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!
Good choice for putting Oldman at top (That is my only film association with Dracula) but not mentioning Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is an egregious sin!! There’s a Count with real sex appeal.
Also, BSD is Ishokia’s movie as far as I’m concerned. Those Costumes, WHOOF
Nah there is no doubt once Horror of Dracula was released in 58′ it changed vampires forever Oldman is no Christopher Lee that’s for sure and neither are any of the actors including Max Shreck but he was a Nosferatu not Dracula but he was a vampire though.
Those costumes are, indeed, WHOOF: on the other hand so is the entire production design (If nothing else this film has an Aesthetic to die for) and – for my money – the soundtrack is WHOOF WHOOF to boot.
Best Dracula Soundtrack Ever, even if it’s not my favourite adaption (By dint of my hating it quite as much as I love it).
BTW, I’m surprised that you didn’t bring up the antisemitism in Nosferatu. That film is even remotely subtextual about it
Gary Oldman FTW
One of the most outstanding actors ever, imo
On an unrelated note, George Hamilton kind of nailed it too, albeit in a VERY different way, in a fun film
Yes!
“They must be from the government, they’re wearing shoes”.
George Hamilton was very well tanned for a Dracula, IIRC.
If we’re including television, I’d add Louis Jourdan, in the 1977 BBC film “Count Dracula.” It is also one of the most faithful adaptations of the original novel.
This! That is the most faithful adaptation as far as I am concerned. I mean, yes, it takes more liberties than some, but in feel? The most faithful, and therefore, the scariest.
Quite right! While this COUNT DRACULA makes changes of it’s own, it is infinitely more faithful than the Francis Ford Coppola DRACULA of AD 1992 (Which is always more faithful to the minor details of the book than to the actual plot).
Used to watch the PBS re-run every Hallowe’en. Just my favorite Dracula from all points (even if the Van Helsing portrayal seems a bit over-the-top).
Mr Frank Finlay, for my money, nails the sweet spot between the Ultimate Vampire Hunter and the most goofy character seen in the book like nobody else, which makes him the Best Van Helsing on any list.
I just want to say Frank Finlay is one of my favourite actors ever, so I stand by your evaluation of his van Helsing!
Duncan Regehr from The Monster Squad? He has always been my favorite Dracula.
If we’re going to be really completist – although I don’t know that I’d count him on either the best or worst lists – we ought to at least mention Henry Polic II from the obscure Saturday morning TV series entitled Monster Squad (no relation, at least as far as anyone has ever acknowledged, to the feature film).
If nothing else, that one strikes me as potentially interesting from a technical acting standpoint, since according to the premise, Polic II is actually playing a wax replica of Dracula brought to (un?)life by oscillating vibrations from Fred Grandy’s home-built Crime Computer, who has repented his evil ways and is now fighting supervillains alongside the (un?)live wax replicas of Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolfman.
As the Wikipedia page points out, it is totally not a coincidence that Monster Squad was created and written largely by Stanley Ralph Ross, one of the most prolific writers for the Adam West Batman series….
To clarify, the Michael Nouri “TV movies” were re-edited from their original serialized form. Cliffhangers, created by Kenneth Johnson (The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk, V, Alien Nation), was a show that tried to emulate the style of classic movie serials, with each 1-hour episode containing 15-minute segments of three different serials, The Curse of Dracula, The Secret Empire, and Stop Susan Williams. Like Star Wars, the show pretended to be coming into serials already in progress, with Dracula already up to “Chapter VI” in the premiere episode. Like many short-lived 1970s shows such as Battlestar Galactica, Planet of the Apes, and Spider-Man, its episodes were recut into TV movies that could be syndicated alongside other TV and theatrical movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliffhangers_(TV_series)
This essay catches precisely what I did about Michael Nouri’s performance, though I was not at all aware at the time of the Jewish dimensions to the equation. At the time, I found myself looking at Dracula as a genuinely tragic figure, as much a victim of his curse as a creature of evil, thereby lending a Shakespearean dimension to the story (even if the overall scripting and acting mostly didn’t support that vision).
