Dracula (Universal, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 31 – well, what else were they going to show on Hallowe’en?) Charles and I watched a pair of films on Turner Classic Movies identified as horror classics from the 1970’s. Both of them were reworkings of Universal horror films from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s: the 1979 remake of Dracula and the 1974 Phantom of the Opera spoof Phantom of the Paradise. I have vague memories of seeing the 1979 Dracula, directed by John Badham and written by W. D. Richter, once before in the early 1980’s on a poor-quality image on an over-the-air black-and-white TV, and seen today it’s a good movie but not a great one (something I could say about the 1931 original Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye, too). Richter made the same mistake Garrett Fort, who scripted the 1931 version, did; he based it not directly on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula but on the intervening play version written by British actor/playwright Hamilton Deane and edited and rewritten by John L. Balderston for a U.S. production on Broadway in 1927. (I’ve read that before the 1931 Dracula was filmed, Universal commissioned Louis Bromfield to write a script based directly on the Stoker novel, but decided it would be too expensive to film and had Fort adapt the play instead.)

Oddly, both movies transposed characters from the original novel; in Stoker’s book it’s Jonathan Harker who goes to Transylvania as a real-estate agent to negotiate Dracula’s purchase of a castle at Carfax Abbey in England. In the 1931 film it’s Renfield who does that (though I don’t mind that if only because it gave Dwight Frye, who played Renfield and was by far the best actor in it besides Lugosi, more screen time). In the 1979 version, which omits the Transylvanian prologue completely and begins with the vessel Demeter (Vesta in the 1931 film) floating off the coast of Whitby, England with no living crew members except for a tribe of rats, it’s Lucy (Kate Nelligan) who’s Jonathan’s (Trevor Eve) fiancée and the story’s ultimate heroine, and Mina (Jan Francis) who’s vampirized by Dracula midway through the film. Badham and Richter also decided to make them the daughters of principal middle-aged male characters: Lucy is the daughter of Dr. Jack Seward (Donald Pleasence) and Mina the daughter of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier, replacing Edward Van Sloan from the 1931 cast and playing it effectively except for his overwrought accent to make himself sound appropriately Eastern European). Mina’s own father Van Helsing has to remove her heart to end her vampire existence and allow her to die normally, which adds an unexpected bit of pathos to Olivier’s characterization. It doesn’t help the film that Kate Nelligan and Jan Francis look so much alike, or that we see them sleeping in the same bed so often we start to think they’re having a Lesbian relationship (until we remember that the original novel was published while Victoria was still on the British throne, and that sort of thing was frowned upon so much a popular writer like Bram Stoker wouldn’t have dreamed of including it).

The biggest problem with the 1979 Dracula was that John Badham seems to have taken way too much to heart the criticism of Browning’s original that it was too static and theatre-like. Badham fills the screen with so much camera movement (the cinematographers were Gilbert Taylor and an uncredited Frank Tidy) and such a plethora of cacophonous sounds (the movie is already several minutes old before we hear a line of recognizable English rather than just characters making vaguely vocal noises) it becomes more overwhelming than entertaining. One of the reasons the 1979 Dracula was based on the play rather than straight from Stoker’s novel was that before the film was made Frank Langella had starred in a revival of the play on Broadway, and the film was built around the renown Langella had won for performing the role live. Like the movie as a whole, Langella was a good Dracula but not a great one; he doesn’t have the otherworldly quality Lugosi brought to the role (but then, aside from Orson Welles in the 1938 radio adaptation of Dracula that remains my favorite retelling of this story in any medium, who did?). He wanted to play Dracula more as a tragic figure than an out-and-out monster (ironically there are hints of that in the 1931 film as well, especially in the scene in which Lugosi as Dracula says, “To die – to be really dead! That would be wonderful! … There are far worse things awaiting man than death,” lines that oddly don’t appear in the simultaneously filmed Spanish-language version). The tag line for the film’s promotion was, “Throughout history, he has filled the hearts of men with terror, and the hearts of women with desire.” (In its original release, the 1931 Dracula was sold similarly as “the strangest love story ever told,” probably because there hadn’t been a major horror film with sound before and Universal’s marketing people weren’t sure how to sell one.)

