I recently spotted that the 1931 film Dracula was playing on the Horror channel, and duly recorded it with one eye on a seasonal blog (this) and another eye on a suitably creepy family night-in with a classic, justified by the proximity to Halloween. Frankly, I was sceptical about the latter, given that my mind’s eye visualisation of an idealised family event or shared experience doesn’t always pan out as imagined; I suspected that the obvious ancientness of the movie would turn off teenagers. Indeed, it did turn one of them off and she soon drifted vampirically off to her bedroom, but the other one, and her mother, were gratifyingly drawn into this atmospheric and trope-laden classic.

The cultural icon that is Count Dracula had had its treatment earlier than this movie: the German Expressionist filmmaker F W Murnau had filmed Nosferatu in 1922 (though without permission and subject to a copyright infringement claim brought about successfully by Bram Stoker’s widow). The first authorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel was the stage play written by Irish playwright Hamilton Deane in 1924 and revised for Broadway in 1927 by John L Balderston. The Broadway production cast Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the lead role, which helped him (though not without opposition from certain quarters) secure the role in the film version four years later.

Directed by Tod Browning, the film premiered at the Roxy Theatre in New York City on February 12, 1931. Newspapers reported that members of the audiences fainted in shock at the horror on screen. This publicity, shrewdly orchestrated by the film studio of course, ensured that people would flock to see the film, and indeed, within 48 hours of its opening, it had sold 50,000 tickets, and ended up being the biggest of Universal’s 1931 releases.

The mesmerising performance of Bela Lugosi was of course a key element in the success of the movie. It is said that he was quite an odd and quiet man; David Manners (who played Jonathan Harker) said: “He was mysterious and never really said anything to the other members of the cast except good morning when he arrived and good night when he left. He was polite, but always distant”. However, on screen he certainly looked and acted the part to the point of creating an enduring archetype.

The atmosphere of the movie is cleverly crafted, and it has all the defining features that you’d expect: the huge, cobweb-bedecked castle, with an impossibly large and ranging staircase, an inordinate number of candles and hovering bats at the window. Lugosi nails the Count’s stand-offish charm and of course the authentic eastern European accent, and there is a lingering, pervasive sense of danger.

Enjoy this clip, the excellent “mirror scene” in which, after a tense meeting between Dracula, Van Helsing, Dr Seward, Jonathan Harker and his fiancée Mina, Van Helsing notices something very unusual…