But every time I revisit Dracula, I find myself very pleased by one thing or another. Certainly Bela Lugosi's performance is mesmerizing (nothing like the later caricatures he would degenerate into), and Dwight Frye's Renfield remains one of the most wickedly indulgent bits of acting ever preserved on film. Then there's the original Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), a delightfully pompous and self-righteous old man who bears no resemblance to later attempts to tart up that particular character. What Dracula has in spades, though, more so than any of the old-school Universal monster movies, is genuinely creepy atmosphere, and this is the element that people tend to forget when they think of the film only in terms of its most famous scenes. The spiders, the ghostly movements of Dracula's undead wives, the bats … these are the things I always forget about and am always tickled by upon coming back to this movie. Perhaps it would have been better had the studio put money toward making Dracula the big-budget scarefest it was intended to be, instead of what is basically a filmed version of the then-current stage play. Indeed, some of the scenes are terribly creaky when seen nowadays, and the audio is such that some dialogue is all but inaudible. Yet, given the inescapable cheesiness of Frankenstein (a great film, sure, but not always for the right reasons), I'm content with the occasional boredom factor and mustiness of Dracula. The recent DVD issues of the film contain an optional score by Philip Glass (performed by the Kronos Quartet), which arguably provides just the right amount of padding to make the more tedious stretches more engaging. But either way, the film still stands as one of the sole Universal horror films that actually delivers anything like real creepiness, as opposed to campiness.
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