Bela Lugosi

Dracula

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Close up of Dracula's face

“Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.” Hollywood horror starts here, with 1931’s Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning, it made an international star of the man who uttered those words, Bela Lugosi. He’d already become a huge Broadway star off the back of a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. This film would propel him onto the global stage, and into posterity. The film sticks fairly close to the play, which sticks fairly close to the book. There have been trims in characters and settings but most of the original plot is intact as Browning’s version of it follows Dracula from his ancestral home in Transylvania, on to … Read more

The Black Cat

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Lugosi and a shirtless Karloff

If you’re looking for a slightly leftfield scary movie for Halloween, you could do a lot worse than 1934’s The Black Cat, which not only stars horror titans (veterans division) Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the first of a run of movies they’d do together but is directed by Edgar Ulmer, a largely wasted talent who could put on a real show when he wanted to, and he does here. Freud lurks in the undergrowth of the story of a man back from the Great War facing down the man who stole his wife while he was away. But first let’s meet the teams, as they say. In the vanilla corner, a … Read more