Directed by Tod Browning – Starring Bela Lugosi, Dwight Frye and Helen Chandler

A mysterious Transylvanian count arrives in England and begins preying upon the people around him.

It’s Halloween season, and what better way to celebrate than watch and write about the scariest movies ever made — (checks notes) — classic Universal monster movies?

I haven’t watched any of these Universal horror films before, so I thought this was a good time to start.

I began with Dracula.

I didn’t realize how macabre this film was going to be.

I was expecting something much campier. Instead, there are some genuinely unsettling moments. The first time we see Dracula and his wives rise from their coffins is chilling. The fog surrounding the castle creates an eerie atmosphere, and the strange man driving the coach through the night is so unnerving. The whole journey into this strange, unfamiliar world works incredibly well.

And then there’s Bela Lugosi. Due to all the parodies and imitations over the years, I wasn’t prepared for how good he actually is in this role.

Most of my experience with Lugosi’s Dracula before this was seeing little snippets of the performance over the years. Watching the whole thing, I finally understood why he became so iconic in the role. He’s dark, charming, scary and almost demonic at the same time. Even the way he moves his hands is mesmerizing. His fingers seem to crawl like little spiders.

He’s just so much fun to watch.

I also didn’t realize how much of the movie starts with Renfield. Dwight Frye has a much bigger role than I expected, and he makes the character fascinating to watch. After his encounter with Dracula, Renfield becomes this manic, increasingly disturbed figure, obsessively eating flies and spiders and pleading with the people around him. Frye gives him an energy that makes it hard to look away, even when his behavior gets a little ridiculous.

The more traditional heroes — Mina Seward (Helen Chandler), her fiancé John Harker (David Manners), and Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) — feel a bit boilerplate for a movie from this era. They’re the sensible people trying to understand and stop the monster. But when everything else is working so well, I didn’t mind having them there to play the straight men.

There are definitely some hokey moments.

Dracula calling out “Children of the night!” is one of them. And then there are all the random armadillos running around his castle. Were those scary back then?

But there’s plenty here to make up for the sillier stuff. The sequence aboard the ship carrying Dracula to England is a highlight. We learn what happened through the aftermath of the voyage, with the crew mysteriously gone and the captain found dead, lashed to the ship’s wheel. Renfield is the only living person left aboard, and by the time the ship reaches port, he’s completely lost his mind.

The movie doesn’t need to show us Dracula attacking everyone. The empty ship and the bodies tell us everything we need to know.

Another thing I loved was how little music there is. There are long stretches where the movie is almost completely silent as Dracula creeps into a room toward his next victim. That silence creates a surprising amount of tension and suspense. Rather than relying on music to tell us when to be frightened, the movie lets the atmosphere do the work.

Nearly a hundred years later, some of Dracula inevitably feels dated. There are awkward moments and performances that occasionally made me smirk for reasons I don’t think were intended. But the atmosphere, the imagery and Lugosi’s performance are more than enough to carry it.

It’s clear why this film is such an important part of horror history.

Verdict: Spooky