10. Gary Oldman; or, the Goth Dracula

From the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) directed by Francis Ford Coppla
Right off the bat (bat, geddit?) let me say that I do not care for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s a breathtaking film to look at, but almost every perfomance in the film is uniformly terrible and Gary Oldman as Dracula is inexplicably popular with people who don’t really like Dracula movies. Playing up the “he’s really Vlad the Impaler” angle, Oldman’s Dracula starts the film as a old white-skinned guy with boobs on his head and ends the film as a distinctly Ann Riceian proto-goth with long hair and a grey stovepipe hat. There’s very little menace in his performance and he seems to be more concerned with taking Winnona Ryder to dinner than drinking her blood.

9. John Carradine; or, the Elegant Dracula

From the movie House of Frankenstein (1944) directed by Erle Kenton
With his white moustache and jauntily askew top hat, Carradine looked more like a Missisippi riverboat gambler than a vampire Count. Unfortunatley written as a bit of a milqetoast wuss, Dracula isn’t given much to do in House of Frankenstein or its sequel House of Dracula. However Carradine played Dracula several more times in his career, most notably in the woeful Billy the Kid versus Dracula.

8. Udo Kier; or, the Warhol Dracula

From the movie Blood For Dracula (1974) directed by Paul Morrissey
I’ve written before about Udo Kier on this site and I’m afraid I’m going to have to repeat myself. The fact that Udo Keir isn’t in every movie ever made is tragic. One of the most underrated actors alive, Kier is nothing short of brilliant in everything he’s in and Blood For Dracula is no exception. Sounding suspiciously German for a Transylvanian Count (but we can’t hold that against him given Langella’s American accent, Lee’s English accent and Olman’s ludicrous accent) Keir’s Dracula is only able to drink virgin blood and so moves to Italy in search of virgins. Suffice to say he does not find them and becomes ill after drinking tainted blood. Undoubtedly one of the creepiest screen Draculas.

7. Max Schreck; or, the Anti Dracula

From the movie Nosferatu (1922) directed by F.W. Murnau
The odd one out on this list since Schreck isn’t strictly speaking playing Dracula, but Graf Orlock. Depending on the print of the movie you watch, Schreck’s character is named either Orlock or Dracula (the Dracula print is more common these days than the Orlock print) but it’s clear to anyone with even a basic understanding of the novel or the story behind the making of Nosferatu that Orlock = Dracula. The only actor on today’s list to play the Count as a horrific monster rather than an urbane sophisicate, Shreck’s version of Dracula is every bit as iconic as Lugosi or Lee, but the fact that it is *so* far removed from the classic image of Dracula explains its low place on the list.

6. Jack Palance; or, the Animalistic Dracula

From the TV movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1973) directed by Dan Curtis
Like Gary Oldman’s Dracula, Jack Palance’s version of the Count is presented as being one and the same with Vlad Tepes. The first film to introduce the now standard “long lost love” angle, Palance’s Dracula doesn’t beat you over the head with this angle like Oldman, preferring to remain somewhat ambigulous about the whole affair. Presenting an intense and at times animalistic Dracula, Palance’s Count is as scary as he is tragic.

5. Orson Welles; or, the Radio Dracula

From the Mercury Theatre’s radio production Dracula (1938) directed by Orson Welles
Regal, magisterial and capturing the very essence of Dracula, Orson Welles’ performance as the Count on his Mercury Theatre On The Air program is to this day spellbinding and breathtaking. Welles, a personal hero of mine and perhaps the greatest genius of the 20th Century, was reciting Shakespeare at the age of two, giving lectures at college at the age of ten, wrote a book on Shakespeare that is still used to this day at eighteen, changed the face of broadway (twice!) in his twenties, made a fortune in radio at the age of twenty two and directed the greatest movie of all time before his twenty fifth birthday. Is it any wonder, therefore, that his perfomance as Dracula (at the age of 23!) is one of the greatest of all time?

4. Louis Jourdan; or the Urbane Dracula

From the BBC miniseries Count Dracula (1977) directed by Phillip Saville
Louis Jourdan (of Gigi and Octopussy fame) might seem like a strange choice to play Count Dracula, but play him he did in a 1977 BBC miniseries and his performance is one of the very best. Playing Dracula as an urbane sophisticate but with novel-mandated sharp nails and hairy palms, Jourdan gives us a calculated and seductive evil. Despite a few dodgy special effects, the miniseries is a minor masterpeice that not enough people have seen. If you’re one of these people and if you’re a genre fan, I strongly recommend it to you, if not for Jourdan’s chilling Dracula then for Frank Finlay’s Van Helsing: for my money the best Van Helsing ever.

