Last week, I elucidated my picks for the worst on-screen Draculas. This week, I dive into their more inspired, even transcendent counterparts.
Rather than repeat everything I covered in the first piece, you can find an in-depth discussion of my criteria, qualifications, and the background necessary for breaking down a Dracula performance there. To briefly summarize, I have a PhD in Victorian Gothic literature, Dracula is among my very favorite novels, and I’ve taught vampire literature classes for the last fifteen years. Given my ongoing obsession with film and television adaptations of Stoker’s novel, I’ve decided to rank the best and worst on-screen Draculas, because life is too short to settle for boring, mediocre vampires (unless you happen to be immortal, and even then it’s no fun).
Once again, I’m focusing only on portrayals of Dracula himself, and not just “a Dracula type.” Other than that, the plot doesn’t have to reflect the plot of Stoker’s novel. This ranking considers any film in which Count Dracula appears to be a Dracula film, and while there’s no way to watch all the many hundreds of films in which the character appears, I’ve tried to pull from a wide variety of time periods and genres to get a more even spread.
Let me repeat my criteria, as mentioned in the first post: I’m judging the portrayal of Dracula himself, here. That is obviously going to be affected by both the film in which the Count appears and the choices of the actor portraying him. Sometimes a film’s script or production design uplifts a less compelling Dracula. Sometimes an awful movie highlights the quality of a good performance by making it feel out of place. The reverse is also true for both these scenarios. Also, as a general rule, I talk about the performance and the actor behind it in these rankings. Any performance of a role is shaped by a variety of factors—the talent of the actor, sure, but also the competence and confidence of the director, the quality of the material provided by the screenwriter, the way in which the performance meshes or fails to mesh with fellow actors and the rest of the film. Please don’t take my condemnation or praise in this list as vitriol or encomia leveled at the actor portraying Dracula alone.
For a discussion of Stoker’s novel, and the history behind it, please see the section titled “The Basics” in my earlier post. And now, without further ado, let’s get to the list…
The Best On-Screen Draculas
While perhaps a bit less difficult to catalog than my previous list of the worst on-screen Draculas, trying to enumerate the best is sure to draw more controversy. In many ways, a good performance can be a far more subjective endeavor than a bad one. I’ve tried to do a reevaluation of the classics, as well as include some recent or obscure performances that are worth examining.
10. John Carradine, House of Frankenstein (1944)
The Erle C Kenton-directed House of Frankenstein is a bit of a mess. Like so many of the post-Golden Age Universal monster movies, it showcases a mishmash of multiple monsters all descending on the same hapless humans. In this particular case, Lon Chaney’s Wolfman, Glenn Strange’s Frankenstein’s Monster, and Carradine’s Count Dracula all converge upon the villainous Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff), who is trying to replicate Frankenstein’s experiments after making his way to the ruins of Castle Frankenstein in Visaria (the fictional Alpine country where many of the Universal monster movies take place). The plot is more complicated than that, but is also immaterial because the film is just an excuse get a bunch of the company’s iconic monsters in a room together and make them fight (see also 2004’s Van Helsing which, incredibly, appears later on this list).
John Carradine, the legendary character actor, takes on the role of Count Dracula for the first time in this film (he would go on to play the Count at least three more times), and imbues him both with his signature baritone voice and an intense stare. He was rumored to have done a screen test for the 1931 Dracula along with other horror film royalty, including Lon Cheney and Conrad Veidt, before the role was given to then-stage actor Bela Lugosi.
One can see why he was always on the studio’s short list. Even in a film as patently dull as House of Frankenstein (though still superior to its follow-up, the quite nearly Dracula-free House of Dracula), Carradine has a hypnotic gaze that requires no special effects. Whether using that gaze to seduce a newlywed traveler or intimidate a rural Bürgermeister, he burns a hole in the screen with sheer intensity.
Vampiric glamours are treated as a kind of seduction in some materials, in others, they act similarly to an anglerfish’s lure—putting the ensnared human at ease before being fed upon. There is no romance in Carradine’s Dracula. He’s an elemental force of nature, as likely to kill as to kiss, but he somehow sells it. The audience can’t help but fall under his spell, even as he makes no effort to draw us in.
