A few years ago one of our BRI writers saw the classic 1931 horror film Dracula for the first time …and thought it was terrible. He never knew there was a story behind why the film had so many problems -or even that other people agreed with him that this Hollywood classic was flawed- until he came across this story in a book called Hollywood Gothic by David J. Skal, a leading authority on the history of monster movies.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

One of the nice things about silent films is that everyone can understand them, regardless of what language they speak. Of course, they needed title cards to help explain the plot, but it was easy -and cheap- to write new cards for each foreign market.

As a result American films found their way into countries all over the world, and silent films became a truly universal art form: American studios made half of their revenues from foreign film sales; silent screen stars like Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan became the most recognized human beings on the face of the earth.

SILENT TREATMENT

But the advent of talking pictures changed everything -and not just for silent-screen stars whose thick accents quickly consigned them to the Hollywood scrap heap. Suddenly, American films became incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t speak English. American film studios faced the prospect of losing up to half of their business overnight.

Bela Lugosi

Foreign countries that had become used to a steady stream of Hollywood films found themselves left out in the cold; some threatened to retaliate by slapping tariffs on films with dialogue in English, or by boycotting American films entirely.

Making matters worse, sound recording and synchronization technology was still very primitive, and dubbing foreign-language dialogue onto English-language films was all but impossible. Besides, one of the things that attracted audiences to the first “talkies” was the thrill of hearing their favorite actors speak for the very first time. Even if dubbing had been practical, it might not have been very popular. There was no easy solution to the problem, and as a result many foreign language markets were left out of the early years of the talkie era -except for the Spanish-language market. Spanish was too popular, and Mexico, Central, and South America were too close for Hollywood to ignore.

THE DOPPELGÄNGER ERA

No film crew works 24 hours a day. At some point everyone goes home, leaving the soundstage and the expensive sets unused until morning. So, reasoned Hollywood studios, why not bring in a second cast and crew at night to film foreign-language versions of the same films that were being made in English during the day?

Because the sets had already been constructed and second-string actors and crews could be hired for much less money than Hollywood stars, a film like Dracula that had cost nearly $450,000 to film in English during the day could be remade in Spanish at night for as little as $40,000. By 1930, nearly all of the major studios had begun filming Spanish “doppelgänger” films at night.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT

Lupita Tovar

Universal Pictures was one of the last major studios to adopt the idea, when it filmed Spanish and English versions of the film The Cat Creeps in 1930. Dracula was slated to be only the studios second Spanish-language film.

Paul Kohner, Universal’s head of foreign production, hired director George Melford, who’d worked with Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, and cinematographer George Robinson. A 38-year-old Spanish actor named Carlos Villarias was cast as Dracula, and a multilingual actor named Barry Norton was hired to play “Juan Harker.” A 17-year-old Mexican actress named Lupita Tovar was hired to play Harker’s fiance Eva, who was known as Mina in the English version.

“The American crew left at 6:00 PM and we were ready,” Tovar recalled. “We started shooting at eight. At midnight, they would call for dinner… They didn’t pay us much, but we didn’t complain. We were happy to have some money -most actors were starving.”

FIRST RATE

Since they were using a second-rate cast and crew after Hollywood’s finest had gone home for the day, the assumption was that the film made at night would be inferior to the original. That may have been true in most cases …but not in the case of Dracula.

For all of its popularity and accomplishments as Hollywood’s first vampire film, on a technical level, the English-language Dracula is considered a very poorly made film. A lot of the blame for this goes to director Tod Browning, a hard-drinking recluse with a reputation as a troublemaker. Browning had been fired from at least one studio for his drinking, and was blacklisted from the entire industry for two years in the early 1920s. Making matters worse, Browning had directed nine films starring horror superstar Lon Chaney, Sr. when both men worked for MGM, and he was still reeling from Chaney’s recent death from throat cancer.

