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Master of Horror Dan Curtis on making Dracula scary again
The expert tells all in a vampiric exposé!
Vampires are the perfect allegory. That's why they're used in so many stories. They can represent so many different things. Vampires have been stand-ins for xenophobia. They can represent immigrants, bringing "old world" magic to unwanted shores. Vampires have not-so-subtly been used as an allegory for the spread of disease. They can be parables about trust, a stranger that needs to be invited in.
By 1973, these bloodsuckers had been explored through almost every lens imaginable. Vampires were on TV, in the movies, and of course, in film. Right there at the dawn of scary movies, we have these creatures of the night. Famously, there's Nosferatu in 1922, our first (albeit unauthorized and completely illegal) adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, a novel that would later be adapted again by Universal Studios in 1935. But even before Nosferatu, vampires were right there in the title of the 1915 French movie Les Vampires. Almost as soon as humans are able to make movies, we're making vampire movies.
So by the time Dan Curtis is making his own Dracula in '73, the vampire genre has been thoroughly done before. There is no shortage of vampire movies by this point. The 1935 Bela Lugosi Dracula led to an entire cycle of Universal Studios sequels and crossovers. Hammer Films over in England had their own Dracula series, with eight entries by '73. Batman fought Dracula. Billy the Kid fought Dracula. Even Abbott and Costello appeared beside our caped subject. So what could Curtis add, really?
Within his own filmography, vampires weren't new territory. Curtis himself created the seminal series Dark Shadows, perhaps doing more than any other artist to humanize vampires up to that point. It was ABC's highest-rated daytime series in 1969, amassing a huge audience. It's since grown in popularity with a sizable cult following.
Curtis built on his success with The Night Stalker, the made-for-TV movie that presented Darren McGavin's Kolchak to the world for the first time. That film saw a vampire on the Vegas Strip and was also a gigantic ratings hit.
So why would Curtis return to tell another vampire story? What hadn't he touched on in Dark Shadows or its two follow-ups? Hadn't he exhausted the topic with The Night Stalker? It turns out he had not, and his 1973 movie Dracula proved why.
For starters, although he'd made plenty of vampire stories, Curtis hadn't yet explored the most famous iteration of the story. A Dracula adaptation allowed Curtis to finally play in the sandbox of Bram Stoker's iconic character. He had more opportunity for subversion than ever before; this was the vampire story viewers were most familiar with.
In the May 28, 1973 edition, the Greenville, South Carolina Greenville News printed an Associated Press interview in which Curtis explains his philosophy about how he can finally make another effective Dracula adaptation.
"You have to have a believable story. You have to take out every element that's not totally believable. You're under greater scrutiny because it is horror.
"Some producers don't care about the story. It's just an excuse to get a couple quarts of blood on the screen. That's not what scares. It's a mood, a feeling, a whole ambience."
Sympathy was another cornerstone of his creed.
"It has to have more elements than those that frighten. You must have certain human dimensions that make you care, or in my opinion, it fails."
25 Comments
I meant Rich💰Koz
The other played boxer characters quite a bit as well. Mike Mazurski was his name.
P.S. Nosferatu is AWESOME!