This movie has exactly two things going for it: the presence of Peter Cushing and a fairly straightforward linkage between Dracula and sex. The rest of the movie is mostly just fine, if threadbare. For all of the impact his portrayal would end up having on popular culture, there is a shocking lack of screentime for Christopher Lee’s Dracula in this movie. He was apparently paid a whopping $750 for his appearance, which by my math works out to about $75 a minute. There are really only eight characters of any substance over the course of the movie’s not-very-crowded 82 minutes so it’s not like anyone gets a huge amount of time on the screen. Luckily for the audience about half of said time is taken up by Peter Cushing, who in this movie was Tom Hiddleston before Tom Hiddleston. The menace of Dracula, meanwhile, is shown mostly by his effect on the women characters of the movie, which sells his presence far more than Christopher Lee himself does.
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| Hammer always with the classy font. |
The plot of the movie takes the barest bones of the book and rearranges them into a much smaller form. We open with Jonathan Harker arriving at the castle of Count Dracula, but instead of traveling from London to finalize a real estate purchase he is instead traveling from a relatively nearby city to start as the Count’s librarian. The entire first five minutes of the move is taken up by Jonathan wandering around the four empty sets that make up the castle waiting for Dracula to appear. There are absolutely no servants and the only person he runs into is a woman who begs for his help and claims that she’s being held against his will. Jonathan Harker’s response to this is a puzzled frown. After she runs away and the Count shows up he apparently doesn’t give it another thought as he’s shown to his room for the night, during which he doesn’t even bother to mention her. After admiring a photo of Jonathan’s fiancé Lucy the Count locks him in, at which point the movie pulls a twist on us by revealing that Jonathan is actually a secret vampire hunter, here to stop Dracula’s evil once and for all.
All of which frankly just makes the entire first twenty minutes of the movie make very little sense. There literally doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the castle other than the Count and the woman, so if Dracula really did hire him as a librarian it would have just been the three of them rattling around the place. The library seems pretty big but that's the one servant he's going to spring for? Also Dracula leaves Jonathan entirely alone to eventually get out of his room, whereupon he runs across the woman again. After she begs for his help and he eventually agrees to offer it she immediately attacks him. Dracula is instantly there to rip her away from Jonathan and the next day Jonathan awakes on his bed, presumably put there by the Count. So apparently it never occurred to Dracula that the other vampire in the place might attack the only other human in the place, and his reaction upon this unforeseen occurrence happening is to put Jonathan in his room and hope he just didn’t notice. This is not long-term strategic thinking.
Jonathan cements his title as the worst vampire hunter ever by wasting daylight to scribble some more in his diary, hiding it outside, then finally making his way to a crypt he suddenly just knows the location of, where he wastes some more time killing the female vampire first instead of taking out Dracula, then taking so long to do it that Dracula literally wakes up and watches as the sun goes down through the window while Jonathan is busy slowly killing the woman. Eventually Jonathan decides he might as well kill Dracula while he already has the stakes and hammer handy but it’s too late and Dracula dramatically looms and fades out the scene.
Luckily this gets us to the Peter Cushing as Van Helsing portion of the movie and although most of the remainder of the plot makes just as little sense there’s a better actor around to at least give us something interesting to follow. The rest of the movie hangs on the slender reed of Dracula wanting revenge on Jonathan for killing his lady companion by attacking slash seducing first Jonathan’s fiancé and then her sister-in-law. We only know that this is why he’s doing what he’s doing because at some point Van Helsing simply asserts that as the reason and his word is good enough for me.
I really can’t say enough good things about Cushing in this movie, and if you’ve seen his other work I’m not going to say anything new to you. He brings a solid dignity to the part and has such an earnest intensity that you never for a moment doubt that he really, really wants to kill Dracula for all of the bad things he’s done. He might be in the middle of a fairly silly vampire story but he never winks at the camera, never for a second seems anything other than deathly serious about the threats around him. That doesn’t stop the script from having him do very dumb things from time to time but Cushing does a good job of making it seem like it’s not his fault.