I had also by that time read and very much liked the first two Fred Saberhagen Dracula novels, and I m astonished that no one’s ever adapted those for the screen. (It is almost certainly wishful thinking, but I’d be sorely tempted to hire Benedict Cumberbatch to play the lead in such a project.)
I like this article, it’s a broad selection for well-considered reasons. Kudos to you sir. Especially for championing Oldman whom I recall being slated upon release for being OTT.
I have two personal-fave Dracula depictions which do not appear here. I wonder if you might give your take on these?
Firstly, the 1977 BBC TV adaptation of Dracula with Louis Jourdan in the lead role. I saw this adaptation at around the same time as I first tackled the novel and it struck me how much it attempts to be faithful to the written word, possibly helped by longer running time. Jourdan predates Langella by a couple of years but gives an impressively charming and melancholic performance. It was also my callback when I finished viewing the horrible Gatiss and Moffat fiasco.
Secondly, Dracula as voiced by Graham McTavish in the recent ‘Castlevania’ animated series by Powerhouse Animation Studios. The series does a marvellous job of rewriting a videogame plot into animated art. It also succeeds in reimagining Dracula as a clever, passionate. sympathetic and scary character worthy of being the big boss in a steampunk medieval Europe.
Anyone else hold a candle for these two?
I was always a fan of the Louis Jordan Dracula, and the Dracula in Castlevania is fantastic. If you’re throwing animation into the stack, I’d add in Alucard (get it?) from Hellsing as my favorite Dracula. His voice actor Crispin Freeman nails the character’s unhinged manic violence coupled with boredom with his life outside of that,
I’ve never seen the ‘77 TV movie but have had enough recs for it now that I feel I need to! I also never got around to the Castlevania Netflix show though, of course, I loved the games throughout my childhood/teen years. It might be an uncomfortably large factor in my ultimately becoming a Gothic literature professor (also key to my fundamental inability to understand how whips work).
For what it’s worth I was hoping for a word on Castlevania’s take on Dracula as well (he features most prominent in seasons 1 and 2, you needn’t go beyond that to form an analysis, IMO. Probably my favorite take on the character.
Jack Palance did a good job in a TV movie from 1974.
I agree! Jack Palance was great.
Christopher Lee by fsr is the best Dracula on screen
Which is, of course, why he accomplished the rare triple of playing Vlad the Impaler, Movie Dracula and the literary Dracula in separate productions (Honourable mention to Mr Rudolph Martin for having played Vlad the Impaler and Movie Dracula in separate productions).
I’m sad (but not surprised) that Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) by Guy Madden isn’t mentioned. The campy title doesn’t match the tone of the movie at all, which is poetic, erotic, creepy & beautiful all at once. It’s unique in that Dracula, played by Zhang Wei-Qiang is Asian. I think he does a fantastic job, being both compelling & seductive, domineering & terrifying, all at once.
Most of the many who have found Langella (your #3, which which is a fairly acurate placement) to be compelling due to his magnetism are not aware of his “eye condition” (apparently called “Nystagmus”). If you scrutinize close-ups of him closely enough, you can notice his eyes moving ever so slightly and ever so quickly back and forth. It is apparently involuntary. Nevertheless, it is something that works on viewers at the subliminal level, giving off a quality of extra energy. It is essentially a superpower of Langella’s. Of course, the production values of this 1979 version don’t exactly hurt matters – nor does having Olivier in the film.
“Dracula Untold”, missing from your list, is criminally overlooked and underrated, in any case, and Luke Evans handles the role perfectly well. I think that, as a film, the 1979 Nosferatu was also one of the better entries into the genre.