9. Christopher Lee, Horror of Dracula (1958)
The first Hammer Horror Dracula makes the bold decision to have its star—horror icon, inspiration for James Bond, occasional heavy metal singer, and child witness to the last sanctioned guillotining in France, Christopher Lee—play the Count without any hint of a continental accent. That’s not a problem, as Lee’s clipped, disdainful, British basso is threatening enough that it more than gets the job done.
The film is largely a vehicle for Lee’s longtime screen partner, Peter Cushing, who plays van Helsing (they would go on to star three more times together across the nine total Hammer Dracula films). That’s not anything new—Dracula is often not on-screen (or on the page) in his own films. But Lee makes an inescapable impression with his brand of wall-rattling, contemptuous calm, interrupted by terrifying close-ups of a Count with the mask dropped, revealing the savage bloodlust beneath the elegant disdain. He is more monster than man, especially in the first film, but that isn’t a reason to discount him.
Much like Carradine, Lee doesn’t rank higher on the list mainly because his screen time is both limited and largely relegated to lurking in the shadows. That said, it’s hard to ever discount the magnificent Sir Christopher in any film, let alone one in which he gets to swish his cape menacingly and tower over the hapless hunters who oppose him.
8. Thomas Doherty, The Invitation (2022)
The Invitation is a film whose critical reception (a cruel 31% on Rotten Tomatoes) belies the fact that it’s one of the more fun and novel Dracula adaptations of the last decade. Starring Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel as Evie, a Black American caterer who uses a genetic ancestry service and discovers that she’s related to a reclusive British playboy residing at Carfax Abbey in Whitby. After being invited to attend a family wedding, she falls for her distant relation, Thomas Doherty’s Walter De Ville.
We know the rest though. Walter (for Wallachia) and De Ville (for, you know) is Dracula in an alternate version of the novel where he defeated van Helsing, made Lucy one of his brides, and now runs a cult of vampire aspirants through his Whitby-dwelling descendants. Critics rightly pointed out that the film is obvious about its twist and that it’s not a particularly scary horror film. No argument there. But what those reviews miss is how effective the film is at using vampire narrative tropes to talk about race, and what an incredible job it does of recontextualizing Dracula in the era of Hallmark movies.
See, while Emmanuel is, obviously, magnetic and more than carries the film—Doherty, as Walter, plays the Count as the sort of charmingly normal and devastatingly handsome British heartthrob that wouldn’t be out of place in A Christmas Prince or The Princess Diaries 2. Doherty is playing on at least thirty years of slightly befuddled, British love interests: He’s Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, Jude Law (who he uncannily resembles) in The Holiday, or Hugh Jackman in Kate & Leopold (technically Australian, but you get my point). And when the not-so-surprising twist finally occurs, he changes only subtly. The great fun of Doherty’s performance lies in how much a blood-swilling Bluebeard can still read as a Colin Firth-esque rom-com hero.
And that’s not to mention its Get Out-inspired commentary on race. I’m not comparing the two films in terms of quality. Get Out is a marvel and The Invitation is a fun, B-movie romp but, given the novel’s obsession with the purity of bloodlines and the “dangers” of reverse-colonization, it’s nice to see a Dracula film lean into and call out those themes as grotesque. The film makes use of the kinds of images and dog-whistles borrowed from Get Out and the wave of Black-experience-centered horror that followed it, alongside adaptations and remakes like Lovecraft Country and Candyman. But more than anything, with its blend of stuffy English formality and fairytale-romance overtones, it seems to draw upon press coverage and imagery from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding along with the gallingly racist tabloid coverage that followed.
In their last conversation before their violent conflagration of a wedding, Dracula attempts to sell Evie on what she would gain in becoming one of his brides, saying “For someone of your… hmm…background, surely this is more than a leg up.” It’s not the smartest movie in the world but it effectively taps into some thoughtful tropes as Doherty oozes blithely through the film, making the viewer ever more uncomfortable in the way he still manages to sound halfway charming even as Dracula betrays his vile views.
