Dracula

DRACULA A. D. 1979

Frederick C. Szebin

Through all of the cinematic versions of Bram Stoker’s groundbreaking 1897 vampire novel Dracula that remain chilling (Christopher Lee’s first Hammer outing, directed in 1958 by Terence Fisher), interesting (Flesh For Dracula, AKA Andy Warhol’s Dracula, directed in 1974 by Paul Morrissey, which has to be seen to be believed), and over-rated (Lugosi’s 1931 ‘classic’, directed by Tod Browning, a film which drags like a particularly uninteresting dream, rather than grabbing its viewer like an unnerving nightmare) lies director John Badham’s woefully overlooked and underrated 1979 version with Frank Langella reprising his successful 1977-78 Broadway role.

The actor became so popular as the titular jugular-biting Count on stage that he ultimately served as the single impetus to reshoot the undead patriarch’s adventures.

With his now-legendary Saturday Night Fever a box office smash by the Christmas of 1977, Badham began looking for a new project to add to a filmography that included such TV movies as Isn’t It Shocking?, The Godchild and The Law, as well as the feature The Bingo Long All Stars and Traveling Motor Kings. Over the next few years he would add Whose Life Is It Anyway?, War Games, Blue Thunder, Short Circuit, Stakeout and The Hard Way. At the same time, Universal Studios wanted a remake of the venerable Dracula, a property they had held the feature film rights to since 1930. Langella’s turn on Broadway with the play that made Lugosi a stage star in 1927, then a cinematic legend, seemed to be setting the actor on the same road.

By the 1970s, Hamilton Deane’s and John L. Balderston’s 1927 play was staged more for chuckles than chills, with a definite air of camp. This was not a tact that Badham was interested in taking for his film. He saw Langella in the play during late January, 1978 and began talking with Universal executives about what approach to take on the much-filmed Count, and began considering why he would want to.

“First of all,” he says, “I was a big fan of Frank Langella, and of the whole Dracula story. When I was doing television I did a lot of shows for Night Gallery, and I liked doing those spooky things. I thought it would be fun to revisit this material, go back to Bram Stoker’s novel, see if we could bring a production that was closer to it, and take a particular point of view that appealed to me that was different from the stage production. The stage production had two stars—Frank Langella, but it also had those fabulous Edward Gorey sets. They were his fabulous black and white drawings translated into flats. It was very two-dimensional. He created a living room with the books drawn on the wall and everything. And because the drawings were so clever, it worked. There was a slightly campy approach to the material like, ‘Aw, we’re just kidding, folks! We know this is a 1927 play by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane, and we don’t really think that in these modern days of 1978 that we would be taking this stuff seriously.’ They were winking at the audience. Now, I looked at it and said first of all, you can’t do the Edward Gorey sets on film because film is too realistic a medium to take that kind of stuff. You might be able to do interiors, but the minute you went to exteriors it would be so jarring.

“And secondly,” Badham continues, “you have an extremely good-looking and charismatic leading man in the form of Frank Langella. If you look at the character of Dracula as an extremely evil person, it doesn’t mean that he has to be ugly. When you think about many of the so-called evil temptations of the world that we face, they are quite often packaged in extremely attractive ways. That’s one of their appeals; a successful evil is the one that we think is terrific. You can say, for instance, cigarettes are in this category. ‘I smoke because I want to be cool and I want to be admired, and people who smoke cigarettes look cool! Oh yeah, yeah, it says I’m going to die, but I don’t take that seriously.’ Alcohol, drugs, wild, wild women—you can pick your poison. But, usually, any evil that is successful comes in a very attractive package. That’s the seduction of it. This was the point of view that we set about to take with Frank playing this character, that we would not have wild eyes and fangs on him, and we would see the devastation he caused as he goes through the world looking just fine. What we would create would be romantic in nature and the settings in Cornwall, which was standing in for Whitby in the north of England, I knew were going to be very pretty, beautiful and kind of romantic.”

To take on the task of adapting this kind of Dracula, Badham turned to W. D. Richter who had just written Philip Kaufman’s smart remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and would later script Home For the Holidays for Jodie Foster, and direct The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzia; Across the Eighth Dimension. But it was another project that had originally gotten Badham and the scribe together.

“John was originally going to direct Brubaker,” says Richter about the fact-based Robert Redford prison film that was eventually directed by Stuart Rosenberg in 1980. “I don’t think we quite had a green light, but it seemed like the movie was going to get made. We were working on the script, which I had written several years before. I don’t recall how far development got, but it was more serious than, ‘we might make this movie.’ He was offered Saturday Night Fever as a ‘go’ movie, and it was a wise decision on his part to take that because Brubaker might not have gone at all.

“John and I knew each other as a result of that project,” Richter continues about his involvement in the film in early 1978. “I can’t remember exactly why (executive producer) Walter Mirisch (who, along with his brothers Harold and Marvin, produced The Magnificent Seven, West Side Story, The Great Escape, In the Heat of the Night, Midway and many others) called me about Dracula, but John was already involved. We met and had a very nice lunch where they said, ‘If we’re going to do this, let’s do it now,’ and Walter revealed the release date of the movie! I don’t think we’d even made a deal, but that’s how determined the studio was to make it because they were basing their decision on Langella’s successful Broadway play. That was really the reason to make it, rather than somebody deciding to go back and do the book again, although we all immediately decided—right or wrong—that you couldn’t do that tongue in cheek, campy romp that was on the stage at the time.”

