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Dracula (1931) Dir. Tod Browning & Karl Freund

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Watched Dracula (1931)

Potentially blasphemous take incoming: this might be my favorite version of Dracula. Half a dozen shots that took my breath away, mind blowing set design, a few extraordinary performances, and I think the silence really worked for me. It created a sense of tension and waiting that, although perhaps not matched by the 'action' of the film, creates an impressive atmosphere in which Lugosi's monster is horribly comfortable. The conclusion is admittedly weak, but I really don't care about the lack of excitement in an essentially atmospheric film.

Lugosi is obviously the stand out, and conveys better than any other version I can think of the feudal horror of Dracula. He shows us the fear of the bourgeois that the monster of landed aristocracy that they have slain will rear its head again, will take over their system so easily exploitable with historical capital and influence. The specter haunting the nightmares of Browning's new bourgeois is not the revolutionary future, but the defeated past. Renfield best displays the reaction to this fear, hoping that loyalty and industriousness will allow him to sit alongside Dracula as new aristocracy, but there is no such thing. He, as with the rest of the liberal bourgeois, has lost the revolutionary spirit, and craves only power. Van Helsing's mission, then, as the rationalist vampire hunter, is to put to bed this looming ghost of feudalism and protect the best interests of capital. He is a pseudo-revolutionary, carrying on the revolutionary task of his forebears but in defense of the new lords of the Earth.