“For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you're a wise man, Van Helsing.”
I was lucky enough to catch this in a movie theater last night, which is really ideal, given the stunning set design and gothic atmosphere with which this film drips. It’s a film carved from black marble, which is to its credit during the Transylvania-set scenes (witness the shot where Renfield is framed by the shadow from the window, casting bars across his face as he walks, quite literally, into the spider’s web). That’s to its detriment when it transitions to the drawing rooms of London, however, where the film falls flat when not centered around Bela Lugosi and his interactions with Van Helsing. Lugosi gets all the laurels – and deservedly so – but Dwight Frye is downright unhinged as the pitiable Renfield and almost steals the show. It’s a role that apparently brings out the scenery-chewing best in actors (see Tom Waits in Coppola’s take on Stoker’s tale). It might be blasphemous to say, as many moments in the film rely on the aural negative space, but the film certainly suffers on the whole from not having a musical score. To that end, once you've seen the original, I suggest seeking out the version with the accompanying Phillip Glass/Kronos Quartet score, commissioned in 1998. As Roger Ebert remarked, "The Glass score is effective in the way it suggests not just moody creepiness, but the urgency and need behind Dracula's vampirism. It evokes a blood thirst that is 500 years old."
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