Browning’s myriad personal problems found their way into the finished film. “In scene after scene,” Skal writes, “the script demonstrates just how much Browning cut, trimmed, ignored, and generally sabotaged the screenplay’s visual potentials, insisting on static camera setups, eliminating reaction shots and special effects, and generally taking the lazy way out at every opportunity.” In one scene, a piece of cardboard the crew used to reduce the glare of a lamp takes up nearly a quarter of the entire screen, and in the film’s climax, Dracula’s death isn’t even shown on film; moviegoers had to settle for the sound of Lugosi groaning offscreen.

ON PURPOSE

Legend has it that cinematographer Karl Freund got so exasperated with Browning’s slipshod style that he just turned the camera on and let it run unattended, Skal writes:

Indeed, there is one endless take in the finished film featuring Manners (who played Jonathon Harker), Chandler (Mina Murray), and Van Sloan (Dr. Van Helsing) that runs 251 feet, nearly three minutes without a cut that was clearly meant to be broken up with close-ups and reaction shots. At one point Chandler tells Manners, “Oh, no -don’t look at me like that,” in an apparent reference to a dramatic change in his expression. The two-shot, however, shows Manners as motionless as a wax dummy -as if oblivious that the camera is even catching his face.

As if that isn’t sloppy enough, in the final credits, Universal President Carl Laemmle’s title is misspelled as “Presient.”

¡EL VAMPIRO!

The film crew on the Spanish Dracula was another story.

Kohner, who had produced the Spanish version of The Cat Creeps, was headstrong and ambitious -and not above second-guessing the English-language unit, trying to improve upon their work. On The Cat Creeps, he watched the daily footage produced by Robert Julian, the director of the English version, and found the scenes to be poorly lit and uninspiring. So when filming the same scenes for the Spanish film, Kohner relit every set and filled them with atmosphere-creating candles, cobwebs, and shadows that had been missing in the English version. Universal Pictures head Carl Laemmle, Jr. was so impressed with Kohner’s work that he ordered Julian to refilm his own footage, this time using Kohner as his artistic advisor.

Kohner did the same thing during the making of the Spanish version of Dracula. Using a moviola machine that was kept on the set, they watched the daily footage, or “dailies” that had been shot for the English-language version, made notes of the sloppiness and mistakes, and then made sure that their own scenes were better.

One thing they didn’t try to improve on was Bela Lugosi’s masterful performance as Count Dracula. Instead, Kohner insisted that Carlos Villarias imitate Lugosi as closely as possible, and he alone among the actors was allowed to watch the English-language dailies to make sure he got it right. They even let him wear Lugosi’s hairpiece, although it’s unclear whether Lugosi ever knew about it.

Carlos Villarias as Count Dracula

Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

Perhaps the most notable difference between the two films is their use -or lack thereof- of special effects. In scenes showing Dracula climbing out of his coffin, for example, the Spanish version uses a double exposure to show a cloud of mist rising out ofthe coffin and turning into Dracula.

In the English version, the coffin lid starts to tremble, the camera turns away from the coffin and points at a wall …and by the time it returns, Bela Lugosi is already out of the coffin.

NUMERO UNO

When completed, the Spanish version of Dracula cost just over $66,000 to make and only took 22 nights to film, compared to the seven weeks and $450,000 it took to film the English version. In fact, the Spanish crew shot the film so fast that they ended up shooting some of their scenes on sets that weren’t completely finished. Rather than wait for them to be finished, the filmmakers compensated for the empty sets with clever lighting.

The first preview was held in early 1931, before the original Dracula was even finished, and the reviewers who saw the Spanish version were impressed. “If the English version of Dracula, directed by Tod Browning, is as good as the Spanish version,” Hollywood Filmograph magazine wrote, “why, the big U (Universal) hasn’t a thing in the world to worry about.”

Villarias and Tovar

The only problem, of course, was that the English version wasn’t as good, as Filmograph reported a few weeks later. The first few minutes of the film were enthralling, the magazine wrote, but quickly deteriorated after that. “Tod Browning directed, although we cannot believe that the same man was responsible for both the first and later parts of the picture. Had the rest of the picture lived up to the first sequence in the ruined castle Transylvania, Dracula would have been a horror and thrill classic long remembered.”

