Dracula is what you might call a bona fide cinematic icon. From Bela Lugosi’s official celluloid origination of Bram Stoker’s vampire in 1931 to Christopher Lee’s outings as Dracula in the Hammer Horror films from the ’50s to the ’70s, the villain has enduring appeal. This comes thanks to some truly brilliant actors cementing his status, not to mention countless appearances throughout movie history, from live-action to animation.
Also integral to the OG vampire’s staying power is his canny ability to morph and change, standing as a marker of our time, whatever that time happens to be. Thanks to filmmakers imagining new ways to represent the social and cultural climate of the era through him, we’ve seen the Prince of Darkness transform from “the Monstrous Other” to “Dark Romantic” — and now, in this year’s irreverent horror-comedy Renfield, “Toxic Narcissistic Boss” (played, of course, by Nicolas Cage).
“Dracula changes so much — he is a shapeshifter,” Dr. Laura Westengard, an associate professor of English at City University of New York who specializes in gothic literature, visual culture, and queer studies, told Mashable. “He changes in order to reflect the anxieties and desires of the time and place… so we can really learn a lot about culture and society by looking at the evolution of the vampire figures that resonate.”
In Renfield, which screenwriter Ryan Ridley describes as a “pretty era-appropriate” adaptation, Dracula’s bug-eating familiar (Nicholas Hoult) becomes the superhero protagonist trying to escape his boss and their centuries-old, codependent relationship. “This is an era of a lot of abuse of authority being exposed,” Ridley told Mashable. “What we’re really talking about is why we stay with people that aren’t very good for us,” director Chris McKay added.
It’s a fresh take, but it’s grounded in the character himself.
In Bela Lugosi, the count gets a glamorous makeover.
Credit: Universal / Kobal / Shutterstock
For McKay, Dracula would be nothing without Bela Lugosi’s seminal performance. “Whether it’s Count Chocula or the count on Sesame Street, people have been influenced by Bela Lugosi,” McKay said. “Those movies are an indelible piece of film history and pop culture.”
While Lugosi’s Dracula was the first cinematic iteration to be made with sound, a silent offering came first. Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau’s unauthorized German take on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, was released in 1922 and positioned the Transylvanian bloodsucker as “the Monstrous Other” through Max Schreck’s Count Orlok. He sported a hooked nose, creepily long fingernails, bulging eyes, and a bald head. It was an aesthetic that leaned into the antisemitic themes from Stoker’s novel and reflected the anti-Jewish sentiment in Northern Europe at the time. Orlok might have been closer to the repulsive literary appearance of Dracula — minus the mustache — but when Hollywood got its hands on the film rights, the count got a glamorous makeover.
“Whether it’s Count Chocula or the count on ‘Sesame Street’, people have been influenced by Bela Lugosi.”
Hungarian actor Lugosi fought hard to secure the eponymous role in Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula. He was fighting against the “fear of the other” of Universal studio execs who wanted an American actor to play the count, despite the fact that Lugosi had impressed widely on stage. Ultimately, the actor’s performance — and his thick accent, handsome features, slicked-back hair, and caped uniform — set a new standard for the vampire.
“My students are fascinated when I say that Bela Lugosi was a heartthrob,” said Westergard. “He was debonair; he was elegant and wore these beautiful tuxedos. He’s not really running around in a cave.”
Set primarily in Victorian London, Browning’s Dracula plays on societal fears against foreigners; in this case an Eastern European who penetrates Polite Society and refuses to adhere to its civilized conventions of conservatism or repress his most base desires. The film is also, said Westengard, indicative of “Gothic literature and a cinematic culture [of the time] that allowed folks to be excited and titillated by transgressive sexualities, monstrosity, and behaviors that were completely out of conventional norms — as long as at the end, they were destroyed and the status quo was re-established.”
Dracula is not allowed to win, but you’re certainly allowed to lust over him.
Dracula rides the thin line between fear and desire.
Credit: Hammer / Warner Bros / Kobal / Shutterstock
There’s an erotic aura to Lugosi’s performance that only got more explicit with each new actor stepping into Dracula’s cape. Christopher Lee in the Hammer Horror films was a worthy successor; tall, dark, and handsome, he enticed audiences in 1958 with the first of his 10 outings as Dracula. And he was quintessentially changeable; one minute polite and charming, the next blood-eyed and robustly predatory.
“The most effective cinematic versions of vampires are the ones that can ride the thin line between fear and desire,” Westengard said. “The Hammer films were able to function within the Hays Code [production guidelines that censored motion pictures] in terms of amping up the horror and downplaying the sexuality to a degree, but as soon we get to end of that era, we have this spike in eroticism in the late ’60s and ’70s.”