This romp was originally devised as a frightening mystery play, first by Hamilton Deane for himself to play Van Helsing, that was ultimately revised by John L. Balderston when the play was brought to Broadway by entrepreneur Horace Liveright in 1927. Both versions, the Deane play eventually slipping into obscurity, existed much to the chagrin of the widow Florence Stoker, who not only wasn’t consulted on the changes done to her husband’s work, but missed much of what was chilling and original about it.

Much has been made of Bram Stoker’s trip to the homeland of Vlad ‘The Impaler’ Tepes, the rather roguish 15^th Century Romanian ruler who stuck his enemies living on sharpened wooden pikes to make his politics known to those who would oppose him, but the famed warrior/king had less to do with what would ultimately become Dracula than did the author’s impressive knowledge of archaic mysticism and his own imagination.

Using the diary and letter form of fiction utilized in previous Victorian dramas, Stoker offered us Johnathan Harker, a young English solicitor who travels to Transylvania to complete a real estate deal with Count Dracula, an iconoclastic old gentleman living in the ruins of a once-great castle. Harker discovers Dracula to be an undead monster with a triad of vampiric wives, and a plan to use him to further his understanding of England and that country’s language, then leave the poor solicitor to his wives. Harker witnesses such horrid occurrences as the Count crawling down the sheer wall of his castle like an evil lizard, and the handing over of a bundle to his wives that Harker is certain is a kidnapped infant. He attempts to kill Dracula with a spade while the demon rests in one of his coffins, but finds himself unwilling to commit such a deed. The Count leaves for England with crates filled with his native soil, and Harker escapes the castle, running into the wilds of the unforgiving forests and mountains of the strange land.

The tale switches locations to England, where we go to the journal of Harker’s fiancee, Mina Murray, a fine example of the “New Woman” forcing her way through rigid Victorian society. Her best friend, Lucy Westenra, is a virtual opposite: demure, a perfect vision of Victorian womanhood who suddenly begins sleepwalking after the beaching of The Demeter, a ship that wrecks and is found to be lifeless, except for a lone wolf that leaps from it and runs down the beach before anyone can catch it.

Despite the assistance of Dr. Seward, who runs a sanitarium next to the Carfax estate where Lucy was living, Lucy slowly succumbs to the anemia that has been torturing her since the sleepwalking episodes began, and dies. Mina deals with this grief when she finds her lost fiancee has been returned to England and has been suffering from brain fever. As he recovers, Mina begins to exhibit the signs of anemia and sudden blood loss that plagued Lucy, who she believes has been visiting her in the night and might be “the lady in white” who has been attacking local children. Dr. Seward contacts his old friend and teacher, Abraham Van Helsing, and the two come to the nearly-unbelievable conclusion that all three events are the results of vampirism. In one of the novel’s most chilling scenes, Lucy is hunted, staked and beheaded to save her mortal soul and put her body to rest.

Having regained his strength, Harker helps the Doctors and Mina hunt Dracula, who has reached his fiancee through Renfield, an insect-eating madman in Seward’s sanitarium who believes he can lengthen his life by devouring the life force of the bugs he captures. Renfield’s fear of eternal damnation starts to out-weigh his lust for eternal life, and he begins to disobey his vampiric lord. Dracula kills him as the humans find and destroy all but one of the Count’s earth-filled boxes. In his lone sanctuary, Dracula escapes back to his homeland with local and loyal henchmen. But Harker, Seward, Mina and their friends, Lucy’s grieving love, Texan Quincey Morris, and former suitor for Mina’s affections, Lord Arthur Godalming, chase the Count over water and land, finally dispatching him, but not without the loss of Morris, who dies happily to save Mina from the horrors Dracula had planned for her.

For The Vampire Play Dracula that Deane and Balderston created, much was left out to create a drawing room thriller that could be performed cheaply on the stage. Balderston made Mina Dracula’s main victim because, according to David J. Skal’s excellent Hollywood Gothic, the author preferred a name that had “twin connotations of light: the redeeming and the luciferic”. It is a change that affected the public’s knowledge of Dracula ever since; even Richter and Badham did it.

The three act play opens in the library at Dr. Seward’s sanitarium with John Harker anxious about Lucy’s condition of severe lethargy, anemia and blood loss. Mina has died and Lucy is showing the exact symptoms that led to that death. Professor Van Helsing has been called and hears of Mina’s symptoms just as Renfield, a fly-eating madman with a secret connection to the show’s title character has escaped from his cell. Renfield wants to leave the sanitarium to “save my soul.” Van Helsing questions the man and is suspicious of his involvement in the mystery. Renfield attacks the elder doctor after Van Helsing shows him wolfsbane. The madman is led away. Renfield’s behavior to the herb solidifies Van Helsing’s impression. He describes the legend of the vampire and firmly believes that is what they are facing here.