You are probably right to have Coppolla’s version as #1. I know that you are focusing on the portrayals of the character, and not necessarily the films as a whole, but to me, judging by the latter, it is still probably the best Dracula film to date – the only other possible candidate is the 1931 original. It being the case that it has been over 30 years since what is probably the best version yet has been made means that we are overdue for another masterpiece-level Dracula re-rendition – one which “hopefully” would be well-steeped and well-anchored in Central/Eastern European politics and culture – both past and present.
Lastly, but certainly not least-ly, if Raymond McNally’s thesis that “Dracula was a woman” (specifically Erszabet Bathory) is correct, then possibly THE Dracula/Vampire movie of ALL OF THEM to watch is “Bathory” (2008) starring Anna Friel in the titular role. Last time I checked, it was free (with commercials) on Amazon. It was a very well-done movie with wonderful production values. It gives a very plausible re-imagining of who Countess Bathory might REALLY have been – not a serial-killer, but somebody framed for hundreds of murders that she didn’t commit, and in the context of Central/Eastern culture and politics during the Protestant Revolution, the importance of such absolutely cannot and must not be underestimated.
Neither Dracula Untold nor Nosferatu (1979) are on this list because the article’s author put them on their list of worst portrayals of Dracula.
Just a reminder that you’re welcome to disagree with the list or make the case for your own picks, but please avoid being rude or dismissive toward the author or other commenters. The full moderation guidelines can be found here: https://reactormag.com/moderation-policy/
I’d add Claes Bang’s performance in Netflix’s “Dracula..”
I agree with you, but this author included Bang in his “Worst Portrayals” list.
That was totally a riot!!! The humor was off the charts! The Dutch lady saying to Dracula “Welcome to England, Count Dracula!” and “Good Morning, Count Dracula” as she enters his prison cell area, ever so gingerly as if she was offering tea and biscuits to a harmless, tamed pet was…well, I can’t find the adjective to properly describe it, but it was such a ridiculous appropriation of The Count. On the one hand, I have respect for the legend of Dracula. On the other hand, it was such a humorous, novel approach to treating the character. Of course, he ultimately got his freedom. But the humor!
I totally agree, was quite fun initially. Unfortunately it tanked hard after they shifted the action to modern times. The ending was just… (gags)
Your choice of Gary oldman at number one is dead on, but putting Lugosi at seven is sacrilegious. Lugosi created the role and is the architect of all portrayals after him.
I hated Richard Roxburgh, as Dracula as much as I hated the design of the Frankenstein’s creature, so many weird design choices.
While I agree that many of the design and script choices were questionable, Richard Roxburgh obviously understood *exactly* what kind of a movie it was, and gleefully ran with it – unlike his co-stars, who took a campy film much too seriously.
What about Luke Evans portrayal of the Count? He is Vlad Teppes the impaler and Dracula???
It’s included in the same author’s “Worst Draculas” list.
So, where did the trope of Dracula pining for a lost love – and possibly obsessing over her reincarnation – originate? The earliest film I can think of with that plot was Karloff’s Mummy, but it somehow migrated into vampire lore. But how and when? Fright Night is a notable example of this, but they treat it like a well-established piece of mythology.
They used that trope on DARK SHADOWS, but I don’t know if it ever turned up in a Dracula movie prior to that.
I think it’s a combination of a more romantic characterization in the Hamilton Deane play, possibly some spillover from Karloff’s Mummy, as you say, and a general trend towards sympathetic, lovelorn vampires. It has a shape uptick after Rice published Interview with the Vampire whose influence on the genre can’t be overstated. It’s also worth noting that, pining for a reincarnated lost love is new(ish) in the history of Dracula, you have both Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Polidori’s The Vampyre (two wildly important English language vampire novellas published decades before Dracula) positioning vampires as rakish seducers first and foremost.
It may also just be the Occam’s razor explanation if you want Dracula to be sympathetic, romantic, and still not have a long and thoughtful relationship with Lucy or Mina.
Yes, all of this. I just wonder where the specific trope of Dracula finding a new version of his old lover enters the mythos. I think the earliest example is Blacula lol
Also, the idea that sunlight kills vampires seems to come directly from Nosferatu, as in the Dracula novel their powers just wane in the daylight. But doesn’t Stoker himself mention “contrary to belief, sunlight doesn’t kill them” or something?