INTO THIN AIR

Dracula was one of the last foreign-language films produced in Hollywood. By 1931 the Great Depressions was in full swing, and American film studios, desperate to cut costs whenever possible, abandoned Spanish-language markets almost entirely. Universal never even bothered to register the copyright on the film and never had preservation copies made so that new prints could be made when the originals wore out.

The Spanish Dracula made the rounds of Spanish-language countries into the 1950s, then gradually disappeared.

Life After Death

It was thought to be lost entirely until the late 1970s, when an incomplete negative was found in a warehouse in New Jersey. Then, in 1989, a complete version of the film was found in the Cuban Film Archives in Havana. In the late 1990s, Universal and the UCLA Film Archives restored the film and released it to cable and video markets, where it is developing a new following and has finally received the recognition it deserves.

Here is the complete movie for your enjoyment.

(YouTube link)

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.

The 13th book in the series by the Bathroom Reader’s Institute has 504 pages crammed with fun facts, including articles on the biggest movie bombs ever, the origin and unintended use of I.Q. test, and more.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Dracula Postertext – $31.95

Attention book lovers! Are you looking for a great conversation piece to hang on your wall? You need the Dracula Postertext from the NeatoShop. This fantastic poster is created using the first 13 chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The negative space from the text recreates an iconic moment from the book.  This is the perfect piece of art for your castle.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop to see all the amazing Postertext posters available.

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The second I heard "Count Dracula, come to my AID!" / "I’m COM-I-I-ING!" I knew it’d be a big hit!

Team Billy Chong FTW: Link [embedded YouTube clip]

It was a dark and stormy night… no, it really was. And that was the perfect setting for telling one of the scariest stories of all time. Here’s how it happened.

CABIN FEVER

It all started in the summer of 1816. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famed English poet, was vacationing along the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland with his 18-year-old future wife Mary Wollstonecraft. In adjoining villas were their friends, the poet Lord Byron, and Lord Byron’s personal physician Dr. John Polidori. “It was a wet, ungenial summer,” Mary Shelley later wrote, and then the rain “confined us for days.”

The group passed some of their time reading German horror stories. Then inspired by the tales, Lord Byron announced to the group, “We will each write a ghost story.” And with that challenge, two of the most enduring monsters in English literature came into being.

DYNAMIC DUO

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a tale about a mad scientist who assembles a monster out of body parts stolen from cadavers and then brings the monster to life. Polidori, she recounted later, “had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was punished for peeping through a keyhole.” Percy Shelley came up with a story “founded on the experiences of his early life” …and Lord Byron created a story about a vampire.

Wollstonecraft spent the rest of the summer turning her story into a novel-Frankenstein. Lord Byron never did complete his story, but Dr. Polidori was so intrigued by the vampire idea that he scrapped the skull-headed lady and, borrowing from Byron, later wrote The Vampyre, the first vampire novel of any substance to appear in English literature. The Vampyre was published in the 1819 edition of New Monthly Magazine, and earned Polidori £30.

REVENGE!

The Vampyre might have been just another simple retelling of the traditional vampire legends of Eastern Europe, were it not for the fact that Polidori and Lord Byron had once been lovers. Cooped up in the villa in Geneva that summer, they were driving each other crazy. Polidori was jealous of Byron’s increasingly close friendship with Percy Shelley, and, perhaps because of this, he decided to make the vampire character a parody of Lord Byron.

The vampires of Eastern European lore were not that different from today’s conception of werewolves: They were scary, uncivilized creatures, more animal than human. But Polidori’s character was different. His vampire was a nobleman, and an immoral, sinister antihero named Lord Ruthven-not unlike Lord Byron, whose numerous sexual liaisons were the scandal of English society.