Act two opens in Lucy’s boudoir. Dracula hypnotizes the maid to follow his will, then disappears out a window as Van Helsing enters. The vampire and Van Helsing face off, with the good doctor almost losing his soul to the creature. He has finally convinced Harker of Dracula’s origin and intention. Scene three opens in the library. Renfield has escaped again, the bars of his window pulled apart. He slinks into the library when Seward and Van Helsing discuss the problem at hand. He had disobeyed the Master, he tells them. Lucy enters, drawing closer to being the vampire Dracula wants her to be. She berates, then seduces Harker, getting ready to bury her new-found fangs into his throat, when Van Helsing rushes in with a crucifix and drives her away.

Once she regains her senses, she makes Van Helsing swear to lay her to rest as he did to Mina, to drive a stake through her heart. Dracula kills Renfield for his betrayal, and Harker, Seward and Van Helsing track the vampire to a tomb through a hidden passage in the library, staking him to end his evil, and to save Lucy’s soul.

With the built-in release date at least a year from their initial meeting, Richter began his scripting chores in the Spring of 1978, and feels that the process of taking on Stoker’s novel—while dealing with vague memories of the play, although not using Balderston’s and Deane’s work in any way—went quite smoothly. The screenwriter set himself down to adapt the way he always had, with the proviso that this Dracula be more romantic than previous cinematic incarnations.

“I can’t recall how all of that came about,” Richter says, “but it was a decision to look at our Dracula and say here we have Frank, who is a very sensual character and he makes women swoon. It’s not Christopher Lee, and it’s not Bela Lugosi. He’s a seducer of sorts, so let’s get into that. That point of view made me look for more of the romantic, melancholy aspects of the story. It’s got a sad side to it. Dracula movies have always been pushed over the top about the terror of the vampire, but the vampire is relegated to the night. It’s not something the vampire seeks. I remember changing one line in the book to support that; the hounds are wailing into the night. When Dracula says, ‘Listen to them; the children of the night. What beautiful music they make.’ I changed that to ‘sad’, because we were trying to get to the heart of being trapped, isolated and cut off, deprived of things rather than relishing your bloodlust. Vampirism is supposed to be a curse, so it’s not something that you seek out, or want or relish when you get it. It’s like a terrible disease. He’s an afflicted person.”

With literally dozens of Dracula-inspired films having been done over the years, one would think that yet another version would be hard for an audience to take, considering the familiarity of the famous story, but Richter didn’t consider that particular problem at the time.

“I didn’t feel that because I was looking back at the point from the Hammer Draculas and the early Lugosi’s,” he says. “I may be forgetting something, but nobody for a while had treated the book as a serious thing, and I thought if you care at all about the genre, if the word ‘Dracula’ is going to have an allure for the audience with Frank Langella in it because he’s wonderfully mysterious, then you’re really not competing with Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee because those were totally different takes, and presumably you’d be throwing up a trailer on the screen that was lush, sumptuous and romantic. You would be saying to the audience, ‘This is what this Dracula is. Now accept it or reject it,’ but they’re not going to say, ‘That looks like the Hammer take on Dracula.’”

During his writing, Richter made some changes to the story mostly for what he recalls as economies having to be made in the telling at the time. The film opens with the wrecking of the Demeter, the vessel that transports Dracula and his earth-laden coffins to England. It is the time of the play’s period-the early-mid 1920s-and young Mina finds a wounded Dracula in a nearby cave. Harker’s business trip to Transylvania is dropped altogether to get the story moving with the drama of a mysterious shipwreck. Renfield is made a resident of Dr. Seward’s asylum only after having been bitten by the Count and forced to do his bidding. Mina is Van Helsing’s daughter, which makes her eventual demise by his hand after she’s been transformed into a vampire more dramatically powerful and poignant.

It is while being interviewed about such changes that Richter seems to recall getting a grounding is his Dracula’s romanticism from a seemingly odd source.

“I don’t recall any profound reason for doing that stuff. We didn’t do anything we thought would destroy the fabric of the book, but there are so many choices you make, and unless somebody is asking you just after you’ve done it, you can’t remember. I accept things in the movie as stuff I got from the book, and then people always remind me that I changed something. I haven’t read the book again, and I haven’t seen the movie in quite a while. It all just mixes up in the memory. Even Paul Morrissey’s Dracula is probably floating around in my head! (LAUGHS) I love that movie. It’s spectacular! It’s just wonderful. It’s ridiculous at times because of (Joe) Dallesandro. At other times it’s just wildly romantic. It’s very funny; a very smart movie. Polanski’s in it for a very brief period in a wonderful little set piece at the very beginning. It’s a very refreshing take on the story. He needs ‘wirgin blood’.