The real reason I think this movie caught on, and a thread I think is going to run through a lot of future vampire movies, is the completely deliberate and all but explicit link between Dracula and sexytimes. After the opening at Dracula’s castle the movie switches to the unnamed city of Jonathan and Van Helsing and Dracula’s pursuit of first Lucy Holmwood and then Mina Holmwood. Including Jonathan Harker Dracula only attacks three people over the course of the entire movie and only kills two of them. This might have the lowest body count for a movie starring actual Dracula.
After the death of Jonathan we get Cushing’s Van Helsing making his way to the castle. He arrives just in time to see the count’s carriage bolt from the scene. He then finds Jonathan in vampire form in a coffin. We cut from Van Helsing staking Jonathan in the crypt to a scene where he informs Arthur and Mina Holmwood, Jonathan’s fiancee’s family, of his death, and at first it’s not clear there’s been a decent time jump. He offers to tell Lucy but they tell him she’s not feeling well and they’ll tell her themselves. They’re clearly not big fans of Van Helsing. We’re then introduced to Lucy who is sick in bed and it gradually comes out that it’s been ten days since Harker’s death and she’s been all pale and anemic since then. As soon as the audience finally puts all the pieces together she’s left alone in her room and her face instantly changes into what passed in 1958 for intensely horny. She immediately jumps out of bed, flings open the doors to the outside, and arranges herself in bed just so as she stares outside. Soon enough Dracula himself is there and the scene fades out decorously just as he’s leaning down over her. Lee himself would later in life talk up his erotic, romantic take on the vampire, and that’s sure to be showcased in other movies, but in this one all of the heavy lifting is done by the expressions on the actresses’ faces.
Soon enough Lucy dies despite Van Helsing’s best efforts and he and Arthur Holmwood team up to put her down and then track down and dispose of Dracula himself. What’s most likely unintentionally amusing is that while the two men are racing around tracking down clues, bribing border guards for addresses, and investigating morgues, Dracula just sends a messenger for Mina Holmwood, gets down to business with her, and then moves into their basement. The investigative duo even manage to see nothing amiss when Mina Holmwood wanders in first thing in the morning with her evening coat pulled tight around her throat and an expression on her face of intense satisfaction. And this is deliberate, the director was later quoted as instructing Melissa Stribling, the actress, for the scene, “Listen, you should imagine you have had one whale of a sexual night, the one of your whole sexual experience. Give me that in your face!” They knew what they were doing.
After a very badly botched attempt at luring Dracula into attacking Mina while Arthur and Van Helsing stand guard outside in wait for him, which Dracula masterfully foils by just already being in the basement, they realize where he is, chase him out with Mina in tow, and thus begins a race to his castle before sunrise. They arrive just a few minutes behind him and while Arthur comforts his near-dead wife Van Helsing confronts him in the largest of the four empty sets that make up the castle and it’s only here, at minute 78 of 82, that you realize that Dracula and Van Helsing have never actually met before this moment. They struggle for a few minutes until Van Helsing leaps from a table and tears the curtains from a window, letting in the morning sun. He uses two candlesticks to form a cross to fend off the vampire and keep him in the sunlight. Dracula crumbles to dust, the end.
This was not the first Hammer Horror film, that title belongs to either ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’ or ‘The Curse of Frankenstein,’ depending on how technical you feel like getting, but it was a huge box office success and cemented Hammer’s turn towards horror. Cushing would reprise his role as Van Helsing in 1960’s ‘The Brides of Dracula’ and Lee would return as Dracula in 1966’s ‘Dracula: Prince of Darkness.’ This move established the popular image of visible fangs and red contacts and popularized the idea of professional vampire hunters, stakes always at the ready. This set a baseline for gore and sexuality which, while tame by any modern standards, really was seen as daring at the time, and vampire movies would only get daring-ier. It mostly holds up as a lean, vampire-light vehicle for Peter Cushing and was the inspiration for a lot more movies to come.
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