Now that we’re positively swimming in adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s easy to forget just how much of our cultural understanding of the character was built around one actor for decades. Bela Lugosi played the role for Universal a number of times after originating the part on stage, and to this day, when you ask many people about the vampire, they imagine Lugosi’s theatrical lugubriousness above all else. His performance was typical of the early era of sound cinema, partly defined by his own inexperience with the English language and the limitations of a small budget. The more he played the role, and the more audiences grew weary of the early Hollywood horror boom, the more mannered and parodic he became. Eventually, despite his early impact and undeniable allure, Dracula stopped being scary, and nobody dared to try and follow up Universal’s version of the character. Well, not in Hollywood. Across the pond by the mid-1950s, change was in the air.
Hammer Film Productions was established in 1934, and for well over 20 years, they produced a slew of movies across various genres. But by 1955, they’d found a profitable niche in horror. Two years later, they made The Curse of Frankenstein, their first color horror that outraged critics but made a ton of money. Starring as the monster was Christopher Lee, a bit-part actor who was 6’5” and cast mostly because of that. His stature and gentlemanly allure made him particularly appealing for the studio’s next horror film, Dracula. According to producer Anthony Hinds when it came to casting Dracula, “it never occurred to any of us to use anyone else but Chris Lee.”
1958’s Dracula is not an especially faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel. Most films aren’t. It’s more concerned with emphasizing the gothic salaciousness that remains implied throughout much of the book. The details that Hays Code-era Hollywood couldn’t portray are in full force here, most notably the ever-exciting combination of sex and blood. For a post-War Britain struggling to escape the staid confines of the stiff upper lip, Hammer was primed to shake the dust off the coffin and make the subtext text.
One of the key subtexts of Dracula has always been the idea that this dark foreigner would come over here and take all our women. Lee’s Count makes it abundantly clear that the ladies are all too happy to fall into his welcoming arms. Christopher Lee benefitted from color cinema, which added depth to his dark eyes and made the glaring red of the fake blood Hammer loved seem more phantasmagorical than ever before. His Dracula is dignified, forever in control of the situation and suave in a way that other male characters are simultaneously wooed and made suspicious by. His presence is so magnetic, so otherworldly in its sophistication and menace, that you forget he’s really not on-screen for that long.
In a 1990 interview with NPR, Christopher Lee said that, through reading the novel, he discovered that Dracula was “heroic, erotic and romantic.” He also viewed the character in a far more sympathetic light than Lugosi had been allowed to convey. “Here’s a man who is immortal. Here is a man who, through being immortal, is a lost soul. Here is a man who experiences the loneliness of evil, something he can’t control, who wants to die but there is a force in him, a malefic force, which drives him to do these terrible things.” It’s that dignity that carries Lee’s Count through the franchise, that indomitable force of a man who is torn between life and death and whose isolation needs to be fed as much as his hunger for blood.
Audiences loved Dracula, especially Lee’s performance, and the movie was a box office smash. Sequels, of course followed—eight of them in total from 1960 to 1974. Strangely, Lee did not appear in the first of these follow-ups, The Brides of Dracula. He would rise five years later in Dracula: Prince of Darkness, but the problems with the then-ongoing sequel assembly line were evident. Lee doesn’t speak in this movie, only hissing on a couple of occasions. He later said this was because the script was so bad that he outright refused to speak the lines (although screenwriter Jimmy Sangster disputed that). Dracula: Prince of Darkness holds up, but this defanging of Lee’s Dracula, so to speak, robs him of some of his thrall. Mercifully, his mere presence does a lot of heavy lifting. The way he moves, slinking through a room as though his feet barely touch the ground, is a display of pure power.
As the ‘60s got more swinging, Hammer doubled down on the provocative nature of its horror films. To put it bluntly, as scholar Ian Cooper did, the focus became “tits and fangs.” And blood. Lots of blood. Released in 1968, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave advertised itself as a proudly pervy affair, as demonstrated by its cleavage-heavy poster. Lee remained a tempting presence, understandable as a murderous lothario who could free buttoned-up Victorian women from the repression of their era. Yet he’s given little to do, reduced mostly to lurking around shadowy corners while the gormless humans eat up most of the screentime. By now, the formula of Hammer Dracula movies was firmly in place and running on autopilot. Some glimmers of interesting ideas pertaining to religion are quickly discarded before they can be developed, and some strong setpieces are left to liven up a stodgy script. Again, what holds it all together is Lee who, even when the material is working against him, is so uniquely gripping an actor as to warrant our undivided attention. Only he could drag your eyes away from the boobs and blood.
Hammer kept making Dracula movies, and Lee kept appearing in them, often under duress. He grew increasingly exhausted with the direction the character was being taken in, reduced to a near-silent boogeyman rather than the suave menace with romantic aching Lee had envisioned him as. He got something meatier to chew on with Dracula A.D. 1972, a truly trippy and proudly brash movie where the Count is revived in modern London and tangles with the descendants of Van Helsing. The movie is knowingly silly and pun-laden (“She’s a bit drained!”), but also genuinely fun. While Dracula still spends most of his screentime in a derelict church away from the modern world, Lee is clearly enjoying playing the character as a representation of an outdated generation trying to deal with all these damn hippie kids.
Its direct sequel, 1973’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula gave him an even more bananas story to delve into. This one has devil-worshiping cults, biker gangs, secret agents and a Bond villain-esque plan to unleash the bubonic plague onto humanity. This is also the movie where Dracula is felled by a garden bush. The movie is ridiculous and enjoyable for it, but Lee’s disdain for the parodic slide the Dracula lore had taken in Hammer’s series is evident in every scene. Even his own hatred for this role can’t stop him from looking cool as hell, though. After this, Lee hung up his cape for Hammer, hoping to move on from the typecasting that had defined his career for 15 years.
Christopher Lee remained a horror icon until his death in 2015 at the age of 93. He starred in The Wicker Man, became a muse for Tim Burton, a self-described Dracula nerd, and ruined a few hobbits’ lives in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He even recorded a few metal albums. But there’s a reason he shall forever be known as Dracula, long after other actors have tried and failed to fill his boots. Many performers have brought their own spin to the character, as well as vampire fiction at large, but they clearly borrow heavily from Lee. Gary Oldman’s Dracula is lascivious and aristocratic like Lee’s. Anne Rice’s vampires, so aching with emotion and torn between empathy and bloodlust, owe a lot to the blueprint pioneered by Lee.
It was through Christopher Lee that vampires began to feel like a threat again, stripped of the unconscious camp that engulfed Lugosi. This Dracula was one to fear as well as something of innate desire, which is at the heart of Stoker’s book and partly why it has endured for well over a century. The scariest monsters are those that feel palpably human, tied to the real world and evocative of our innermost horrors. We’re drawn to that which we fear, and few actors have embodied that dichotomy as thoroughly as Christopher Lee.
Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.