3/5/2023 0 Comments Love at first bite disco![]() That an undead creature of the night could be so seductive creates its own kind of terror.ĭracula performed respectably but never caught fire with viewers in the summer of 1979, where it competed with such films as Rocky II, The Muppet Movie, and The Amityville Horror. ![]() Langella’s performance, however, sets it apart. It needs a creative choice as daring as Gorey’s visuals (or maybe just Gorey’s visuals, which could have made for a remarkable, if much different, film). His Dracula feels grand without ever seeming distinctive, apart from seduction scene with psychedelic visuals by James Bond title designer Maurice Binder. That’s generous, but it also speaks to a kind of wishy-washiness that pervades most of the film. In interviews, Badham essentially says he likes them both, and can’t really decide which he prefers. It’s telling that two strikingly different looking versions of the film exist (both included on the new Scream Factory Blu-ray): a theatrically released version with vivid colors that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hammer film, and a version with a desaturated color scheme that’s appeared in home video incarnations. To direct, the studio brought in John Badham – coming off the blockbuster Saturday Night Fever – then shipped the production to England for moody location photography. Seward, director of an insane asylum and father to Lucy Seward (played by rising star Kate Nelligan), who in this version of the story serves as Dracula’s love interest. They didn’t stop there: Beyond securing Langella’s services, Universal recruited Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing and Donald Pleasence as Dr. The studio even drew from the Star Wars talent pool, bringing in cinematographer Gilbert Taylor and composer John Williams. Sensing a potential hit, and one with a character already associated with the studio, Universal readied a big-screen version for 1979 release – one big enough to compete in a post- Star Wars summer movie environment. But he’s more seductive than blatantly scary. Sure, there’s bloodsucking involved, and he’ll kill anyone who gets in his way. Langella plays Dracula as a tortured romantic yearning for satisfaction he’ll never find and determined to seduce others into his dark existence. He is a beautiful and sensual Dracula.” Then came the “but”: “but he notably lacks terror.” Based on Langella’s performance in the 1979 film, Eder’s not wrong. with an occasional prosaic reflex as if he were mentally counting coffins. Langella is a stunning figure as Dracula,” he enthused, continuing, “tall, pale. In his New York Times review, Richard Eder praised the production but expressed some reservations about its star. In 1977, producer Eugene Wolsk took the Gorey sets to Broadway for what was billed as an “Edward Gorey Production of Dracula.” It became a sensation, thanks in part to Gorey’s black-and-white-with-splashes-of-red visuals, and in part to the star for whom Dracula would become a breakout role: Frank Langella. In 1973, producer John Wulp turned to Gorey to design the sets and costumes for a Nantucket revival of Dracula that would later move to New York in an off-Broadway staging. But the first ripples of what became a wave can be traced to 1973, and to the pen of Edward Gorey.īy the early ’70s, Gorey was already deep into his career as an illustrator whose work found the intersection of the macabre and the whimsical. It’s hard to determine where trends start and, in all likelihood, 1979’s three Dracula movies were the result of parallel thinking. Five years later, however, Dracula felt ready for a resurrection. By 1974’s The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires - a goofy but fun co-production with Hong Kong’s martial arts producers the Shaw Brothers - star Christopher Lee had stopped showing up. Since the 1958 film Horror of Dracula, the character had felt like the property of Hammer Films, but by the middle of the ’70s, Hammer’s Dracula started to feel exhausted. By 1979, Dracula had seen better days – at least at the movies. That’s not to say they can’t seem extremely sleepy for years. Yet each would live on in its own way, finding new audiences as they influenced the films of the following decade and beyond. One became a surprise hit one an unexpected box office disappointment and one found a receptive arthouse audience and became one of its director’s touchstone films. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu, a blockbuster-sized Hollywood production, and a schticky comedy. He didn’t always get the reception he expected: Bram Stoker’s bloodsucker appeared in a trio of wildly different movies in 1979 – an austere remake of F.W. In the final year of the 1970s, Dracula rose from the grave not once but three times.
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