Review: Dracula, 1931 (while moving to a house without internet)

Darkness and light collide on the desolate battleground of John Harker's forehead.

I take a lot of inspiration from Ursula Le Guin. Her daily schedule reads:

3:00-5:00 p.m.—correspondence, maybe house cleaning.

5:00-8:00 p.m.—make dinner and eat it.

After 8:00 p.m.—I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this.

A lot of you probably know that I was moving this past week. October has found me after 8 p.m. perpetually. In lieu of the next essay, I thought it’d be fun to share something straight from my notebook.

I downloaded a bunch of movies to watch during the move, since we wouldn’t have internet for several weeks. I thought it’d be fun to review each movie based on how it fit into the moving process — but then we solved the internet problem, and that idea sort of fell to pieces. Still, if you’re wondering what sausage discarded from the sausage-making process looks like, here’s a cut from my viewing of Dracula (1931).

Dracula starts with the dopey, but I guess extremely brave Renfield traveling to a half-ruined castle at midnight against many warnings. He’s led through cold ruins to an inner chamber, a roaring fire, unsuspicious dinner. I watched the film over two nights, in the bedroom we’d set up to have a warm place in our otherwise disassembled house.

There’s a longer title for this review: “Review of Dracula (1931), while moving into a home without internet, thus downloaded onto the Prime video app with two seasons of Psych, which we had to stop watching because my girlfriend found the plot of Psych too compelling and she needed to get some sleep.”

And for that specific use case — not compelling enough to keep you up, but good if you want an excuse to stay awake — Dracula was perfect! I mean, it hangs on quiet moments in the way older things do. Long shots of people standing and talking, few cuts. But as a horror film, it sometimes sticks on shots just a little too long for comfort. Renfield stares wide-eyed from the bottom of a dark hatch for a full 12 seconds.

In a movie that’s more historical than horrific, this moment is the only one that threatened to scare me away, except that I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I was too exhausted to even lean forward and adjust the volume. My comfort shows are all on YouTube.

You can’t generally tell if it’s night or day in a shot of Dracula. That’s sort of important for a movie about vampires. But in the way that black-and-white gave us deep noir shadows and, uh, Justice League: Justice Is Gray, the interplay of light is the film’s main device rather than limitation. Dracula is a story about eyes peering at you from the dark. A bar of light illuminates Bela Lugosi’s eyes whenever he compels someone.

This works because those eyes belong to Lugosi. I remember a review which described Daniel Kaluuya’s eyes, somewhat romantically, as “some of Hollywood’s most special effects.” The same applies here, in a performance so iconic that I don’t even want to get into it. He’s just Dracula. Literally every image of Dracula you conjure when I say that name, it’s just Bela Lugosi. Bela Lugosi did that.

I watched his eyes because, in the warm bedroom we’d set up to have one place that wasn’t in shambles, I could here nothing over a freak thunderstorm that collided with my window. The dialogue became unintelligible. Everything became a bar of light across Dracula’s face and Renfield’s crazed stare. I stopped watching and picked up the following night.

Which, it turns out, was not the move. When I could hear the film’s shift in focus from the coffee-smooth Dracula to doorstop extraordinaire John Harker, it became clear that the plot was on a steep decline into oatmeal territory. I wished for a climactic moment that didn’t come, making due with some sort of cool exchanges between Van Helsing and the vampire.

I understand that the plot was constrained by what pearl-clutching audiences might be willing to accept: A dumbass doing nothing and getting the girl. Even the performance we did get caused folks to faint in the theater, so maybe we’re just pampered nowadays with respect to pure evil.

Dracula, at its best, is a film about contrast. If you’re at a high-contrast moment in your life, I strongly recommend its first half. If you’re at a brightly lit English manor moment in your life, a vaguely day-night moment in your life — then make yourself a delicious bowl of oatmeal and enjoy act two.

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Hope you enjoyed. I don’t love sharing my work straight from the notebook, since it’s usually less polished and more boring (this piece did see some edits, just fyi). But I wanted to break in the new office, stretch my fingers a little bit, and rap about a movie I really enjoyed.

Been saying this for a while, but I’m fingers crossed about getting on a regular posting schedule soon. May break out the “What I’m Having Fun With” section to its own weekly thing, if only to spare word count on my bigger essays.

Anywho, look forward to seeing you in the next one.

DR