation of Dracula spearheaded by the play. In Stoker, Dracula is royal in appearance, but far from handsome:

“His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth.

These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.”

Valentino on the left and Schreck on the right.

Rudolph Valentino he was not. Rather, Max Schreck’s rat-like visage in Nosferatu seems a rather faithful representation. Now, Bela Lugosi’s Count, in his impeccably-tailored tailcoat and vest and his elegant cape is an entirely different creature. Stoker’s vampire was not without charisma or even seductive power, but he also elicited a shudder of revulsion. Lugosi brings a movie star charm to the role. He has the exotic accent and he moves with peculiar mannerisms, but he makes the Count attractive, even sexy for the first time, and this is a quality that would stick. These days it is a rarity to see a Dracula who isn’t a charmer. And, at the same time, Lugosi still retained an element of the monstrous. His Dracula is no tragic romantic figure, chasing lost love and doomed to an eternity of isolation – he is always a predator: a rapacious, dignified, bewitching predator. Whether he is padding through the streets of London to prey on a poor girl selling flowers or hypnotizing an usherette at the opera so that he might better make the acquaintance of his new neighbors, this Dracula never ceases to both captivate and unsettle. He is a beast, but he’s never not the most interesting person in the room. It is a terrible shame that Lon Chaney was cut down so early by cancer (he’d been the first choice for the role), but it is a gift to our culture that Bela got the chance to bring to the screen what he had been doing on stage (which he begged to do, drastically undercutting his earnings in the process). By contrast, Villarias’s Count can wear the cape, but he doesn’t exactly fill it out, and at the worst, he can even come off a bit goofy – forecasting the fate of many a “Dracula” costume wearer in the future – unsurprisingly, you can paint on a widow’s peak and still fail to look cool.

Another striking feature of this Dracula (and I believe this comes down to the play as it is featured in all three versions) is how little he seems to care if people know what he is. In modern times, one is accustomed to blood suckers who feel the need to hide their true nature, but he is apparently wholly unconcerned, and that makes him come off as all the more powerful. The first time he meets the main cast (Lucy, Mina, Jonathan Harker, and Dr. Seward) at the opera, he speaks like one who has lived an unnaturally long life, with lines like,”To die – to be really dead, that must be glorious!” or “There are far worse things awaiting man…than death.” Um, ok, nice to meet you, Mr. Dracula, was it? Care to come around for tea?

Browning’s is better lit, but I like how Melford has the unreflected Count kiss her hand farewell.

Or, later, when Van Helsing has discovered his vampiric nature having glimpsed his lack of reflection in a mirror, Dracula responds, “For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man Van Helsing.” In that moment, Dracula knows that he knows, but while irked at being discovered, he ultimately doesn’t care. He apologizes to his host, Dr. Seward, for reacting so violently (either swatting away the mirrored cigarette case in English in a short burst of rage, or explosively lashing out and destroying the case in Spanish), and exits, telling Seward that his friend, Van Helsing, will explain. He then doesn’t try to run away, knowing that they know he’s a blood sucker – instead, he immediately lures Mina outside to drink her blood under his sexy cape. He is really, really not worried.

Lugosi explodes for the briefest of moments before composing himself, but when he does, you can see how much hatred has been tightly wound within. By contrast, Vallarias bugs out his eyes and throws a tantrum.

The other players are the next significant field of difference. The English speaking cast is good, and their performances seem appropriate to the Victorian origins of the text. They are all proper gentlemen and ladies, a bit staid and respectable, their genteel English world invaded by this bold outsider, this royal figure from beyond their understanding of society or reality, undaunted by conventions of propriety – all qualities that make him both appealing and disruptive. They are all also, kind of boring (on one of the commentary tracks, I think, it was said that the role of Renfield was increased because everyone knew what a drag Jonathan Harker was). Browning thus dully plays up Renfield for all he can, allowing him a far creepier moment at one point when the camera cuts away just as he has finished crawling over to a nurse who has fainted – in the Spanish version, we see him snap out of it and laugh/cry away the notion that he might have hurt her – in the English version, her fate is unknown and we can only assume the worst.