The print we saw on TCM had an unusual look in which the colors were deliberately toned down to look almost black-and-white, which according to an imdb.com post under “Alternate Versions” was John Badham’s idea. Badham had originally wanted to shoot the 1979 Dracula in black-and-white like the 1931 version, but the “suits” at Universal said no and forced him to shoot it in Technicolor. (Likewise Mel Brooks had had to move his production of the 1974 spoof Young Frankenstein from Columbia to 20th Century-Fox because Columbia wouldn’t let him shoot it in black-and-white and Fox would.) For the original home-video version, first on laserdisc, then on VHS tape, and finally on DVD, Badham denatured the color sufficiently to achieve the “black-and-white in color” look he’d wanted, and that was also the version that got shown on over-the-air TV. Not until 2019 was the original full-color version released on DVD, on a reissue label called Shout! Factory which gave you the option to watch both the theatrical original and Badham’s decolorized version. Oddly, the TCM print we were watching was edited for commercial TV, since it had periodic pauses in the action which were very noticeable and were obviously where the commercials were supposed to go when the film was shown on TV. One odd result of the film being based on the play was that certain famous bits of dialogue turned up, like Dracula’s “I never drink … wine” and, responding to the howling of wolves outside, “Children of the night, what music they make!,” as well as the marvelous exchange I’ve heard otherwise only in the 1938 Orson Welles radio version, in which Dracula’s seduction becomes a wicked parody of the Communion ritual: “Flesh of my flesh – blood of my blood!” The 1979 Dracula did decently at the box office but not so well as to merit a sequel (though an ambiguous ending seemed to be setting one up). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz attributed that to the release just six months earlier of another Dracula movie, the 1979 spoof Love at First Bite, directed by Stan Dragoti, with George Hamilton as a modern-day Dracula reincarnated in New York at the height of the disco craze.

Phantom of the Paradise (Harbor Productions, Pressman-Williams Enterprises, 20th Century-Fox, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the next film after the 1979 Dracula on Turner Classic Movies’ 2026 Hallowe’en marathon was considerably better: Phantom of the Paradise (1974), written and directed by Brian De Palma and obviously a rehash/spoof of The Phantom of the Opera set in the world of rock music. The principal villain is Swan (Paul Williams, who was at the height of his 15 minutes in the mid-1970’s and wrote and produced the music for the film as well as playing a major role on screen), a teen idol from 1953 who made a deal with the Devil that he would never age visibly. The deal was recorded on a videotape (though an imdb.com “Goofs” poster noted that color videotape didn’t exist in 1953) on which, The Picture of Dorian Gray-style, Swan’s image would age over the years while the live person would not. We don’t learn Swan’s sinister backstory until well past the halfway point of the film. Instead we meet Winslow Leach (William Finley), a nerdish young composer who’s just written a rock cantata based on the Faust legend. Swan hears this music and decides it’s the perfect piece to open the Paradise, a palatial ballroom he wants to open as the ultimate rock-concert venue. Of course, being a music-industry slimeball with an even slimier business partner, Arnold Philbin (George Memmoli), Swan also takes credit for Leach’s score and puts his own name on it as composer (a plot twist also used in the 1943 and 1962 films of The Phantom of the Opera and in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1996 musical, though not in Gaston Leroux’s original 1910 novel or the first – and still the best – film version, made in 1925 with Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgwick and Lon Chaney as directors and Chaney as star). Swan and his henchmen try to get rid of Winslow by framing him on drug charges; he’s given a life sentence at Sing Sing and forced into an experiment in which all his teeth are removed and replaced by metal ones. He escapes (absurdly easily) only to be caught in a record press at Swan’s “Death Records” label, which is pressing copies of Swan’s version of Winslow’s Faust cantata. The press wrecks his vocal cords and permanently scars the right side of his face, forcing him to don a metal mask and haunt the Paradise as its mysterious “Phantom.”