“My memories are not about the violence at all,” Richter continues on the blood-drenched 1974 vampire drama. “There is some remarkable photography in it. Dracula is in a wheelchair at one point because he’s getting weak, and he’s tearing around this old palazzo with the camera mounted on this wheelchair. It’s really moody and a rich movie. It was made around the same time as Morrissey’s Frankenstein, which seems tacky and strange, and different completely from Morrissey’s Dracula, which is wryly funny at times, and Dallesandro is just talking with a Brooklyn accent. He’s not even attempting not to! Our Dracula was set in England, theirs was set in Italy. It’s a very different premise from the book. Morrissey didn’t do the book at all, but what that film did—and maybe that’s one of the reasons I was even advocating our approach—was that it really had this wonderful rich palette of muted Italian colors, the romance of the whole notion of a vampire in a tuxedo, early automobiles…If I remember the order of the film’s releases, that would have been a very important film for me to have seen.”

The screenwriter, unlike other types of authors, thinks primarily for a visual medium. How the words of a screenplay are used for description is generally considered of no great importance to the industry at large, but Richter doesn’t follow that belief. To him, the screenplay is more than a blueprint for a film.

“A good screenplay is an evocative thing,” he says. “I haven’t read the Dracula script lately, but I might have been using a kind of 19^th Century style. Sometimes it’s fun to do that, rather than write in a completely contemporary voice for a period film. Although there was probably mood in the script, I definitely would attempt to give you a sense of the piece. When reading all of that 19^th Century literature, that mood is going to enter into your writing somewhere, and I believe it has to. I think, when adapting, you’re trying to recreate the mood of the piece and not just the plot. For instance, if the dialogue is going to have a slightly archaic ring to it, if you’re going to use the slightly more inverted 19^th Century dialogue, why just shatter it when you go to description? Try to keep it up, and in that sense it should evoke a gaslight era, a lot of shadows, a different kind of darkness from the darkness of the modern world. It was a very short script, which surprised me. I did find ways to cut, but it didn’t lose anything in the cutting. It was one of the shortest scripts I had ever written. I think it was barely over 100 pages. That was a nice feeling because they probably weren’t going to shoot a lot of stuff that wasn’t needed. It’s so hard to write a script to be the length of the movie. It always wants to be longer by 20 or 30 pages. I always struggle with length.”

The first draft took 10 to 12 weeks, which included underlining the book, making preliminary note cards on scenes and action that most writers use to order their thoughts. The idea for this cinematic incarnation of Dracula was not only to showcase Langella’s power as a leading man, but to bring things to the screen that hadn’t been used from Stoker’s rich and chilling narrative. The film’s opening sticks in Richter’s mind as one of the script’s most important scenes—the wreck of the Demeter, Dracula’s arrival in England, and all the mystery and suspense that entails.

“It was important for us to get some sense of the arrival of a vampire, not that you understood it in any great, elaborate form why was he on the ship, or why was the wolf on the ship, but that there was an arrival on these shores because he was a foreigner, so that sequence I recall. Whether it’s in the book or not, I really don’t remember because the book is composed of letters. But it was important not to start with a dark and stormy night in a castle where a guy had been living. We wanted to get some sense of arrival, of a stranger in everybody’s midst, and not the guy on the hill where everybody says ‘Don’t go up there.’ That is a fun scene, but there I would have felt I was doing something that had been done before, and why do it? But a ghost ship without a crew, a wreck on a shore…that’s fascinating to me because shipwrecks are really interesting. Everybody can get down there and take whatever they want because it belongs to whoever grabs it. It was a nice scene, the morning after a shipwreck.”

The one thing that Richter—and everyone else—thought didn’t belong in this Dracula was the post-Exorcist gore and grue that had become a staple of the horror film in the 1970s. This Dracula didn’t even have fangs, an image that would have worked very strongly against the romantic nature of the character who showed his threat and power in other ways.

“John (Badham) is not a violent sort of guy,” says Richter. “Dracula was being mounted, I think, in a fairly classy way. We really wanted it to be more 19^th Century romantic than gory and awful. The success of the finished film had to come from a belief that you’re making a romantic movie, and why sully it? Why suddenly make people gag when you’re really trying to create a mood that is far more romantic?”

An obvious asset to obtain that “mood” was New Jersey native Frank Langella, who had played another famous leading man, Zorro, in a 1974 TV movie before donning the cape for Dracula. He had also appeared in the early Mel Brooks comedy The Twelve Chairs, Diary of a Mad Housewife, and followed up Dracula with the charming Those Lips, Those Eyes, a fanciful turn as Skeletor in Masters of the Universe with Dolph Lundgren as He-Man, the inventor of The Doomsday Gun, as a mad pirate in Cutthroat Island, and in the recent remake of Lolita.

Sir Laurence Olivier gave a fine turn as Van Helsing after an illustrious career on the stage and on film in such classics as Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Pride and Prejudice, Henry V, Hamlet, The Entertainer, Sleuth and The Marathon Man, among many others that helped to make him a legend in his own time, a dubious honor that did not keep him from having friends and co-workers call him ‘Larry’.