On the other hand, the Spanish speaking cast is consistently less tightly bound, and comes across as far stronger emotionally. While the English version may be more fitting to the social conventions of 1897 when Dracula was written, I’ve got to say that the Spanish speaking cast is far more compelling, and I was more engaged with their trials and tribulations as they are targeted and try to fight back against this threat. Helen Chandler’s Mina looks lovely while she turns from her lover knowing that only unlife awaits her, but Lupita Tovar’s Eva sheds real tears and breaks down in a way that can really tug on your heart strings.

The English version has the better still, but the Spanish version has the better scene.

This is one way that the Spanish version excels. In general, it seems a bit more free, and it also seems less burdened by concerns over what the censor might think (I don’t know much about what could be shown in cinemas in Latin America in the early 30s, but it doesn’t seem crazy to expect that the English speaking market of America and Britain would be more prudish). This can be seen in small things like Tovar’s almost see-through night gown vs Chandler’s shiny silver nightdress.

Plus, Tovar’s exuberance is infectious.

It is evident in acting choices like the English language Van Helsing’s easy, reclining power as he holds the cross vs the Spanish Van Helsing’s dramatic bombast.

Or in the bite marks on Lucy’s neck, shown in Spanish, but only talked about in English.

It comes across in significant plot details that are glossed over in the English language version. For example, we see Harker and Van Helsing come out of a cemetery, but we don’t know why – whereas in the Spanish version, Van Helsing talks about how terrible it was to stake Lucy in the heart, but in doing this terrible deed, they have saved her soul (however, in both versions, Lucy dies so suddenly and isn’t much discussed or mourned afterwards – it’s odd…). Furthermore, there is a strong Catholic religiosity in the Spanish version utterly absent in the English. As far as I can tell, this is both an issue of targeting a very Catholic market (Latin America) and avoiding running afoul of censors who might disapprove of anything that could be seen as sacrilegious. To some extent, this is just a matter of local flavor, but in at least one case, it really changes a key moment, resulting in the Spanish version having a much stronger finish.

As the Spanish version is concerned more with the fates of the souls of those under Darcula’s thrall, it contains a meaningful exchange, the absence of which renders the ending of the English version quite wanting. In both versions, there are many scenes of Seward and Van Helsing dealing with Renfield, who constantly vacillates between devotedly serving his dark master, fearing him, pitying himself, mocking the others, and just trying to eat as many bugs as he can. At one point, in Spanish, when the others are discussing Lucy’s sad end and how they may have to do the same for Mina, Renfield plaintively asks Van Helsing if, even though he is a sad lunatic, he would also do this act for him. This comes back significantly in the final reel after Dracula kills Renfield, either causing him to fall down the curved staircase in English, or, more brutally, directly pushing him off the staircase in Spanish.

At the climax, after Van Helsing has hammered a stake (off camera in both versions) into Dracula’s chest and Mina/Eva have sympathetically felt the pain of the wood piercing their own hearts before finally being freed from the vampire’s dark spell,

Jonathan/Juan and Mina/Eva are about to leave and they ask Van Helsing if he’s coming with them. In the English version, he just says, no, he’ll come later. That’s odd? Why not now? Maybe he needs to pee or something? Ah well, the young couple walk up the stairs in a wide shot and leave. Sometimes older movies end quite abruptly and this is one of those. I was quite surprised to suddenly see the spinning Universal globe and the cursive text of “The End.” In the Spanish version, it all makes more sense and ends with more of an emotional punch.

Browning’s ending

As in Browning’s, the young couple asks if Van Helsing will come with them and he says no, but this time, he goes on to explain that he has to keep his promise to Renfield. The next shot is from the top of the stairs, looking down on the romantic leads as they climb into the light of day, into a more hopeful future, the nightmare finally over, but then Melford cuts to a wide shot in which we see them nearing the top of the stairs as we also see Van Helsing approaching poor Renfield’s corpse, ready to mutilate his body that his soul might survive. It lands with a sting and is, by far, the stronger ending. Personally, I’m not a fan of religiosity in my horror, but it is nice when scenes make sense and deliver on the emotion.

Melford’s ending

Across the board, I would say that Melford’s film in Spanish is consistently more engaging – I felt more of a sense of narrative drive, I enjoyed watching it more (sometimes in Browning’s, I got sleepy), I was more invested in the fates of the characters; by many counts, you might call it the better movie (and some do). And yet, and this is weird, I don’t think it actually is.

