''Dracula'', also known as ''Bram Stoker's Dracula'' and ''Dan Curtis' Dracula'', is a 1974 British
made-for-television
A television film, alternatively known as a television movie, made-for-TV film/movie or TV film/movie, is a feature-length film that is produced and originally distributed by or to a television network, in contrast to theatrical films made fo ...
gothic
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
Richard Matheson
Richard Burton Matheson (February 20, 1926 – June 23, 2013) was an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres.
He is best known as the author of '' I Am Legend'', a 1954 science fictio ...
and directed by ''
Dark Shadows
''Dark Shadows'' is an American gothic soap opera that aired weekdays on the ABC television network, from June 27, 1966, to April 2, 1971. The show depicted the lives, loves, trials, and tribulations of the wealthy Collins family of Collinspo ...
'' creator
Dan Curtis
Dan Curtis (born Daniel Mayer Cherkoss; August 12, 1927 – March 27, 2006) was an American director, writer, and producer of television and film, known among fans of horror films for his afternoon TV series ''Dark Shadows'' (1966–1971) and ...
, with
Jack Palance
Jack Palance ( ; born Volodymyr Palahniuk ( uk, Володимир Палагню́к); February 18, 1919 – November 10, 2006) was an American actor known for playing tough guys and villains. He was nominated for three Academy Awards, all fo ...
in the title role. It was the second collaboration for Curtis and Palance after the 1968 TV film ''
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'' is a 1886 Gothic novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It follows Gabriel John Utterson, a London-based legal practitioner who investigates a series of strange occurrences between his old ...
''.
Plot
"Bistritz, Hungary May 1897": natives in Transylvania seem afraid when they learn solicitor Jonathan Harker is going to Castle Dracula. Jonathan finds the Count abrupt and impatient to get things done. Dracula reacts very strongly to a photograph of Harker's fiancée Mina and her best friend, Lucy. After preventing his brides from devouring Harker, he forces the young solicitor to write a letter saying he will be staying in Transylvania for a month. Harker climbs down the castle wall and finds Dracula's coffin but is attacked and knocked out by one of Dracula's gypsy servants before he can stake Dracula. They later throw him in the lower levels of the crypt, where the brides attack him again.
The ''Demeter'' runs aground carrying only Dracula and the dead captain lashed to the wheel. Soon after, Lucy begins to fall ill. Her fiancé, Arthur Holmwood, is perplexed and calls in Dr. Van Helsing. The doctor starts to recognize what might be happening, especially after Lucy walks out of her home at Hillingham and is found, drained of blood, under a tree the next morning. Dracula has flashbacks of his wife - of whom Lucy is the spitting image - on her deathbed centuries earlier.
Lucy's mother is in the room with Mina when Dracula comes calling the last time, a wolf shattering the window. Lucy soon rises from the dead and comes to the window of Arthur's home, begging to be let in. Arthur does so, delighted and amazed that she's alive, unaware that she is now a vampire under Dracula's control. This very nearly gets him bitten, but Van Helsing interrupts with a cross causing her to flee. They go to Lucy's grave and drive a wooden stake into her heart. When Dracula comes to the tomb later and beckons to her, he goes berserk upon finding that she's truly dead.
Mina tells Van Helsing about the news story about the ''Demeter'', the boxes of earth, and Jonathan going to meet Dracula to sell him a house. From these clues, Van Helsing and Holmwood go about finding all but one of Dracula's "boxes of earth" (containing his native soil, in which a vampire must rest). But back at the hotel, the vampire hunters discover Dracula is there seeking revenge. He has bitten Mina and, before their eyes, forces her to drink blood from a self-inflicted gash in his chest. All that they love, all that is theirs, he will take, he says.
The tracking of Dracula back to his home commences with Van Helsing hypnotizing Mina. Via the bond of blood, she sees through Dracula's eyes and discovers where he is headed. At the castle, Van Helsing and Holmwood find and stake the brides. Jonathan, now a rabid and bloodthirsty vampire, attacks Arthur and Van Helsing, but in the struggle is knocked by Arthur into a pit of spikes and killed. The final confrontation with Dracula takes place in what looks like a grand ballroom. The crosses wielded by the two men are something Dracula doesn't seem to want to look upon. Dracula gets the better of them, ridding them of their crosses. Van Helsing pulls down the window curtains, and sunlight pours in. Dracula is weakened, finally going dormant long enough for Van Helsing to pierce his heart with a long spear.
They leave him there. Before the portrait of a living warrior Dracula, with Lucy's lookalike in the background, a text scrolls across the screen about a warlord who lived in the area of Hungary known as Transylvania, and how it was said he had found a way to conquer death—a legend no one has ever disproven.
Cast
*
Jack Palance
Jack Palance ( ; born Volodymyr Palahniuk ( uk, Володимир Палагню́к); February 18, 1919 – November 10, 2006) was an American actor known for playing tough guys and villains. He was nominated for three Academy Awards, all fo ...
as
Count Dracula
Count Dracula () is the title character of Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic horror novel ''Dracula''. He is considered to be both the prototypical and the archetypal vampire in subsequent works of fiction. Aspects of the character are believed by some ...
/
Vlad III the Impaler
Vlad III, commonly known as Vlad the Impaler ( ro, Vlad Țepeș ) or Vlad Dracula (; ro, Vlad Drăculea ; 1428/311476/77), was Voivode of Wallachia three times between 1448 and his death in 1476/77. He is often considered one of the most imp ...
*
Simon Ward
Simon Anthony Fox Ward (16 October 194120 July 2012) was a British stage and film actor. He was known chiefly for his performance as Winston Churchill in the 1972 film ''Young Winston''. He played many other screen roles, including those of Sir ...
as
Arthur Holmwood
Arthur "Art" Holmwood (later Lord Godalming) is a fictional character in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel '' Dracula''.