Another hard working Brit, Donald Pleasence, appeared as Dr. Seward. In works ranging from big budget Hollywood fodder (The Great Escape, Fantastic Voyage, Telefon), to fine horror (Cul-de-sac, From Beyond the Grave, Halloween) to the patently forgettable (Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie and many Italian and German-produced atrocities), Pleasence always gave a fine performance, whether the material warranted it or not. As Lucy, Canadian import Kate Nelligan offers a range from Victorian propriety to outright lasciviousness. Moving easily from television to stage to film, Nelligan has graced such productions as the 1975 TV version of The Count of Monte Cristo, 1981’s spy thriller Eye of the Needle, Without a Trace, The Prince of Tides, Wolf, Up Close and Personal and U.S. Marshals.

Three fine British-born supporting players offered strong performances; Trevor Eve’s Harker is strong and personable, being the physical strength to elder Van Helsing’s vampire hunter. After debuting in Children in 1976 (as Man In Shower), Eve sought work in film and TV, notably in Lace, Jamaica Inn, The President’s Child and An Evil Streak. Jan Francis is a near-scene stealer as doomed Mina, alive and undead. A regular on British television, she has also graced The Long Chase, Just Good Friends, Ghostbusters of East Finchley and Spark. And giving Renfield a go was British TV and film veteran Tony Haygarth, whose work includes I, Claudius, Britiannia Hospital, Holocaust, Ivanhoe (as Friar Tuck, 1993’s TV adaptation of The Borrowers and soon to be heard along side Mel Gibson, Miranda Richardson and Julia Sawalha in the animated feature, Chicken Run.)

Getting the script into shape wasn’t a problem for Badham, who worked closely with Richter, but let the man do his job.

“He’s a good man,” Badham says of the scribe. “I knew his work and was quite interested in having him do it, for one reason because he has—in addition to being a wonderful writer—a great sense of humor. I wanted this to have a lightness to it, a slight tongue in cheek quality without getting to be farcical. I thought the humor shouldn’t hit the audience on the head and be as straight forward as, say, the Hammer films were, which were just designed as pure horror, and to say we do have a sense of humor and taking a lead from the New York production. Rick Richter is also very, very good at adaptations and extracting the best from material and finding a way to make it work, which is tricky when you’re compressing ideas.

“I lived fairly close to him,” Badham continues, “and would go over to his house twice a week and we’d wander around, talk about the ideas that he was working on, try to iron out where he was having difficulties, and see if we could find solutions; how do we get into this sequence, how does the Van Helsing character work in this particular film? We made a choice, for example, to have Van Helsing be the father of Mina because I was always puzzled about Van Helsing. Did they look in the yellow pages under ‘Vampire Killers’? You might say, ‘It’s a bit coincidental that Mina’s father just happened to know about this, but at least he had an emotional stake in it—pardon the pun! He was emotionally involved. We didn’t try to make him a professional vampire hunter, but someone who has some familiarity coming from Holland and being closer to middle Europe, bringing all of that to bear. So, it was not like Vampires R Us.”

Richter refined his own work, with no other writer becoming involved, and even studio heads keeping their distance. If the actors had any comments or additions, Badham would give all comers due consideration, checking with Richter to make sure it would work within his screenplay, although there wasn’t a lot of that, except for one major scene suggested by a major player.

“The English actors have a very strong tradition of respect for the text,” Badham recalls. “If you want them to say ‘Blublublublu’, they’ll say it. If they’ve agreed to do the part, they’re there for you, and they are trained to try to make anything work. They don’t come from our more psychologically-based training that makes us come in and question everything and start saying annoying things like, ‘My character wouldn’t say that,’ which translates into ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Langella was very good about the text, and he only had one scene that he said he really wanted in the movie. It was one we had left out from the stage play that there was not a comparable version of in the script. He said, ‘You know, we don’t have a proper—in dramaturgy they call it the scenafaire, the face-off-between Van Helsing and Dracula.’ There is such a scene in the play and it’s not in the screenplay. Rick and I looked, and I said, ‘Well, of course you’re right. It’s not there and it should be.’ When you set these guys up at odds, you have to put them together. That’s why it’s called the scenafaire, or ‘the scene you have to do.’ Basically, we just lifted it from Balderston and Deane, polished it briefly and Frank wanted it pretty much the way it was in the play, and that was okay because it was good.”

In the scene, Van Helsing is in the library doing something, Dracula walks in on him and Van Helsing looks up in the mirror, sees the doors open, but doesn’t see Dracula come in, and realizes what he’s up against. Dracula breaks the mirror, Van Helsing gets some garlic out, forces it up against Dracula There’s a kind of stand off and Dracula leaves the room. Badham had him leap out the window and change into a wolf, as he often would do—change into various creatures-in the book.