7. Bela Lugosi, Dracula (1931)
The Hungarian immigrant who, for all intents and purposes, cemented every stereotype about how one plays Count Dracula when he originated the role in the Deane and Balderston Broadway show, was cast when Tod Browning adapted the play for his iconic 1931 Dracula for Universal Pictures. Part of the Universal Monsters lineup that included James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932), the film is, much like the novel it’s based on, very sparing in its use of the Count. Bela Lugosi only speaks in a handful of scenes. He is, compared with many of his fellows on this list, quite subtle. In many ways, in fact, Dwight Frye’s wide-eyed, shivering Renfield is the more unhinged and compelling performance: he’s the character an unsuspecting viewer is more likely to be frightened by. In rewatching the film, I found myself wondering if this, the single most important and influential on-screen portrayal of Dracula, was neither poor enough to make the bad list nor truly good enough to make the good one.
But, after some agonizing, I think I can safely say that, while he’s not my favorite Dracula, Lugosi’s Count does deserve a spot near the top. Lugosi uses his real accent for his few lines, which he delivers, by turns with unctuous, plastered smiles, and a far more genuine cold imperiousness. He gives the impression that the iconic, ear-to-ear grin is masking a fury-laden snarl. As Harker, Seward, and van Helsing bumble their way through the mystery of Dracula’s identity, that smile grows more and more strained. Lugosi gives the impression that his Count would rather be doing anything else than speaking with these troublesome mortals.
And, in the few moments when Lugosi is given the chance to unleash his version of a Count unfettered by politesse, one understands why he is the mold from which most other Draculas are cast. He’s domineering, frigid, just a touch spiteful. For a performance that has been parodied countless times and might be impossible to effectively emulate, the original is still capable of being shockingly fierce.
6. Michael Nouri, The Curse of Dracula (1979)
I may be biased here since this 1979 TV movie, called The Curse of Dracula and released as part of the Cliffhangers anthology series, reimagines modern-day Dracula as a suave, passionate, and beloved college professor. And, like some other films on this list, Cliffhanger’s Curse of Dracula and its sequel are both not recommendable as films. They are deadly dull and far too focused on charisma-lacking performances from Stephen Johnson and Carol Baxter.
But the movie’s general lack of appeal might also highlight how good Michael Nouri is in this role. Nouri has had a long career, mostly as a character actor, though he’s probably most famous as the love interest in Flashdance. And it’s that combination of character actor energy combined with leading man good looks that makes his Dracula magnetic. The film leans into the darkly romantic aspects of Dracula and presents him as almost entirely sympathetic while he’s on the screen. We rarely see Nouri’s version actually threatening or menacing anyone, with the film preferring instead to focus on his electric charisma, mixed with a soupçon of sadness. He is a world-weary Dracula, always hunted, always misunderstood, and Nouri plays it to the hilt. Our first and best look at him in this otherwise forgettable TV movie is lecturing to his students about the marriage and subsequent suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria in the sort of exquisite detail that only someone who had been in attendance could evoke. It’s convincing as the exact sort of lecture that would entrance a certain kind of student into a talented professor’s cult of personality and, if the film sees that as a bad thing, it is quite inept about voicing that concern.
Moreover, it’s worth noting that Nouri is one of only a handful of Jewish actors to take on the role—certainly he is the only one I could find that played Dracula in a sympathetic version of the role. In the background, I alluded to the antisemitism of Stoker’s novel and, while Dracula himself is not ever explicitly tied to Judaism, specifics of his physical description track with grotesque stereotypes of ethnic Jewishness popular at the time. While antisemitic caricatures have been a constant across Europe for millennia, mid to late 19th-century England was a hotbed of antisemitism, thanks in part to a massive wave of immigrants fleeing Russian pogroms starting in the late 1870s. Resistance to this influx can be seen in the lead-up to Dracula’s publication with everything from George Eliot’s encomium for Jewish immigrants in Daniel Deronda, which highlights the heightened antisemitism, to the widespread supposition that Jack the Ripper must have been a Jewish immigrant because butchery was a common profession for Jewish men and Whitechapel was a Jewish ghetto at the time.