Melford’s film plays it straighter, it makes more sense, and I had more fun watching it; however, it also feels less substantial, more superficial, more forgettable. On the other hand, while the camera may be static and the performers stagey, every moment, every element, every choice in Browning’s film feels like it is creating a new icon that will last, that should last. I understand Browning had a very successful career as a director of silent movies (though I’ve only seen one of these, I really loved it), and I have heard the opinion that he shot his Dracula more like a silent movie, not entirely comfortable with dialogue. I don’t know if that’s true, but almost any still from his film could be framed and carry a kind of power. Browning’s lead players: Dracula, Mina, Van Helsing, and Renfield, each speak with an unhurried, chosen steadiness that can slow things down, but they all work their way into the memory. There are reasons that this film, these shots, and these performances have persisted into our culture.

Melford’s film is good (and, having been largely forgotten for many years, it is great that it is now readily available, at least if you’re willing to pick up a physical copy). It is engaging, exciting, and entertaining, but the fact that all of that engagement, excitement, and entertainment somewhat pales in comparison to Browning’s work says something about how significant that work is.

Dracula Tends To Return

In 1977, Frank Langella headlined a revival of Dean and Balderston’s play on Broadway, emphasizing more romantic, sensual readings of the character than had heretofore been dominant. This production was such a success that Universal apparently thought it was time to return to the Dracula well for a new film, still based on the theatrical text, but with a new sensibility.

Directed by John Badham (a director with no other horror credits, but who made many films that I loved as a kid, like Short Circuit and War Games), the 1979 film succeeds in many ways but didn’t exactly blow me away and I probably wouldn’t be writing about it were it not in relation to these other two films. Like those two, it is also rooted in the playscript, and in some ways adapts it more faithfully by setting itself entirely in England, beginning with the Demeter running aground, the crew decimated by an unseen, animalistic force.

Soon Dracula is getting to know the Sewards and the Van Helsings (confusingly, the film switches the names of Lucy and Mina, so now Lucy is the main character and the daughter of Dr. Seward, whereas Mina is the first victim and now the daughter of Van Helsing) and striking up a steamy relationship with Lucy. How these characters and the relationships between them are handled is the greatest strength of the film. From the beginning, we get the sense that Jonathan Harker is pretty much a needy, possessive, petulant jerk and when Lucy (who, we must remember, is the character traditionally known as “Mina”) meets this charismatic, dashing, intriguing man from abroad (with an American accent rather than anything Eastern European), she is drawn to him not because of his dark magics, but because she, as an adult woman with agency and sexual desire, finds him hot.

Thus, the film works best in the first half as they circle each other, falling in love and lust. Dracula does not cast her under a spell, but they mutually fall under each other’s. He can still be dominant, but it feels more like he’s performing a role – speaking dominantly to one who finds that sort of thing attractive, rather than controlling her with magic. This finally culminates in a big lovemaking/blood drinking scene at about the halfway point, after which much of the drive falls out of the movie. I was invested in their flirtation, but once she is thus bonded to him and the focus of the film shifts more to those who would oppose him, it was a bit harder to maintain interest.

Also, while Langella plays the Count successfully as a lonely romantic, I didn’t find him to be much of a monster and he just feels less threatening than one might like when squaring away against Harker, Seward, and Van Helsing. Thus in the second half, I felt a bit adrift as an audience member – Dracula is clearly a bad guy and it’s not like I’m rooting for him, but when there’s no more seducing to be done, he’s not that scary so I don’t really cheer for the people trying to kill him.

But the film has other things in its favor. Set in 1913, it is very attractive and well costumed. It brings back into a Dracula film a few elements from the book that hadn’t made it to screen in the 30s, such as the bit where he climbs down the wall like a lizard or seeing what actually happens to Lucy (even though she’s named Mina here – argh – it’s unnecessarily confusing).

Some moments of vampire business rather work, such as a surprising moment of “Bat!” when it seems Van Helsing may have the upper hand, and some comic moments between Dracula and Renfield. Also, the production design is really fun and over the top – seriously, who designed Carfax Abbey to have a giant Hellmouth in the lobby, a giant Bat as a chandelier of sorts, and how did Dracula find the time to light all those candles? I joke, but it really does look quite cool in a gloriously over the top, gothy kind of way.