“We go to do this scene in about the third week of production,” Badham says. “Frank is rehearsing it with Olivier, and he is playing it so big that I realized right away that he is playing the scene he had been playing on Broadway for eight months, and he’s playing it at the same scale as though he were in a 1000-seat theater. And, of course, it was way too big for film. On film, you can’t act on that big of a scale, where you’re trying to project to the back balcony. You have to bring all of your stuff way down. I spoke to him about it and tried to pull him down, but he was so much in the groove with that performance that he was locked in, and Olivier is just standing quietly in the middle of the room, this elderly man who is ill with cancer who is under-acting Frank off the screen, so that all this energy that Frank is throwing around-literally bouncing off the walls, is going to naught because the quietness and the presence of Olivier is extremely powerful. Frank resisted the idea of coming down in scale, and I said, ‘Please come to see the film tomorrow. Let’s talk about it. Let’s look at it and see what we think. If you’re right, I’ll shut up, and that’ll be the last I’ll say about that.’ He came to dailies and about five minutes into the scene I heard him behind me go, ‘Oh my God! Oh Jesus!’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do; we’re going to reshoot the scene, but we’re not going to do it tomorrow or next week. We’re going to do it at the very end of the schedule, and we’re going to let you really get into the mode of film acting so that it will be easier for you to get away from a performance that is so locked in your brain. What’s more, we can build a different set. I learned stuff, too. I’ll have it in a library instead of this dining room I stuck it in. Lots of things will be much better. So don’t despair.’ We built a lovely library set that’s in the movie, and redid the scene at the very end of the schedule. Frank was totally in a film mode so that the face off between him and Olivier is wonderful. It’s really strong. It is a good scene, and it’s proper scenafair. It’s one of the best scenes in the film.”

But the library confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing had one other mild hurdle to cross—this being in the form of the legendary thespian sharing the scene with Langella, and the elderly gentleman’s penchant for doing a simple thing that elderly gentlemen do.

“Olivier, being older, had a tendency to let his jaw drop open slightly, about half an inch, on many occasions,” Badham remembers. “You would look at him and suddenly he is standing there with his mouth half open. I gently and as politely as I could pointed out to him that he looked much stronger when his mouth was closed. The term ‘mouth breather’ exists for a reason. So he would try to oblige, and of course, it always looked better. I go to shoot him in this particular scene—his reaction to Langella, pushing the garlic on him and so on. He watches Langella leave the room and his mouth is hanging wide open. I said, ‘Sir, would you mind…is it okay to do it again, and try to keep your mouth closed?’ He said, ‘Dear boy, I have just seen a man jump out of a window and turn into a wolf. I am entitled to have my mouth open.’ ‘It’s okay! You can do it! Sorry! Sorry, sir!’ He had a great sense of humor, a very dry British wit that was kind of wonderful.”

Although not drenched in them as most contemporary horror films are, this version of Dracula made sparing, but quite effective use of special effects. American FX wizard Roy Arbogast was called to England to help the Brit crew pull off some chilling visual set pieces for the film that made use of some rather low-tech disciplines.

“It was before you could do things in other than a photochemical way,” says Badham. “Nowadays, a lot of the effects that were done in that film would be much easier to do in a computer. For example, Van Helsing, Harker and Seward go into Dracula’s tomb to release him. He appears in front of them and young Harker takes a shovel and swings it at Dracula as hard as he can, and Dracula vanishes right in front of him. I said, ‘Let’s have that on film. Let’s find a way to do it.’ The way we came up with was they literally made some kind of inflatable Dracula that we were shooting over the back of. As Trevor Eve swung the shovel, the thing—whatever it was—was not only deflated, but pulled at top speed down into a trap in the floor! It goes so fast that it’s pretty damn impressive! It’s low tech, but those kinds of things are great fun to do. You can see exactly your result and you know if the damn thing works right away. You’re not waiting for months for some computer artist to draw things. It’s fun to do things live, on the set where you can see them and try to deal with things in the old fashioned photochemical way, or the mechanical effects guys are extremely ingenious. The good ones think up great ways to do things.

“Star Wars changed all of that,” he continues. “And in the last five years, we’ve come to the point that anything you think of can be done on film. I have this interesting feeling now that a lot of special effects aren’t impressive because I know they can draw it. I look at stuff and know a computer artist can just whip it out. I say that, but I know it’s very hard work, and extremely expensive. In my film, Blue Thunder, we had to fly helicopters through the city 50-feet off the ground. You knew those were real and that it was bloody dangerous. Now I go see Wild Wild West and see this silly big spider walking through the desert and I know it’s supposed to be impressive and that it cost a ton of money, but it’s not impressive at all because you know it’s drawn. You know it’s just one step removed from animation.”

In one of the film’s most frightening scenes, Van Helsing and Seward discover the undead Mina in the mines under the city. As she comes toward her father, arms outstretched, cadaverous body white and deteriorating, sweetly entreating, “Poppa, poppa…”, Van Helsing thrusts a stake into her chest that spears through her frail body, coming out her back. It was the inflatable special effect to the rescue once more.

“Roy Arbogast had to invent some kind of stake that I think was made out of rubber, and was also was inflatable,” says Badham. “It ballooned out at just the right moment. It was all a matter of timing, so that as Olivier came forward, the stake probably on his side collapsed, then it came out of her back and we shot it in a way that gave the illusion that it came straight through her.”

In the novel, Bram Stoker had Harker witness Dracula crawling down his castle wall;

“…my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings…I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones…just as a lizard moves along a wall.”

Although that stunning image has graced the covers of various editions of Stoker’s novel throughout the years, it wasn’t until a 1978 BBC mini-series version of the book starring Louis Jourdan that such a view of Dracula was put to film. Not knowing of this, Badham and Richter intended to put it into their own film because it was a central image of the Count that had never been seen in a Dracula movie before. Accomplishing the image of Langella doing such a thing involved movie magic at its purest.