The Curse of Dracula doesn’t ever explicitly name its Count as Jewish, but it does lean into the idea of there being an elegiac affinity between his own status as a constantly persecuted and pursued man and a people scapegoated across millennia. In a scene late in the film, Nouri’s Dracula plays piano at a bar and a ninety-year-old Russian (perhaps Jewish) immigrant asks him to play “Moscow Nights” and reminisces about the lost splendors of the “old country.” Dracula indulges him and shares his own memories of fin-de-siècle Russia and the unworthiness of its Tsar compared with the man who sits before him. It’s a surprisingly touching moment to which Nouri lends his soft, melancholy gaze and charming smile.
5. Richard Roxburgh, Van Helsing (2004)
Don’t get me wrong. Stephen Sommers’ madcap, cartoony ode to Universal Monster movies is a very bad film. It has a similar screwball energy to his earlier classic, The Mummy, but that only serves to point out how much the 1999 film requires Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz to perfectly match Sommers’ tone. While they succeeded, Hugh Jackman as van Helsing (here made into the human incarnation of the Archangel Gabriel, stricken with amnesia, and working for a monster-hunting order within the Catholic Church) and vampire-film royalty Kate Beckinsale, as Romani (though the film doesn’t use that term) princess Anna Valerious, just don’t work, either as an on-screen couple or as ambassadors for Sommers’ brand of whiplash-inducing action comedy. Please don’t read this pick as an encomium for the film as a whole.
But Richard Roxburgh, of Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Hound of the Baskervilles (2002) fame, manages to be a thoroughly charming bit of campy continuity in the midst of all of it. Dressed in what is essentially the Victorian version of one of Prince’s concert outfits, he’s given some femme touches—earrings and a golden hair-clip, to match mannerisms that are effervescently queer-coded. He quips and rages and loudly mourns the deaths of each of his brides, channeling the kind of smarmy, licentious energy that one expects from Jeremy Irons, Charles Dance, or Alan Rickman as a ’90s action film villain. He punctuates his post-John Woo wirework bounds and levitations with little waltz and ballet maneuvers that signal he’s having far more fun than anyone else on set (with the possible exception of Shuler Hensley’s operatically warbling Frankenstein’s Monster).
Comedy Draculas are a delicate balancing act and it’s easy to go in for broadly bland shtick a la George Hamilton in 1979’s Love at First Bite, or simply ape Lugosi, or just be Leslie Nielsen. So when someone manages to make a fundamentally silly Dracula lively, campy, and just perverse enough to still feel like a threatening villain, it’s a real triumph. Van Helsing may have aged poorly, but Roxburgh’s Dracula is timelessly entertaining.
4. Max Schreck, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
Bram Stoker had only been dead a decade when German Expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau made Nosferatu. Unable to secure the rights to Stoker’s novel, Prana Films changed the names of its characters and altered a few plot details, but don’t be fooled: Count Orlok is Count Dracula. After a protracted legal battle, a German Court ruled in favor of Florence Stoker (Bram’s widow)’s copyright lawsuit, and ordered all prints of the film be destroyed. The film survives today only because of diligent film historians piecing it together from partial prints.
Made before the Hamilton Deane play, Orlok, like the novel’s Dracula, is an ugly, bestial, creature—hairless save his intense and bushy eyebrows, with pointed ears, long claw-like fingers, and a pair of fangs in the front of his mouth that might, uncharitably, be reminiscent of a rodent’s incisors. The film is silent, of course, but even so, Orlok has few placard lines compared to the rest of the cast. Instead, Murnau focuses on the predatory fury of Schreck’s gaze and the interminable stillness of his movements, a spider in the center of a web that Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim’s not-legally-distinct-enough Harker) hasn’t yet realized he’s in.
Whether he’s rising from the cargo hold of a ship, clawed fingers menacingly gripping the edge of the hatch, or skulking through a doorway that only barely contains him, or casting a grim, hunched shadow on the wall of Hutter’s well-appointed home, Max Schreck gives us a nightmare-inducing Count who is all strange, angular contortions of limbs and empty eyes. There is no deft turn from suave to savage. Murnau and Schreck concoct a demoniac revenant who is just barely human-shaped and whose placards feel impossible to square with the vision of an apex predator that the audience must assume hunts only in total, terrifying silence.