For Jewelle Gomez, playwright, poet, activist, and author of lesbian vampire series The Gilda Stories, Frank Langella’s performance in both the 1977 Broadway adaptation by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston and John Badham’s 1979 film Dracula typifies that lubricious evolution of the character. “He delivers a sensuality that really underlies the power of the figure,” Gomez said. “His physicality is full of power, even in his stillness, and he has this wild thing he does with his eyes where they move/twitch in a mesmerizing way.”
Langella’s count is a true voyeuristic seducer intent on making the character of Lucy, played by Kate Nelligan, his vampire bride, and the journey makes good on their palpable sexual tension. Badham’s Dracula certainly paved the way for Francis Ford Coppola to up the horny ante with his 1992 adaptation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring Gary Oldman as the Dark Romantic antagonist. It’s the closest cinematic rendering of Stoker’s narrative up to now, but also steeped with campy, homoerotic, and amorous visuals as well as a love storyline that humanizes Dracula in a deeper way.
This count in Coppola’s version is a 15th-century lovesick warlord who blasphemes against god after his lady love commits suicide. Three hundred years after becoming a vampire, he plots to take Mina (the reincarnation of his dead paramour) as his eternal lover. She’s the repressed virgin, and once Dracula regains his youthful appearance through feeding, he becomes a sexy and exotic rebel with a bloodthirsty cause.
Oldman, like Lugosi, Lee, and Langella, embodies Dracula as a desirable screen icon. “There is the audacity of presenting a cisgender, white male with an outrageous style, manner of speaking, and intensity,” said Gomez. “At the same time, we are asked to see that he is trapped, too. He’s kind of like the motorcycle bad boy in teen movies — outside the norm both in appearance and action, and flaunting law.”
Through shifting power and perspectives, the vampire endures.
Credit: Aip / Kobal / Shutterstock
Thirty years before Coppola’s version, there was director William Crain’s 1972 Blaxploitation film, Blacula, in which actor William Marshall exemplified the tragic romantic vampire trope and established the Black vampire onscreen. Blacula added historical realism to conventional Dracula lore by grappling with the legacy of the slave trade and having Marshall’s African prince enslaved into vampirism by the white Count. It’s an iconic performance from the actor, but, as with the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter, starring Gloria Holden as the titular vampire, these substitute Dracula protagonists weren’t given the same autonomy as the original white, male character.
“Earlier versions which featured women in the role or an African American confused some viewers because the original was lifting up the Victorian, white male as the master over life and death,” noted Gomez. “Shifting that power to the Other appealed to women or people of color, but the writing never really took into account (socially or politically) the shifting perspective.”
Dracula’s appetite for women in the original novel reflected patriarchal attitudes of dominance and subordination more than romantic intent, and Gomez lamented the lack of film adaptations that have truly interrogated this misogynistic theme: “He took women to be his ‘wives’ but they ultimately were a sacrifice to his life.”
Westergard agreed with this assessment. “In earlier versions of Dracula, sometimes it’s just about taking a woman away from the other men,” she says. “It may not be that Count Dracula really wants Mina or Lucy, but he wants to show the other men that he has power over their women. It’s about control, power, and women as tokens.”
While 2022’s The Invitation, directed by Jessica M. Thompson and written by Blair Butler, attempts a feminist reexamination of Dracula’s misogyny to mixed results, Renfield avoids gender politics in favor of a Dracula who is “a supernatural, toxic narcissist.”
Nic Cage offers another Dracula to remember.
Credit: Universal Pictures
Until Cage got the role, Renfield’s Prince of Darkness was going to be a straighter villain. “[Cage] flipped the chemistry so Dracula was the craziest, weirdest thing of the movie,” said Ridley. “Everyone wanted to have more scenes of Dracula, and I’m sure at this point now, people wish there was even more.”
Cage is a magnetic actor who brings a rigorous theatrical energy to Dracula. His performance is both grounded in the humanity of an egotistical, power-hungry man who can’t bear the idea that someone wouldn’t want to be his servant, and heightened by the fantastical realm that this timeless genre narrative provides.
“Once you realize, ‘Oh, this is a bizarre Nicolas Cage character,’ there are no rules anymore, anything works,” Ridley said of giving the actor free rein to make Dracula his own. “He was playing the character scary; sometimes he’s playing him comedic. A part of me wondered if all this was going to come together cohesively — because it’s a different Dracula in every scene — but it’s all underlined by the fact that it’s Nicolas Cage’s energy, and that makes anything OK. So, as strange and eclectic as it was, it all works because it’s through the vessel of his energy and his own iconography.”
Cage’s distinct actorly flourishes might just have secured his place as another iconic Dracula to remember. It certainly won’t be the last Prince of Darkness to grace our screens, but Renfield is proof of his malleability as a villain for filmmakers to prey on and explore audiences’ deepest fears and desires.
Renfield is now in theaters. You can read Mashable’s Renfield review here.