In the novel
Holmwood is engaged to Lucy Westenra, and is best friends with the other two men who proposed to her on the very same ...
*
Nigel Davenport
Arthur Nigel Davenport (23 May 1928 – 25 October 2013) was an English stage, television and film actor, best known as the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Birkenhead in the Academy Award-winning films '' A Man for All Seasons'' and '' Chariots of F ...
as
Abraham Van Helsing
Professor Abraham Van Helsing, a fictional character from the 1897 gothic horror novel '' Dracula'', is an aged Dutch polymath doctor with a wide range of interests and accomplishments, partly attested by the string of letters that follows hi ...
*
Fiona Lewis
Fiona Lewis (born 28 September 1946) is a British actress and writer from Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.Profile , bfi.org.uk; acc ...
as
Lucy Westenra
Lucy Westenra is a fictional character in the 1897 novel ''Dracula'' by Bram Stoker. The 19-year-old daughter of a wealthy family, she is Mina Murray's best friend and Count Dracula's first English victim. She subsequently transforms into a vam ...
/ Maria, Dracula's deceased wife
* Murray Brown as Jonathan Harker
*
Penelope Horner
Penelope (Penny) Horner (born 20 June 1939 in London) is a British former film and television actress.
Life and career
Penelope Horner began her acting career in 1956 in the British film comedy '' A Touch of the Sun''. Other small roles followed ...
as
Mina Murray
Wilhelmina "Mina" Harker ( née Murray) is a fictional character and the main female character in Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel '' Dracula''.
In the novel
She begins the story as Miss Mina Murray, a young schoolmistress who is engag ...
Virginia Wetherell
Virginia Wetherell (born 9 May 1943 in Farnham, Surrey) is an English actress known for her roles in Hammer horror films such as ''Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde'' (1971) and ''Demons of the Mind'' (1972).
Her other film appearances include ''The ...
as one of Dracula's wives
* Barbara Lindley as one of Dracula's wives
*
George Pravda
George Pravda (19 June 19161 May 1985) was a Czechoslovak theatre, film and television actor.
Early life
He began his career in Czechoslovakia, where he was credited as Jiří Pravda, and then emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1956.
Career
H ...
Reg Lye
Reginald Thomas Lye (14 October 1912 – 23 March 1988), was an Australian actor who worked extensively in Australia and England. He was one of the busiest Australian actors of the 1950s, appearing in the majority of locally shot features at th ...
as Zookeeper
*
John Challis
John Spurley Challis (16 August 1942 – 19 September 2021) was an English actor. He had an extensive theatre and television career but is best known for portraying Terrance Aubrey "Boycie" Boyce in the long-running BBC Television sitcom ''Only ...
as Stockton-on-Tees clerk
* John Pennington as Shipping clerk
Production
Dan Curtis decided to film ''Bram Stoker's Dracula'' in two locations:
, where there were old castles and quiet land, and England, where the remainder of the story is set.
Release
The initial CBS-TV broadcast in October 1973 was pre-empted for an address by
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was ...
on the resignation of
Spiro Agnew
Spiro Theodore Agnew (November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was the 39th vice president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1973. He is the second vice president to resign the position, the other being John ...
. Instead it was broadcast in February 1974. CBS took advantage of the successful release of director Francis Ford Coppola's identically titled adaptation, ''Bram Stoker's Dracula'' (1992), to rebroadcast the film on 28 November 1992 (two weeks after Coppola's film opened).
Legacy
According to the featurette on the DVD for the film, Jack Palance was offered the role of Dracula several more times after his first performance, but he turned them all down.
The original title was ''Bram Stoker's Dracula''. The film was also released under that title on VHS and Laserdisc. Francis Ford Coppola and
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production studio that is a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is one of the Big Five studios and a subsidiary of the mu ...
purchased the rights to that title in the early 1990s. Coppola wanted to make it clear that his Dracula movie was unlike any other Dracula movie before it. Coppola's film also takes inspiration from the two key elements in Curtis's film that separated it from other adaptations: making the Dracula character and the historical Dracula,
Vlad the Impaler
Vlad III, commonly known as Vlad the Impaler ( ro, Vlad Țepeș ) or Vlad Dracula (; ro, Vlad Drăculea ; 1428/311476/77), was Voivode of Wallachia three times between 1448 and his death in 1476/77. He is often considered one of the most im ...
, one and the same person, and a reincarnation romance with Dracula's dead wife (which in this movie was Lucy, instead of Mina as in Coppola's movie). Nearly all home video releases of Curtis's film have since been released under the title ''Dan Curtis' Dracula'' or simply ''Dracula''.
The
Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics is an American comic book publishing, publisher and the flagship property of Marvel Entertainment, a divsion of The Walt Disney Company since September 1, 2009. Evolving from Timely Comics in 1939, ''Magazine Management/Atlas Co ...
series ''
The Tomb of Dracula
''The Tomb of Dracula'' is an American horror comic book series published by Marvel Comics from April 1972 to August 1979. The 70-issue series featured a group of vampire hunters who fought Count Dracula and other supernatural menaces. On rare ...
'' features a Dracula whose appearance was based on Jack Palance. Palance had at that point yet to play Dracula and ''Tomb of Dracula'' artists
got the idea from Palance's performance in Dan Curtis' ''The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'', in which he appeared in 1968.
See also
*
Vampire film
Vampire films have been a staple in world cinema since the era of silent films, so much so that the depiction of vampires in popular culture is strongly based upon their depiction in films throughout the years. The most popular cinematic adaptat ...