3. Frank Langella, Dracula (1979)
Based on the same Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston stage adaptation that made Bela Lugosi a star, the 1977 Broadway revival starred Frank Langella and boasted a production designed by legendary Gothic illustrator Edward Gorey. The film, directed by Saturday Night Fever’s John Badham, uses some of Gorey’s designs but ultimately opts for a more traditional approach to sets and costumes, though it is shot through a stunningly muted filter, almost giving the appearance of a sepia-toned silent film. It’s among the nastiest takes on the Deane play, with Harker and Seward (Trevor Eve and Halloween’s Donald Pleasance) being portrayed as incompetent and misogynistic even though the Dracula they are up against is no ameliorative for poor Lucy (Kate Nelligan).
Langella, though obviously far from unattractive, is not movie-star handsome and the film saddles him with perhaps the most ludicrous, ’70s-chic puff of brown hair committed to a drama. It may just be the worst hair any Dracula has ever had, and I say this knowing full well that Lugosi made a hyper-shellacked Lego helmet the standard. But Langella overcomes these stylistic shortcomings with a hard-edged charm. He’s right on the precipice of unbearably cold—too gruff to be strictly sexy—but pulls it back just enough to hint at a salacious joie de vivre into which one might read that domineering ice a little differently.
Firmly of the school that less is more, Langella’s Dracula speaks softly, slowly, and with unnerving amounts of eye contact. He might as well be carved of stone compared with the intense, showy agita of Lawrence Olivier’s van Helsing or the crass over-familiarity of Harker and Seward. Other Draculas on this list exude gravitas and dignity, but no one outshines Langella for projecting unrelenting control.
2. Christian Camargo, Penny Dreadful (2016)
Reactor has already published an article on my intense and fully justified love of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, the supernatural prestige drama that, like Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, imagines a world where most of the great Gothic novels of the 19th century exist simultaneously. Count Dracula is a presence on the show from the first episode where Timothy Dalton’s Sir Malcolm Murray (here the invented father of the novel’s Mina) searches for his missing daughter. But it is not until the show’s final season that Dracula actually makes an appearance on screen.
He’s played by Christian Camargo, who is probably most familiar to folks as Brian Moser, Dexter Morgan’s murderous brother who serves as the villain on the first season of Dexter. But Camargo’s made the rounds as various Gothic villains throughout his career: Henry Wotton in the 2007 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the traitorous Professor Bowden in the 2018 adaptation of China Mieville’s The City and the City; he’s even previously played a vampire, Eleazar of the Denali Coven, in the final two Twilight films. But Camargo is at his best in Penny Dreadful, spending much of the season in the guise of Dr. Alexander Sweet, a mild-tempered naturalist and lecturer.
His scenes are nearly all shot against the maximalist splendor of the Natural History Museum of Ireland in Dublin, where Dracula/Sweet weaves between a panoply of bones and taxidermy, presenting himself as a grieving widower slowly coming around to the suit of tragic, cursed, series lead, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green).
PD’s take on Dracula has him as an immortal spirit, a twin to Satan who was granted dominion over the earth rather than ruling from Hell. As a result, the show dispenses with his Transylvanian origins and the specifics of his invasion of England, so Camargo puts on a British accent plays him as a desperate, dangerous gaslighter, letting his face range from bemused to sorrowful to filled with quiet rage, all with only the barest flicker of the corner of his mouth.
But it’s the genuine sweetness and sorrow underpinning his possessive fury that chills the deepest. Where Tom Doherty’s Dracula lies through his sharpened teeth to dupe his would-be bride, Camargo is bloodcurdlingly genuine in his affections. Even as he plots to isolate and shatter Vanessa, he purrs his loneliness and love. The show even turns Dracula’s command over nocturnal vermin into a facet of his abject sorrows. His final seduction of Vanessa ends with him saying “We’re the lonely night creatures, are we not? The bat, the fox, the spider, the rat.” Penny Dreadful’s Dracula is a distinctly human monster, persuasive in his half-truths, impossible to ignore, unconscionably cruel.