“Basically,” Badham explains, “we did everything upside down. We built the wall, and instead of building it vertical, we had it laid almost flat and turned the camera on its side. Now, he is on wires, almost on his stomach and lifted up above the wall almost six inches. As he pulls himself along, the wires go with him. Somebody has him on a traveler, kind of zipping him along. Underneath the wall, we had drilled holes through the wall and the effects guys got underneath with air guns and blew up so that the cape would have some lift to it instead of just sagging down. At the end of the wall, if you were looking up it vertically, you’d be looking into the sky. I said, ‘Where’s the moon?’ They went, ‘Uh…we don’t have no moon.’ I said, ‘Yes, you do.’ I went over and grabbed one of the lights, about a 500 watt light, and got one of the grips to give me a blue gel. I slammed it in, put it up there, and said, ‘There’s your moon.’ They said, ‘You can see it’s a light!’ I said, ‘No you can’t. It’s not there. You’ll see the light, but you won’t see it’s a theater light.’ They kind of went down and looked at it. I knew what I was doing. I had done it before on Night Gallery. A great old silent movie camera man taught me that trick. The light is bright enough that it kind of flares out so you can’t see the fact that it’s sitting on a stand. We just covered the stand with a little black velour and it was just kind of peaking over the wall. You can look at it in the video and see it; right there—there’s the old moon! And it’s just a light shining at us. I love that kind of stuff.”

Moving into the realm of high technology for his period film, Badham decided to use laser light to create an other-worldly effect for the film’s opening credit sequence, as well as for the love scene between Lucy and Dracula, which showed the couple suspended in a laser tunnel nether world as they consummate their vampiric love affair.

“We were looking for a way to have an interesting love scene between these two people,” says Badham. “I was just tossing around ideas all over the place, thinking of a marriage, of a vampire wedding service with all of these strange creatures there; bats, skeletal people, undead people and so on. I got into some conversations with a man named Maurice Binder, who had done the titles for a lot of the Bond pictures. He and I were kicking around ideas and I said that I tried to use a laser beam on Saturday Night Fever which looked pretty spectacular, and yet they were so big and cumbersome that there was no moving them about. They were enormous pieces of equipment. In the couple of years since then they had lightened up and changed, so we borrowed a laser from The Who and created this strange, weird space where you could blow smoke into the beam, and the light becomes visible. We thought it would be great to have them floating in this weird limbo. The smoke made the light do interesting stuff, and nobody had ever shot with one on film, so it was a first. And there was much complaining about the psychedelic look. I just kept saying, ‘Why not?’ One New York reviewer was quite irritated with it. Then in the next breath she said to me, ‘Why isn’t Hollywood more imaginative? Why don’t they try more things?’ I said, ‘Because people like you rake us over the coals when we try something a little different.’ I always liked that image and thought it was kind of fun. Perhaps a bit modern, but what the hell.”

Using more cinema trickery, Badham created scenes in this full color 1979 film that are so desaturated and carefully orchestrated as to their look that they very much seem to be old style Hollywood black and white. Scenes between Lucy and Dracula, for instance, are all the more romantic because of this subtle visual, and makes one wonder if Badham might not have been frustrated to work in color.

“I wouldn’t have done the film in black and white,” he assures, “but I was trying to do something that had been done in Carol Reed’s Oliver, and John Huston had done it in a couple films, where they desaturated in the coloring process and sort of mixed together black and white with color. When I tried to get Technicolor London to do this they said, ‘You know, the equipment we had that was used to do this has all been sold to Red China. It’s all sitting over there. If you want to go to Beijing, if they’ll let you in (which they were not about to do in those days), you’d be able to do it great. We’ll do the best we can.’ So we did the best we could on the film. When we went to video, I had a lot more control over the color and was able to get really close to what I had originally intended—to get that black and white look and let some reds and things like that pop in. We had deliberately designed the wardrobe, the sets and make up to have a black and white look to them. We limited the color palette very severely.”

John Williams was brought on to work his musical magic as he had on Star Wars and Jaws. Using the London Symphony Orchestra in the same room where he had scored the famed space adventure, Williams chose Wagner’s ‘Tristan Und Isolde’ as the inspiration for Dracula’s soundtrack, creating a moody and artful work. The video box reveals that some rescoring had occurred during transfer, but it’s news to Badham, who has no idea why such a thing would have to be done.

The film had been allotted $10 million and a generous 60-70 day shooting schedule in 1978 and early 1979. Exterior locations were shot in Cornwall, with all the stage work being completed at the famous Shepperton Studios. Unlike far too many films, Dracula did not have to worry about the real blood suckers of our corporate times, studio executives, tinkering with the vision Badham and Richter had in mind.

