Hallowe'en: Why Dracula just won't die

Christopher Lee as Dracula
Fang-tastic: Christopher Lee as Dracula

As a restored version of the classic Hammer film is released for Hallowe'en, Christopher Frayling explains the cultural immortality of the blood-sucking seducer

On November 11, 1957 – several years before the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP – filming began at the new stage one at Bray Studios near Windsor on Hammer Films' Dracula.

This was the first Dracula to be shot in colour, the first to emphasise the theme of sexual awakening, and – surprisingly – the first to feature a British actor in the title role.

Christopher Lee, whose career as an actor had, by his own admission, been "moving very slowly" up to that point, had come to specialise since the late '40s in portraying The Other in assorted period adventure films – Spanish captains, Arab traders, a Montevidean in The Battle of the River Plate, the Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, and, most recently, the Marquis St Evremonde in A Tale of Two Cities. "I'm the tallest actor in the country [6ft 4ins]", he said, "and am not entirely British in appearance."

He was also a gifted mime, good at playing clipped, aristocratic suave, and could hiss and blaze convincingly when thwarted. Just right for the demon lover Dracula, a new take on beauty and the beast with the added ingredient of the loneliness of evil. Dracula was his breakthrough movie – and Hammer's.

George Orwell, had he lived, could have written a classic essay on the cultural significance of the 1958 Dracula. The mixture of Home Counties Transylvania – peopled with eccentric character actors such as bumbling Miles Malleson (as the undertaker), mummerset-accented George Woodbridge (as the landlord), and officious George Benson (as the customs official), and virginal brides waiting eagerly in their negligées for a nocturnal visit from the Count; the positioning of the audience as innocent bystanders watching a morality play, not quite sure whether the film was about desire or loathing; the battle royal between the agile vampire-hunter, Van Helsing (in Peter Cushing's performance, a long way away from the tedious professorial Dutchman of Bram Stoker's original novel), and the charming seducer who is condemned to eternal life; the subtle nuances of the class system in Hammer's version of Victorian society amid ponderous 1885 clutter and baronial interiors; above all, the Eastmancolour celebration of the Gothic in which, as director Terence Fisher put it, "you can't do this any more by shadows on the wall".

Dracula introduced fangs, red contact lenses, décolletage, ready-prepared wooden stakes and – in the celebrated credits sequence – blood being spattered from off-screen over the Count's coffin.

After the black-and-white years, British filmmakers had at last found a very roundabout way of telling stories about sexual liberation. On the whole, the critics were appalled, patronising and/or dismissive. The censors were worried, too, in particular about the stakings, the cleavage, and the moment when Dracula puts his hand to his disintegrating face.

By Christmas 1958, however, newspapers were featuring cartoons about "Peter Cushion and Christopher Flea in Santa Claws". Hammer had arrived. Orwell could have given all this his "art of British murder" and "British seaside postcard" treatment.

It was surprising that this was the first British version, because, apart from anything else, the three foundation texts of the horror genre in film – Frankenstein (1818), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Dracula (1897) – had all been written by Brits, often with a Celtic twist. More recently, the backbone of Hollywood horror from the early 1930s had been provided by émigré directors, such as James Whale, and costumed actors such as Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Charles Laughton and Cedric Hardwicke. An Old World genre in the New World of talkies.

But one reason why Hammer Films made such a splash on first release was that there had been so relatively few horror films made in Britain before the late '50s. Karloff and Bela Lugosi had made one or two over here in the '30s (far from their finest hours), but these had not performed well at the box office, and they weren't a patch on the actors' Hollywood products.

Between 1942 and 1945, the importing of all "H"-certificate films was banned outright by the Central Office of Information and the British Board of Film Censors. The thinking was that there were horrors enough for the public to cope with in everyday life – a misunderstanding, by the way, of the function of horror.

So, when Hammer's first Gothic, The Curse of Frankenstein, opened in May 1957, it seemed – to misquote John Ruskin – like a pot of bright red paint flung in the face of the film establishment, complete with a resurrected dog and eyeballs in jam jars. With Dracula released the following year, the tempestuous loveliness of terror came into its own.

The film may have omitted Dracula's stormy arrival in Whitby – preferring to remain in a cosy version of mittel Europe throughout – but audiences were not fooled. The key moment was when Melissa Stribling as Mina Holmwood returned home after a night spent with the Count in the basement of the Friedrichstrasse undertakers' parlour.

As Terence Fisher recalled: "I told her, 'Listen, you should imagine you have had one whale of a sexual night, the one of your whole sexual experience. Give me that in your face!'?" And she did. A confident, sexy, liberated half-smile, rather than her usual wan detachment. James Bernard's orgasmic music – high-volume variations on the three syllables of Drac–u–la – helped reinforce the point.

Ever since it was first published, in the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the story of Dracula has acted as a crucible for all sorts of different public anxieties – functioning less as literature than as popular myth.

In 1897, these anxieties included insecurity about the end of empire (the Count colonises England), concern among male writers of popular fiction about the rise of the "new woman" (Mina versus Lucy), questions about the resilience of religion in the face of science and technology (Van Helsing's tool-kit of prophylactics), and public confusions about Darwinism (the Count as throwback to lower down the evolutionary chain).

More recently, especially since the rise of the house of Hammer, the vampire metaphor has been re-interpreted much more explicitly as about sex: it always was, but Bram Stoker's original novel was in many ways a manifesto of repression. As literary critic James Twitchell wittily observed: "The myth is loaded with sexual excitement; yet there is no mention of sexuality. It is sex without genitalia, sex without confusion, sex without responsibility, sex without guilt, sex without love – better yet, sex without mention."

Not exactly safe sex: ever since the German Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror (1922), the theme has been associated with the spread of the plague – a staple of the traditional folklore of the vampire. Another critic, a Freudian, has called the Dracula myth "a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match". A way of coping, through the language of myth, with virtually every transgression imaginable.

Which is why Count Dracula will keep rising from the coffin. In Stoker's novel, he was an elderly Transylvanian military commander with massive eyebrows and a breath problem. In the film Nosferatu, he was a creation of folklore, with pointy ears, rodent teeth and a bald head.

In Hollywood's first Dracula (1931), he was played by Lugosi as a hypnotic lounge-lizard in evening dress who rolled his "r"s too much and who lived in a castle infested for some reason with armadillos.

Post-Hammer, he has become a misunderstood blood addict (school of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire), a shape-shifter who represents the last romantic (in Francis Coppola's version, which misunderstands the nuances of Victorian class by turning the Count into a working-class hero), the bogey-man of American high schools rather than the Carpathian mountains, and the last carnivore when everyone else has turned vegetarian.

Van Helsing has been transformed from good vampire-hunter to crazed fundamentalist. But Lee's was and is the definitive performance as Count Dracula. He has no need of hypnotism and grotesque make-up to be plausible; he doesn't transmute into bats or wolves ("that", says Van Helsing, "is a common fallacy"); he has only 13 lines in the whole film, which is admittedly 13 more than he had in The Curse of Frankenstein. All he has to do is stand magisterially at the suburban window. His victims, and the audience, do the rest.

  • The BFI restoration of 'Dracula' is being screened across the country tonight and is released nationwide on Fri. Sir Christopher Frayling is chairman of Arts Council England and author of 'Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula'.