1. Gary Oldman, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
And we come to it. My choice is probably going to be divisive but, for my money, and throughout my many years of teaching Dracula (the novel) and vampire lit in general, Gary Oldman is the closest thing we’ve ever had to a perfect Count. It doesn’t hurt that (with a few key exceptions), Francis Ford Coppola’s campy, maximalist film hews closer to the plot of the original than nearly all film adaptations. It’s overstuffed with a glut of great character actors—Anthony Hopkins as van Helsing, Richard E. Grant as Dr. Seward, Carey Elwes as Holmwood, Billy Campbell as Morris, Monica Bellucci as one of the brides, and Tom Waits (!!!) as Renfield. Even the film’s lowlights—young and in-over-their-heads Keanu Reeves (as Jonathan Harker) and Winona Ryder (as Mina)—are charming, even as they can’t quite get a hang of the British accents they’ve been asked to master. The film’s one glaring drawback is a grossly misogynistic and deeply misinterpreted version of the novel’s best character, Lucy Westenra (though Sadie Frost does her best with a script that does her no favors).
In a post-Anne Rice world, Coppola’s Dracula wants to make the Count a midway point between the character of the original novel and the tortured, romantic vampire antihero that the New Orleans novelist popularized in her novels, beginning with Interview with the Vampire. The prologue establishes Oldman’s Count as one and the same with the historical Vlad Țepeș and uses the tragic death of the Voivode’s first wife as the reason for his turn to vampirism. It only really deviates from the plot of the novel to invent a tortured romance between Dracula and Mina, who is the reincarnation of his dead wife, here named Elisabeta (we don’t know who the historical Vlad’s first wife was, but some suspect it was Anastasia Holszanska of Poland).
The reason why Oldman is as the top of this list is his sheer capaciousness. There are Draculas who excel at being stern, or cruel, or tortured, or monstrous, or campy. Those are all valid and potentially delightful, but only Gary Oldman is all those things at once. And he performs the role with almost no tension between those wildly different modes. His accent is in the Lugosi vein—breathier and potentially sillier—but paired with a broad, toothy smile, and a narrowing of the eyes that turns him into something both disarming and dangerous. Reeves’ Harker begins his visit a bit charmed, a bit contemptuous of his aristocratic host; by the end, he is shrieking in terror, on the edge of madness. Oldman’s choices fully justify that arc.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the start of Gary Oldman‘s tradition of performing from beneath roughly 50 pounds of prosthetics—the sort of repeated stunt that might be accused of detracting from a truly great performance. Here, though, it helps bring Dracula in line with both his Hamilton Deane representation as suave, aristocratic foreigner and his original representation as monstrous, beast-like creature. He appears young and old, human and terrifyingly inhuman with Greg Cannom’s makeup still reading as grotesque and unsettling thirty years later. He is also draped in the designs of legendary costumer Eiko Ishioka, which lend him, among many other iconic looks, the appearance of a skinless armadillo, a Klimt painting, and the root cause of the steampunk scene’s obsession with tiny, tinted lenses.
Through all of his transformations, Oldman’s immortal Count feels remarkably consistent. His Dracula is mad with violent ambition, exhausted by centuries of sorrow, unhinged in a whirl of cruel delight, clear-eyed and earnest on an absinthe-curdled date with Mina. Coppola, when faced with any hard decision about his movie always picks both options and tops it off with a third choice that wasn’t previously listed. He has never been subtle and his films—from The Godfather, to Apocalypse Now, to Megalopolis, to Captain EO—are all exercises in excess. But that’s a good fit for Dracula and its Aesthetic movement-inspired opulence, its faded Carpathian royalty splendor. It’s also a great fit for Oldman, who is more than up to the task of embodying Dracula from every angle and bringing an already baroque film to absolutely luminous, overwhelming life.
But what do you think? Do you have a different pick for the top slot? Is there a Dracula performance you found particularly laudable that’s not mentioned here? Let me know in the comments below—I look forward to the discussion!
