Dracula (1931) a good film, BUT NOT a great one...

It seems that it begins and ends in media res, though of course it doesn't. Unlike Stoker’s book (which is not exactly overt on the matter either), we do not find out much of the Count's history, except for tidbits from Van Helsing, and instead begin with a being already known and feared by the populace. Renfield does not set out from London; he is already near the close of his journey when we meet him. We cut around quickly, almost senselessly, between Transylvania, the ship, the streets of London, the Seward house. The picture ends without clarity or much sense, even; Lucy is of course left wandering the night without a close to her story, and Van Helsing has still more to do when Harker and Mina ascend that near-ridiculous staircase.

Now, let me insist that I am not making the case that any of these factors are intentional. In fact, in some cases we know they’re not. But let me insist they are the stuff of dreams. In dreams, very little is explained; you do not have a clear story-telling structure; you do not have detailed or sensible character motivations; you are simply tossed along a tale of nonsense, a phantasmagoria, without rhyme or reason, but often (especially in nightmares) with a mood of all-encompassing, yet formless, heaviness. The Old Dark House similarly breaks the rules of story-telling, but without the last quality: dread. Formless, even senseless or decadent, dread over the whole thing. (God, now I make it sound as if the movie isn't fun!)

Perhaps that is why Dracula seems primordial and its mistiness poetic. It does not behave as we expect movies to behave, it does not possess the inner story-telling logic that we expect movies to have. It is more a collection of images, strung together with words and conjuring up atmosphere even in its talkiest scenes—more akin to Alice in Wonderland than to Frankenstein.

These are qualities that, whatever Dracula’s cinematic lack of sophistication, I find terrifying and overpowering in a way that I find no other Universal horror, love them though I do. The Mummy comes the closest (though its story is far more linear), and The Black Cat. Whale is one of my favorite directors, but I feel that he is clearly going for other goals; let me note, again, that I was never particularly scared, even when I was young, by Frankenstein or Bride.

I think all of my comments here go back to two images in Dracula, and neither one, curiously enough, is from the evocative opening. I think of the scene in which Lugosi approaches the flower girl, an innocent, and consumes her—and of the beautifully-done yet rarely-mentioned scene in the Sewards’ garden, in which the inky blackness of Dracula’s cape—or is that, truly, the night around them both?—swallows up poor Mina, in swirling fog and deafening silence.

An ancient thing, a cinematic poem, a formless dream? Naturally, these are purely subjective, and—again—at a purely cinematic level, Dracula is weaker than nearly any other Universal horror. But it retains its power to terrify—not in a “jump horror” way, but more akin to an Aickman story—a power to suggest more than it tells, and to fill with a sense of mood and atmosphere that has not left us all these years later.