“They were very good to me,” Badham recalls of the Universal overlords. “They left me alone. I had the Mirisch family, Walter and Marvin. One of them was with me all the time. They were very supportive and very helpful. I had no trouble at all. We had to put it together quickly at the end because they wanted it out in the summer, and I think I finished in February [1979], or so. We had to hustle to get it out when they wanted it. Everyone was very nice. I was running back and forth from England to California, showing it to the executives and getting thoughts from them, which were helpful and supportive. So I can’t give you any good dirt, because there isn’t any to give.”

Richter got to travel to England to be on set for two weeks, more as a vacation than a work-related outing, although he was there for Badham and the actors to answer any script questions that arose. He took his wife and parents with him so all could enjoy the English countryside and the details of filmmaking.

“I have pictures of my mother in the period cars,” he laughs. “It was fun. I wasn’t there to work. The script was locked. I was there for the first reading of it; all the actors in a room on one of the castles. Laurence Olivier was sitting there and I’m thinking, ‘I’m hearing Lawrence Olivier!’ It was neat. He was very ill. I don’t know if you can tell. He had a neurological disease that made his skin very sensitive to the touch. He couldn’t even shake hands. There were times that if he seems a little stiff it’s because he really was in pain. We called him Larry. During this particular experience he was a little reclusive because he really was in incredible pain. You could see it when he went to sit down. It wasn’t easy. He was gracious, but I don’t think he was comfortable in any way. It was also a thrill for me to have Donald Pleasence there. I loved him in Cul-de-Sac. It was one of those organized, rational productions. It went well on its first draft, there were some minor changes, and they went off to shoot it. Walter Mirisch really was a great producer, a real gentleman. He set a tone. John is that way, too. It was fun. People were laughing. There weren’t any bad people on the movie. I think it started with John when he was putting together his crew and cast. If you are mindful of the fact that you don’t want problem people around, then it reflects who you are, unless you get blind-sided. That can always happen. But it came in on schedule and on budget.”

One aspect of this Dracula that has caused a little consternation among its viewers is the very end, when Dracula seems to be dissolving in the sunlight. His cape detaches from the ship and flies away into the clear blue sky, and Badham cuts to an enigmatic smile from Lucy that suggests…what? Escape? Sequel? Who knows?

“Isn’t it wonderful?!” Badham beams playfully at the mention of his denouement. “I love endings like this, so I’m real responsible for it. Rick and I were having the best time. We’ve destroyed this guy, and yet…oh my God, the cape is going away. Is this guy still around? Then you cut to Lucy lying there with this slight Mona Lisa-like smirk on her face, and you go, ‘Does this mean she’s carrying his baby? She was partially like a vampire in training or something, so what’s going on here?’

“As you know, movie audiences really like to have all the loose ends tied up,” he continues. “They are like little children. They don’t want any loose ends. They want to know that Cinderella is happy, and the bad witch is dead and none of this ambiguity. And I love lady-or-the-tiger-type endings. So I find to my annoyance that people choose to interpret this as leaving room for a sequel, and I go, ‘Oh man! Grrrrr! That’s not what I intended!’ Unfortunately that’s the way they read it, and I can’t do anything about that. To me, the best kind of ending is the kind where you come out and go, ‘What’s that? What happened there? What do you think?’ ‘Well, I think she was having his baby.’ ‘Well, I think he was still alive.’ ‘Well, I think the damn cape just blew off.’ I love those kinds of discussions while walking to the car, and think that’s kind of fun. When you just wrap it all up, it’s over. There’s nothing to talk about. And, of course, some audiences just get really annoyed.”

One group that was not annoyed by this treatment of the famed Count was the California-based Count Dracula Society, composed of vampire aficionados, who gave the film their highest praise. Others who loved the film included a few science fiction, fantasy and horror film societies, who awarded the film its highest honors, particularly the Paris SF, fantasy and horror film society, who gave Badham a special treat.

“It’s a wonderful cobra-like thing rearing up,” he says. “Right where the hood of the cobra flairs out, these big wings come out from it. Everybody says, ‘This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen!’ I love it!”

The film did respectable business at the box office, but did not become the classic retooling of the cinematic Dracula legend that it should have. If mentioned at all in some horror film texts, it is only with a line or two, shrugging it off as though Langella’s Dracula wasn’t of any serious note. But the film did much, albeit in a rather low key fashion. This Dracula doesn’t snarl or leer at buxomy Brits, or bathe in blood. What he does with his threat is far more insidious. He is much more subtle until thoroughly provoked, at which point his powers reach their peak, and his attack is swift, vicious and lethal.

Seen in conjunction with other Dracula films (although it doesn’t have to be in order to be enjoyed on its own), it’s remarkable how one filmmaker views the same material. It was a lesson Badham learned when watching Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was far more grandiose than his own thriller.

“There is a big difference between what Francis and I did,” he says. “I think Francis went more toward the horrific. He also went back to the Bram Stoker novel and drew on it, and I frankly think it was a wonderful picture. I was really excited to see it. In History of Art at Yale they were talking about some of the impressionists who would sometimes stand on a hillside and paint the same landscape, and they would come up with totally different views, and they might each be wonderful in their own way. I remember thinking, ‘How is that possible?’ as a young freshman in the History of Art class. Now I understand! It’s exciting to look at what other people do and how they treat the exact same material.”