The name Ruthven was another dig at Byron. Polidori took the name from Ruthven Glenarvon, the main character of Glenarvon, a popular novel, written by Lady Caroline Lamb, another of Byron’s former lovers. Lamb, too, had intended her character to be a satirical slap at Byron.

PULP FICTION

The Vampyre was modestly successful, but not a hit. Two years after it was published, Polidori, despondent over his failures both as a physician and a writer, committed suicide. Yet, for all its failings, The Vampyre was indirectly responsible for launching Europe’s first vampire fad.

“In Paris,” David Skal writes in Hollywood Gothic, “the theatrical possibilities of Polidori’s tale were quickly grasped.” the first offering-a play entitled Le Vampire-generated huge interest. “The production was reportedly thrilling, controversial-and an immense success,” Skal writes. “The public appetite for vampire dramas prompted a veritable stampede of imitations.” Within just a few years, one Parisian theater critic would complain:

There is not a theatre in Paris without its Vampire! At the Potre-Saint-Martin we have Le Vampire; at the Vaudeville Le Vampire again; at the Varietés Les trois Vampires ou le clair de la lune.

The nobleman-vampire was a common theme in these French works. By the time an Irish writer and civil servant named Bram Stoker arrived in London, England in 1878, vampires had become a common theme in English drama and popular literature as well.

NUMBER-ONE FAN

Stoker had been hired to manage the Lyceum Theatre, the most famous theater in London. He was also the personal assistant of Henry Irving, owner of the Lyceum and the man considered the greatest actor on the Victorian stage. And on top of that, Stoker also liked to write novels in his spare time. He had already written three: The Snake’s Pass, The Winter’s Mou’, and The Shoulder of Shasta. None of them had sold very well or won him much acclaim.

Some time around the year 1890, Stoker decided to try his hand at writing his own vampire story.

TRUE TO LIFE

Stoker decided to try to make the novel seem more authentic by setting the story in the present and inserting as many authentic details as possible. But where would the story take place? Who would the main character be?

Like Polidori, Stoker made his vampire a nobleman, and gave him the name Count Wampyr..but the name didn’t sound right. Stoker renamed him Count Ordog, from the Romanian word for Satan…and then Count Pokol, from the Romanian word for Hell. That didn’t work, either.

At some point, as he was sketching the outlines of his vampire tale, Stoker stumbled upon the name of Prince Vlad “The Impaler” Dracula, a tyrannical 15th century warlord. No one knows for certain when or where Stoker learned of the existence of Dracula, but according to one theory, he made the discovery in 1890 while vacationing in the seaside town of Whitby, North Yorkshire. Stoker, who made the village the center of action for much of his vampire story, reportedly found a book on Vlad the Impaler in the Whitby Library.

Some time later while researching his novel, Stoker met Arminus Vambrey, a professor from the University of Budapest. Vambrey had traveled extensively in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and knew many Dracula tales, which he shared with Stoker over dinner. “After Vambrey returned to Budapest,” Raymond McNally writes in In Search of Dracula, “Bram wrote to him, requesting more details about the notorious 15th-century prince and the land he lived in. Transylvania, it seemed, would be an ideal setting for a vampire story.”

Working in the circular Reading Room of the British Museum Library, Stoker read up on the superstitious beliefs of Romanian peasants, and scoured every book and map he could find that described the geography and features of Transylvania (which he’d never visited). He also placed much of the story in Whitby, and even named the ship in the story the Demeter, after a Russian ship that had run aground there in 1885. He may also have drawn some “inspiration” from the crimes of Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London from August to November 1888.

FINISHED!

After spending more than seven years researching and writing Dracula, Stoker finally finished the book in early 1897.

By the time he’d completed his novel, Stoker had worked for Henry Irving for nearly 20 years. He idolized Irving, and is said to have modeled Dracula’s character after some of Irving’s finest stage performances. Stoker hoped to turn his novel into a theatrical vehicle for Irving, and even arranged for a dramatic reading of Dracula at the Lyceum Theatre in May 1897.

