Films: 1950s
(1958) Horror of Dracula
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Horror of Dracula
Director: Terence Fisher
Release: 1958
The Germanic eagle that fills the screen in the first moments of Fisher's remake of Todd Browning's 1931 "Dracula" resets the cultural barometer. No longer toying solely with the idea of outsiders and cultural subversion, "Horror of Dracula" is almost explicitly a post-World War II film, and it deals with Nazism.
Fisher and writer Jimmy Sangster have moved the action entirely into Germany, where Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) is no mere real estate lackey - he's an assassin on a mission to kill the Count. Undone by Christopher Lee's animalistic Dracula, Harker is left in the catacombs a vampire himself and Dracula races west to plunder his left-behind fiancée Lucy.
Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), rather than waiting in some removed English laboratory, is in the mountains - soon to dispatch Harker's undead double. "Horror of Dracula" is vigorous, violent, and full of muscular twists on Bram Stoker's original tale.
Shot through it is the notion of a quest. Dracula is not lurking in castles and abandoned abbeys; he is on the move and plotting a kind of invasion.
Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood - following Lucy's death - oppose Dracula to stop his plan, which seems to have more to do with spreading vampires through Europe than it does some personal feud or lure to the familiar characters of Lucy and Mina.
Among Fisher's characters, the debate is not so much over belief in the supernatural, but more importantly over the need to act in the face of evil. Van Helsing spends little time trying to scientifically justify vampires – a la Browning's incarnation of the character -- Cushing's Van Helsing outright asks Holmwood what he is prepared to do in the face of the Count's onslaught. He describes the wider-reaching consequences of inertia. The equation is simpler and more imperative.
The direct parallel to Western European powers conceding territory to the Nazi advance is plain - and the geography and nationality of Fisher's setting and characters - added to the notable statuary outside Dracula's lair -- drives (a dangerous pun, perhaps) the point home.
The conversion of the ally into the enemy, in this case, via fangs and supernatural influence, carries new significance in Fisher's milieu. Not only is the loss of Harker and Lucy a spiritual destruction, it is the echo of political despair as nation-states folded to Hitler's closing grip. Also of new significance is the village at the foot of Castle Dracula. No longer does the cowering of the peasant represent only the superstitious paralysis of the Old World, it is an ominous mirror of the daily life carried on under the smoke of ovens.
In that context, when Van Helsing rips open the curtains of Castle Dracula and soaks Lee's snarling, brutal monster in the rays of the sun, Fisher is illustrating the lesson of World War II.
It is a world-point: That ideological evil is not slain by a piece of wood through a muscle, it must be burned away and disinfected by the light of day. Only when the protective shield is torn away - when the shroud of denial and inactivity is discarded - can the cleansing of the thing take place. Dracula is no coffin-bound corpse at the end of "Horror of Dracula," he is given a forceful and less ritualized sending off - reduced to a greasy stain on the tile. The catharsis at the end of Fisher's film is intentional.
As he worked on subsequent installments of the Hammer Dracula franchise, Fisher would revisit the ideology of Nazism, and illustrate its lingering presence in Europe. For the moment, he allowed his viewers one victory against tyranny.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Horror of Dracula, 1958
The Germanic eagle that fills the screen in the first moments of Fisher's remake of Todd Browning's 1931 "Dracula" resets the cultural barometer. No longer toying solely with the idea of outsiders and cultural subversion, "Horror of Dracula" is almost explicitly a post-World War II film, and it deals with Nazism.