If you want to be more specific, the first DRACULA adaptation with a ‘Lost Love Reborn’ angle (One of my least favourite elements in any adaptation) is the Dan Curtis version starring Mr Jack Palance – who is, in fact, so good in the title role that Marvel Comics explicitly based their legendary TOMB OF DRACULA version on him.
This plot element is, I believe, something of a lift from Mr Curtis’ own DARK SHADOWS.
Not being particularly serious about this but Vampira (or Old Dracula) from 1974 also has Dracula resurrecting a lost love. But I’d be very surprised if that film has influenced anyone!
Thanks for including Roxburgh. He has always been one of my favorites. Though I also thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It is after all going for the comic book genre. One period review described Roxburgh’s portrayal as having a rock star vibe, which I think nails it
For Lee. My pick would be Dracula Prince of Darkness. He had a fair amount of screen time and is thoroughly menacing without a word of dialogue.
I’m willing to accept this as a list of personal favourites, but fear that we shall never see eye-to-eye on Dracula: for the record, I have never seen HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (Though Mr Carridine looks “a Dracula indeed” to be sure), THE INVITATION (It bears pointing out that the one ranting about Blood Purity in DRACULA the novel is Count Dracula), THE CURSE OF DRACULA (Any adaptation that equates The Count with the Jewish people is a flawed adaptation, in my opinion: it bears pointing out that having an aquiline nose is a generically patrician feature dating back to the days of the Caesars, not a specifically Jewish one and that Count Dracula is explicitly an Old World feudal aristocrat of the sort who often used & abused Jewish financiers, amongst many other sorts of ‘lower beings’), NOSFERATU and PENNY DREADFUL – I therefore restrict my remarks on these films to pointing out that just because Grak Orlock was built from the model of Count Dracula doesn’t mean that he’s an actual Dracula (Any more than Peter Parker getting his start as a glasses-wearing newspaper employee who conceals a superhero alter ego behind a blue and red supersuit makes him Superman).
I will, however, join my voice to the chorus who feel that Mr Richard Roxburgh has no business outranking Sir Christopher Lee AND Mr Bela Lugosi on any list of Best Draculas: they are Iconic, he is merely amusing.
I’m more amused by your understatement of the degree to which the ‘Resurrection Romance’ is a deviation from the novel in the same way that a visit to Mexico City represents a small detour on road trip from New York City to Los Angeles! (It is, for my money, a key element in the film being caught trying to serve two masters – Textual fidelity and Radical Reinterpretation) – and never quite managing to thread the needle).
On the other hand DRACULA ‘92 is an absolute Riot: I wouldn’t hate it nearly so much if I didn’t love so much of it.
Anyway, please don’t think me sore-headed: I respect your love of DRACULA, so while our notions of the novel and our preferences for different adaptations seem to be incurably disparate, this just helps keep the Fan Experience more fun – after all, if we had exactly the same views then we couldn’t discuss why OUR favourite is the Absolute Best or accuse each other of writing from a cell in Purfleet Asylum when we disagree with each other. (-;
On a more serious note, it’s interesting that you don’t mention the literary Count Dracula being very scrupulous about speaking English without an accent – needing someone to practice his command of the language with is, in fact, a key part of why he keeps Mr Harker around for so long (and Mr Harker himself remarks that The Count speaks without an obvious accent, but with a “peculiar intonation’).
“(Any more than Peter Parker getting his start as a glasses-wearing newspaper employee who conceals a superhero alter ego behind a blue and red supersuit makes him Superman)”
To nitpick, Peter became Spider-Man before he began selling his photos to the Daily Bugle, and he was a freelancer, not an employee.
Also, to get super-nitpicky, his costume was originally meant to be red and black, but like many black things rendered with blue highlights in 4-color comics (e.g. Batman’s cape and cowl and Beast & Nightcrawler’s fur), it was later reinterpreted as blue.