Winslow is also in unrequited love with Phoenix (Jessica Harper, making her film debut and giving an “Introducing” credit), whom he heard auditioning for Swan at his palatial mansion (where Swan was entertaining multiple women in a circular bed). Winslow sneaked into the mansion in the first place by dressing in drag, which he was wearing when the cops busted him on the phony drug charge. Once he’s on the loose and haunting the Paradise, Winslow decides that only Phoenix will be allowed to sing his Faust cantata. When Swan assigns the lead role to a man, Beef (Gerrit Graham, voice-doubled by Ray Kennedy), Winslow sneaks into the bathroom where Beef is showering and … well, it wouldn’t be a Brian De Palma movie without an Alfred Hitchcock allusion somewhere, would it? In fact Beef survives his encounter with Winslow in the shower (earlier Swan had sealed Winslow in a brick-walled room à la Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, but once again Winslow managed to escape), only to get electrocuted on stage by a prop lightning bolt Winslow wielded. Ultimately Swan seduces Phoenix and gets her to agree to marry him in exchange for the lead role in Faust, only he really has hired an assassin to kill her on stage because her premature death will send her posthumous record sales soaring. (It’s a gimmick that’s “planted” in the film’s first song, “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye,” by Swan’s 1950’s retro group “The Juicy Fruits,” about a rock star named Eddie who committed suicide because his death would increase his record sales so much it would generate the money needed for his sister to have a life-saving super-operation.) Earlier in the story Winslow had tried to commit suicide himself, only to be told by Swan that he wouldn’t be allowed to do that because the contract he’d signed to sell his soul to the Devil wouldn’t allow him to exit the earth ahead of schedule. Instead he leaves a gaping wound in his chest and Swan tells him that if Winslow tries to kill Swan, his wound will open up and they’ll both die. Winslow manages to save Phoenix from the assassin’s bullet ¬– Arnold Philbin gets shot and killed instead – and he also destroys Swan’s videotape collection, ensuring that they both die but not before Swan’s face ages all at once, repelling Phoenix.

Phantom of the Paradise also contains a sequence that eerily anticipates the similar scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, filmed a year later (though the stage version, The Rocky Horror Show, had premiered in 1972 and so it’s unclear who influenced whom), in which Beef appears as a Frankenstein-style monster created (as in the Hammer Frankenstein films in the 1950’s but not Universal’s originals from the 1930’s) in a bathtub. As his creation is being prepared the cast (Jeffrey Comanor, Archie Hahn, and Harold Oblong, who appear successively as Swan’s various bands, the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums – for a quite funny Beach Boys parody called “Upholstery” in which the main aria from Winslow’s Faust cantata is turned into a car song – and “The Undeads”) sing a song called “Somebody Super Like You.” When he finally emerges from the nurturing vat Beef sings “Life at Last” (whose second line is “Salutations from the other side”) until he’s offed by Winslow’s lightning bolt. I first heard the soundtrack album of Phantom of the Paradise well before I got to see the movie; my then-girlfriend Cat had been a huge fan of the film and had bought the album. I was quite impressed with the quality of the music and the sheer cheekiness of the concept, and we first got to see the film together in 1980 when it was being revived for a midnight screening in Pacific Beach. Indeed, that was where Phantom of the Paradise lived for years, though it never developed the fanatic following that The Rocky Horror Picture Show did.

For years I had thought Phantom of the Paradise was Brian De Palma’s first feature; it wasn’t – indeed, he already had the strange and beautiful horror film Sisters under his belt when he shot this. But it’s a film I really like and one which holds up surprisingly well. Incidentally, after the screening Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz said that Phantom of the Paradise ran into legal trouble not only from the source you’d expect – Universal, which still owned the movie rights to The Phantom of the Opera – but from one you wouldn’t: the British superstar rock band Led Zeppelin. It seems that though Swan’s record label in the film is “Death Records” (anticipating the real “Death Row Records,” a rap label founded in the 1990’s which was essentially a racket run by one faction of the Bloods street gang; it “broke” such “artists” as Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg before meeting its blessed demise in 2002, though Snoop Dogg bought the remnants of it and tried to revive it 20 years later), its parent company is called “Swan Song Productions.” At the time the film was released, Led Zeppelin had just founded their own record label and had named it “Swan Song Records.” Led Zeppelin sued 20th Century-Fox over the name, and the settlement required the studio to blur out just about every appearance of the name “Swan Song Productions” in the film. According to Mankiewicz, Brian De Palma is still upset about this, and more than once he’s expressed the wish, “Can’t someone take those ugly mattes off my film?”