Orion's Cold Fire

I was thinking of watching the Vance/Walz debate.  But I just didn’t feel like it.  Around ten o’clock I was browsing my X timeline and noticed that several of the people I follow were saying that Vance was doing serious damage to Walz.  But I just couldn’t be bothered.  I figure by tomorrow if he really did serious damage to Walz there would be all kinds of highlights to watch and if there weren’t I would have saved myself a lot of annoyance.  Instead, I decided to celebrate October by watching some Universal Horror.  I watched Dracula.

Now. I’ve seen that movie dozens of times.  I know it inside and out.  But what I did was to try to watch it as if for the first time.  I divorced it from the familiarity that renders it just a collection stereotypes and associated memories and tried to look at the images and the dialog to see how they strike me as cinema.

And it’s a funny thing.  It occurred to me that an audience that was used to cowboy movies and had only in the last year or so begun watching talking pictures might have been very excited by the visuals and the scenes portrayed.  The opening scene of Renfield travelling by horse drawn carriage into the Carpathian Mountains was very atmospheric.  The backdrops of the mountains were very well done.  And Castle Dracula was equally well done.

Renfield’s interview with Dracula was just the right combination of comedy and menace.  I will confess that I never found Bela Lugosi menacing enough to make his Dracula compelling but Van Helsing’s scientific vampire hunter is highly entertaining.  When he confronts Dracula with the mirror and later during his conversation with the vampire where he promises to find Dracula’s coffin and drive a stake through his heart, we are witnessing the central tension of the movie.  Everyone else is blind to how their neighbor from Transylvania is the nexus for all of the death and inexplicable occurrences.  But once Van Helsing shows up with his wolfbane and crucifixes even Renfield starts talking sense.

And that brings me to another aspect of the movie.  The humor between Renfield and the psychiatric orderly Martin is hammy and over the top but provides a very enjoyable counterpoint to the wildly unrealistic dramatic story.  The working-class manners and behavior of Martin and the rest of the staff contrasts to the more aristocratic manners and speech of the Sewards and their friends.  Even the madman Renfield is humanized in his dealings with Martin who affectionately calls Renfield “old fly-eater” and seems genuinely friendly to this vampire-in-training.

The final climax of Van Helsing and Harker storming Carfax Abbey and finishing off Dracula with the promised stake through the heart is a little underwhelming but I think that at the time and at first view Dracula must have been an exciting motion picture that thrilled audiences, especially young women who would have personalized the erotic danger that Dracula was meant to imply for them.

Now of course, for us, after nearly a century of time in which the movie has accreted mostly comical connections to everything from breakfast cereals to Sesame Street characters it’s hard to imagine real fear associated with this film.  But looked at as a piece of art it can definitely be enjoyed for what it is.  There is still blood left in the movie.  And as Bela reminds us, “The blood is the life.”

Update:

War Pig commented:

To the contrary, since I first saw it as a child, Lugosi was the perfect Dracula. While Christopher Lee was more intimidating, Lugosi was the epitome of the Count. Suave, debonaire, charming, intelligent, faultless evening dress which he wore with dignity and aplomb. So smooth and with the east European accent. Yet he was also the very image of evil when he went for the throat.

Mom and my sister sat and watched it with rapt attention. The vampire is, of course, the ultimate Casanova, as well.