Thank Goodness for that! (I admit to finding black deeply, deeply boring after being obliged to wear it to work for so long).
Incidentally, I am aware that Jolly Jonah Jameson’s favourite freelancer was not a staff photographer at the Daily Bugle, but given how much of his supporting cast is – or has been – associated with the Bugle (and given that we only rarely see Peter take his business elsewhere) I’m willing to stand by ‘employee’ (Albeit only as a shorthand),
I think we can both agree that the parallels between PP and CK in the earliest days of Spider-Man were absolutely not a coincidence though (f only because borrowing from the OG superhero made it easier for Stan Lee et al to show where the new kid on the block differed from the old models).
I don’t know if I’d go that far; after all, a lot of classic heroes were in the newspaper or journalism business. The Green Hornet, Britt Reid, was a newspaper publisher. Jack Ryder/Creeper and Vic Sage/Question are reporters. Brenda Starr, the classic adventure comic strip heroine, was a reporter and a template for Lois Lane.
And if the heroes weren’t reporters, they often had sidekicks or love interests who were — Iris West, Vicki Vale, Snapper Carr, etc. To a significant extent, the idea with Spider-Man was to take a character who would traditionally have been the teen sidekick and make him the lead hero.
@Tyler Dean, I almost forgot to add my compliments on having the good taste to make a Moustache Dracula your personal favourite: the literary Count’s Evil Moustache and Dark Ages Mullet are a tragic loss to far too many DRACULA adaptations (COWARDS ALL!).
Absolutely! My only lament is that Oldman has no moustache when in his elderly makeup. Perhaps it wouldn’t read well against the absolute pallor of his skin
Either that or Dracula went hairless in his old age (A wig would very neatly explain that absolutely hilarious headpiece).
What, no mention of Louis Jourdan in arguably the film adaptation most faithful to the novel?
I would have picked Carlos Villarias from the 1931 Spanish version of Drácula to be in the middle of the list. While I love my Bela as Dracula, Carlos did a much better job on the same sets. Now director George Melford did have the advantage to watch Browning film his version during the day, and then make improvements during the night shoot.
Still, Villarias did have a much higher intensity than Legosi, but that may be from looser restrictions to the Latin America market over the American market.
Just re-watched Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula- and absolutely the best performance of them all. He is seductive, terrifying and tragic all at once. Absolutely the best.
What about Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzogs Nosferatu? I’m surprised he hasn’t been included. I think he gives such a unique and original portrayal of Dracula.. Definately my favourite of them all
I think he was on the “Worst” list last week. No accounting for taste.
Max Schreck
Ugh. JUST NO. Coppola had the nerve to call this film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and it just kills me. At best this is “Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula.” If you put Bram Stoker’s name on it, it should at least look something like the book, no? I just couldn’t with that movie. I’d rather see Eddie Murphy and Angela Bassett in “Vampire in Brooklyn” any day of the week. I’ll stick with Langella, Lugosi, and Schreck.
The really vexing thing about the ‘92 DRACULA is that it does much, much more too look like the novel than almost any other adaptation … but it only LOOKS like the Book, because the writer(s) decided to thoroughly subvert the actual plot for fun & profit (Also Vampire Romance of tbe darkest hue).
It’s this disconnect between meticulous inclusion of relatively minor details from the books and a major change to the plot that produces the uniquely schizophrenic quality of DRACULA 1992 (Which gives me a headache and heartache alike) – part of me cherishes it, part of me wants to bury it at a crossroads with a stake in it’s heart and the severed head placed at knee level, stuffed with garlic).
I should stress that this was a colourful metaphor, not a Game Plan!
You left out Robert Louis Jourdan in the BBC version.
I also enjoyed Louis Jordan’s Dracula on BBC many years ago. He was very convincing and charismatic
Also Jack Palance did a great performance and I think it was also on BBC also.