Finally, I really got a kick out of Donald Pleasence as Dr. Seward, whose dominant character trait seems to be voraciously, unconcernedly eating while the world around him burns. It’s a fun character, in turns oblivious and helpless, offering pretty poor medicine, such as when he explains to his friend, Van Helsing that of course he’d had his friend’s now dead daughter on the morphine, but laughing away the suggestion that he might give something so harmful to his own daughter (probably right before shoving something else in his mouth).  It’s quite a funny performance – choices were made, and I believed in and enjoyed this odd little man. Also, the degree to which her father, and by extension her home, her whole world, is so banal, small minded, and ridiculous probably underscores Dracula’s exotic appeal for Lucy.

Also, it ends satisfyingly – the boring men come and defeat the big bad vampire, but at the finish, Lucy (Mina) sees his cape fluttering away on the wind and can’t hide a secret smile, relieved that he somehow persists and will continue in the world, maybe even returning to her one day. It’s a more satisfying ending to the love story between them than if it were all just wiped away when he dies, and she felt “freed” from his power. I appreciated that.

However, one aspect that I found difficult was the color timing. I guess Badham had wanted to film in black and white and the studio execs had nixed that idea, releasing the film theatrically in vibrant color. He hated how it looked and when it came to releasing the movie on home video, Badham arranged for it to be a “director’s cut” in which he muted all of the colors.

Ah, a nice day lit exterior. It sure is nice to visit dreary, grey British seaside towns.

Honestly, I found its dinginess just oppressive and deadening and found myself craving some degree of saturation (though exactly what I’d expected did occur – in the middle of the film, when Dracula finally drinks from Lucy, there is a hyper-red artsy sequence which pops all the more for being in the midst of so much grey and beige). But for me, it was not enough to justify just how dull the rest of the movie looked.

So that was difficult. As far as I can tell, most versions available on streaming are the desaturated version (it’s what I saw), though if you want to buy a more recent double disc with both versions, that is for sale. Still, having looked at stills from both versions, I can see why the director disliked the theatrical – the full color doesn’t look great either – and the desaturated version is a bummer. Maybe they should have just let him work in black and white as he’d wanted to – it probably would have had some actual contrast and could have been starkly beautiful.

Also, I must say that I went into this viewing with the wrong expectations. I’d always heard that this was the “sexy Dracula” and had expected something lurid and over the top, perhaps like a Ken Russell flick or maybe like the gloriously pulpy extravagance Francis Ford Coppola would go on to craft in 1992 (a film that holds a special place in my heart). That was the wrong way to approach this film, and it kind of did it a disservice – it is better to say that it focuses on the romance between Dracula and Lucy (which, as described above, it does effectively), but otherwise plays as a more “realistic” period drama, and is in no way sensationalistic. So it is worth watching, but don’t go in looking for a superabundance of sensuality, cause you could be disappointed.

Just Three Draculas?

From The Lost Boys

Of course, there haven’t been only three Draculas – Draculas are everywhere! He’s been in hundreds of films, on loads of TV shows, in comic books and cartoons, and transformed into other characters like Blacula or Bunnicula; the Count gets around. There have been other great performances and also plenty of terrible ones. But I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that most of them are in some way indebted to Browning’s film and to Lugosi’s performance. Almost every gesture Lugosi made, almost every inflection in his voice, every shot, every utterance became a ‘meme’ long before that word was reduced to meaning simply a funny captioned picture on the internet. Rather, a meme is a viral concept – an idea that circulates throughout a culture, replicating itself, planting itself in new hosts from which it can further spread. In Stoker (and in Murnau’s Nosferatu), Dracula was associated with plague – he was a kind of viral illness, a sickness of the blood, a venereal disease that could infect proper, buttoned up, Victorian England. It is only fitting that Lugosi’s iconic persona and Browning’s film should similarly exist as just such an infectious concept.

I gotta say – I started this post admitting that I hadn’t returned to Browning’s film as a fan, but after spending this last week and a half with it, I think I’ve come around. It is iconic for good reason. RIP, Bela. I’m sorry that after gifting our culture something so, so good, you had such a famously hard time of it in the rest of your career.