The book, Stoker must have hoped, would demonstrate that he was as talented a writer as Irving was an actor. But it was not to be. “Legend has it,” Stoker’s grand-nephew and biographer Daniel Farson writes, “that Sir Henry Irving entered the theater during the reading and listened for a few moments with a glint of amusement. ‘What do you think of it?’ someone asked as he left for his dressing room. ‘Dreadful!’ came the devastating reply, projected with such resonance that it filled the theater.”

CURSE OF THE VAMPIRE

Stoker had hoped that even if Irving rejected Dracula, the novel might be a financial success. His wife Florence expected as much, predicting that Dracula would earn a lot of money for the family, perhaps even enough for Stoker to quit his his job at the Lyceum Theatre and either retire or take up writing full time.

“The prediction turned out to be mistaken,” Leonard Wolf write in Dracula: The Connoisseur’s Guide. “Though it had a steady small sale, in Stoker’s lifetime it did not earn enough to change the Stoker’s standard of living.”

Stoker continued writing an average of one novel a year-none of which were very successful-and working at the Lyceum Theatre until October of 1905, when Henry Irving died suddenly and the theater closed. He spent the next few years moving from one theatrical project to another until May 1909, when he suffered a stroke that made it impossible for him to continue working. By 1911 he was virtually destitute, and had to apply to the Royal Literary Fund for assistance (he received £100). He died broke on April 20, 1912 at the age of 64. A year later, Florence Stoker was forced to sell her husband’s working notes for Dracula at a public auction. They sold for under £3.

_______________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.

The 13th book in the series by the Bathroom Reader’s Institute has 504 pages crammed with fun facts, including articles on the biggest movie bombs ever, the origin and unintended use of I.Q. test, and more.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Nestled in a chest of drawers existed a list of names of those lives that succumb to the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory. For years, Bathory’s sadistic killing spree went unnoticed as she left a trail of blood from Cachtice Castle to her abode in Vienna.

In Bathory’s Vienna Mansion, her cellar acted as a sadistic torture chamber, fashioned with a cage of spikes. The spikes could be raised or lowered by using as a pulley. Peasant girls and seamstresses with ample bosoms were locked in the cage, while Elizabeth Bathory’s maid Dorothea Szentes prodded the girls with a red hot poker. Elizabeth Bathory would shout perverse words at the girls, forcing them to be impaled upon a spike. She would later bath in their blood, believing it would preserve her youth.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.

Researchers at Ancestry.com discovered that Pattinson and the Transylvanian leader (real name: Vlad III Dracula) are connected through their relationship to the British royal family. Prince William and Prince Harry are Pattinson’s distant cousins; Vlad the Impaler was their distant uncle.

“Tracing Pattinson’s family back to Vlad was difficult research, but the pieces that unraveled created the perfect accompaniment to the Twilight Saga,” said Anastasia Tyler, a genealogist at Ancestry.com. “Without any myth or magic, we find royalty and vampires lurking in Pattinson’s life — making his story just as supernatural as the one he’s playing on screen.”

Link via Nerd Bastards | Images from Geek Tyrant, photo of Robert Pattinson originally from Summit Entertainment

The gesture has a long and complex history, undoubtedly originating as a manual representation of the Devil’s horns; Bram Stoker referred to it in his novel Dracula:

When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a fellow-passenger to tell me what they meant; he would not answer at first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye.

It has subsequently been co-opted by musicians, athletes, politicians, and celebrities for a variety of purposes and meanings.  Students at several universities use the sign in support of their team.  In baseball and football it can mean “two outs” or “second down.”  It is even reportedly an unofficial sign for “B.S.” (as the horns of a bull) in American sign language!

Photo via Old Hollywood.

What if all our favorite pop culture vampires got together in the same room? Pretty much what you’d expect.

Experience Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a new way — in real time. Dracula is an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of letters or diary entries,) and this blog will publish each diary entry on the day that it was written by the narrator so that the audience may experience the drama as the characters would have.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by MonkeyDay.