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.