The First Dracula on Film?
It’s not the one you think. And not the other one, either.
What’s significant about a silent film that focuses on a young woman visiting her father in an insane asylum, where she falls asleep and has a fever dream about an nonconsensual wedding to her high school music teacher?
Would you believe it’s the first film to have Dracula as a character?
I mean seriously. Would you? Because to give the antagonist of this film firsties on being Dracula is a tough sell.
Never mind that neither you nor I nor anyone living has seen this movie.
We are so wrapped up in the image of Dracula established by the likes of Bela Lugosi, it’s easy to forget that before Universal Pictures bought the rights to Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula was a known quantity as a character. So, just like you didn’t see Fifty Shades (liar!) but still have an idea of who Christian Grey is, so did the people at the turn of the century have an image of a bloodthirsty-yet-respectable-seeming nobleman who moved in and out of human circles almost unnoticed until it was too late.
And so, inserting an antagonist that people had a passing impression of seems like a decent movie making gambit. Just think how many damn films have been made about Krampus in the decade since the internet became aware of the anti-Santa’s existence; even though westerners have only the faintest grasp of what Krampus is (thanks Buzzfeed!).
And that’s probably what happened in 1920 when the Hungarian film Drakula Halála, aka Death of Dracula, was being written.
I say “probably” because the film has been lost to time, like so many early horror films. But clues survive in the form of a handful of publicity stills and an adapted script, found by Jenö Farkas in 1997. Farkas summarized the story of the film in a paper, but the broad strokes are:
- Mary goes to visit her father in a mental hospital
- She sees her old music teacher, who thinks himself to be THE Dracula (“Drakula” in this case)
- Inmates abduct her, intent on performing a horrid medical procedure on her eyes
- Mary escapes
- She chooses to sleep the night in the same mental hospital (because that’s what freed abductees do, yes?)
- She has a dream about her music teacher/Drakula, who kidnaps her, takes her to his castle, and attempts to marry her (also an entire subcategory on pornhub)
- The marriage trap is thwarted by a cross
- Mary flees, but is pursued by “Drakula” into a village, where he mesmerizes her with his demon stare
- With the aid of a doctor, she breaks the hypnosis, lights the house on fire, and flees again, this time into the woods
- She Dorothys out of that shit by waking up and wondering if it was all just a dream or if it really happened
- Meanwhile, in the waking world, her old music teacher dares another inmate to shoot him in the heart, to prove his immortality
- Guess what?
- The bullet in his heart do what bullets in the heart do in the real world
- The end
Clearly, this isn’t an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. But is Dracula a character? The character in the dream shares some traits with the world’s most famous vampire, including a castle, demon wives, immortality (or at least, a very long life), and the ability to go full Saruman just by staring a victim in the eye.
“I am Drakula, the immortal one. I have been around a thousand years, and I shall live forever…Immortality is mine!”
When the film premiered in February of 1921 (a full year before Nosferatu premiered), surely a lot of moviegoers in Austria and Hungary were sold on the name “Drakula”. To that point, we can infer that there was at least an intent to represent Dracula in some fashion. Further, I’d extend that if we only dealt with the waking world in the mental hospital, we have nothing more than a reference to an imaginary character who everyone in the movie agrees is imaginary. BUT the dream sequence, which appears to be at least half the film, has the actual character of Dracula represented inside the reality of the film.
It’s like asking “Is there a witch in The Wizard of Oz?” If you say “no, because the witch is just in a dream and doesn’t exist in Kansas,” then you would likely conclude that Dracula is not in Drakula Halála, and also you are probably boring at parties.
Regardless how you regard the question this blog started with, there’s a second story here and it’s bigger and better.
And it was pointed out by researcher and blogger Lokke Heiss. Because even if Drakula Halála has no bearing on our common conception of the character Dracula, the circumstances under which it was made bear directly on how we envision the Count today.
Drakula Halála was the dying gasp of a generation of Hungarian filmmaking, as the harsh regency of Miklós Horthy cracked down on the industry, going so far as to torture to death one director named Sándor Pallós. The anti-Semitic, anti-communist, anti-union government came down so hard on the arts (dictatorships tend to do that) that Hungary’s top talent took the F train out of town. Among them was the co-writer of Drakula Halála: Mihaly Kertesz, who is better known today as Michael Curtiz, the director of White Christmas and Casablanca.
Oh, and also fleeing the oppressive regime was a guy named Béla Blaskó. Who you might remember better as:
Bela Lugosi.
Perhaps it’s appropriate that the country that gave us the indelible image of Dracula in the form of Bela Lugosi also birthed the first film to use Dracula as a character.
But it’s still hard to rule on, because no one alive today has seen the film. Of some 600 Hungarian films made between 1912 and 1930, only 45 survive, and Drakula Halála is not among the survivors. The film never screened outside of Austria and Hungary and never got a rerelease.
So unless there’s a 103 year old Hungarian who’s sketchy parents took her to see the movie as a toddler, it’s doubtful we’ll ever learn what the film was like. If she’s out there, you’ll know her by her gray hair, frail frame, and severe trust issues.
It’s perhaps poetic that Drakula’s first line in the film was reportedly “I don’t remember. I do not remember anything. I am Drakula… the immortal” Echoing the title character’s prescient opening line, Drakula Halála is both forgotten and immortal; it is lost to us and yet indelibly remembered for scoring the first cinema role for gothic fiction’s most famous villain.
toothnitpickings: The film is usually written as “Drakula halála”, with a lower case “h”. I’ve capitalized it here so as to make it clearly part of the title of the film for English-speaking audiences used to seeing title words capitalized. No need to correct me on that one, vampsplainers.
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Image sources: The Hungarian Film Archives