3. Frank Langella; or, the Romantic Dracula

From the movie Dracula (1979) directed by John Badham
Stephanie Meyer, Ann Rice and Gary Oldman take note: *this* is how you do a romantic vampire. Like Bela Lugosi before him, Frank Langella played Dracula on Broadway before commiting his performance to film. A victim of his era, Langella’s bouffant disco hair and Tom Jones open necked shirts might put some people off, but once you get past the glorious Seventies-ness of his look you’ll find a brilliant performance by one of the most underrated actors ever. Playing the Count as a romantic lover rather than an evil bastard, Langella’s Dracula is the kind of guy that men want to be and women want to be with. Acting rings round Lord Lawrence Olivier, Langella seduces his way through the movie, but isn’t afraid to turn up the heat when nessecary, swooping down on Renfield like a giant badass bat and breaking his neck without a second thought. Sadly the only version of the movie available on DVD has, for some reason, had all the colour stripped out of it leaving it looking almost like a black and white move. But worry not, some fiddling with the colour and contrast settings on your TV soon restore it to its full glory.

BONUS DRACULA!
Frank Langella was replaced in the role of Dracula by the great Jeremy Brett who made such an awesome Dracula that I couldn’t leave him out. So here is is, in all his vampiric awesomness.

Elementary, my dear Dr. Van Helsing!

2. Bela Lugosi; or, the Archetypal Dracula

From the movie Dracula (1931) directed by Todd Browning
Whenever the name Dracula is mentioned the first thing that comes to most people’s minds is the image of Bela Lugosi, his velvet lined cape draped over his shoulders, his eyes blazing, his mouth twisted into a sadistic smile and his hand beckoning you towards him. The definitive image of Dracula, Lugosi not only gave us the classic image of Dracula but also forever defined what Dracula is supposed to sound like, his velvet smooth Hungarian accent making potentially cheeseball lines like “I never drink… wine” and “the blood is the life” seem genuinley unsettling and eerie. Trapped forever in the Dracula role, Lugosi played similar characters in such films as Mark of the Vampire, Return of the Vampire and Plan Nine From Outer Space, but 80 years on he is still the most famous Dracula ever.

1. Christopher Lee; or, the Ultimate Dracula

From the movie Horror of Dracula (1958) directed by Terrance Fisher
This is the third time Christopher Lee’s Count has made the number one spot on a list (top ten movie vampires and top ten Hammer horror movies) so regular readers might have predicted who was going to be in the top spot. Lee’s Dracula is a combination of the best parts of every other Dracula on this list: the sauveness of Carradine, the animalistic intensity of Palance, the allure of Langella and the iconicness (it’s a word now, dammit) of Lugosi combined to make the perfect Dracula. Dispensing with any lost love rubbish, Lee’s Dracula isn’t a charmer who seduced women, his biting scenes often have an uncomfortable overtone of rape to them, with him forcing himself upon his victims who, until the realised he was going to bite them and not fuck them, were more than willing to let him into their bedrooms. Energetic and deeply primal, Lee represents not only an undead aristocrat but a force of nature that will stop at nothing to get his way.

So there you go. The Top Ten (movie or otherwise) Draculas. But there’s one very important version of the Count that I missed? Any ideas? No? Well, have a look at…

Count Dracula

From the novel “Dracula” (1897) by Bram Stoker
Dracula may have more screen apperances under his belt than any other monster, but in the countless adaptations of Stoker’s original novel not one has presented us with Dracula as he was originally written. I’ll hand it over to Stoker for a description:
“His face was a strong-a very strong-aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.”
It was this Dracula that appeared on a stamp in 1997 (along with the Frankenstein Monster – labelled as per bloody usual as just “Frankenstein” – Jekyll and Hyde and the Hound of the Baskervilles.)

The closest anyone has come is Christopher Lee in the Jess Franco movie Count Dracula, but sadly, after a strong opening, that movie kinda falls apart. Still worth tracking down if you’re a genre fan.

On the radio Orson Welles, had the advantage of not having to show his face, but his use of a strong accent differs from Stoker’s vampire Count who spoke with no trace of an accent. Perhaps one day Hollywood will give us Dracula as Stoker intended, but sadly, no interpretatin of the Count has come close.

Dracula is perhaps the most famous villain in all of fiction and he is endlessly fascinating. Whether Gary Oldman, Frank Langella, Gerard Butler, Bela Lugosi or even Leslie Nielsen is in the part, the character of Count Dracula is guaranteed to bring in an audience. Did I overlook your favorite Dracula? Let me know below. End transmission.

10. LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927)

They tell me this is a good movie. Quite sure how “they” know is beyond me since no one’s seen it since (at the very latest) 1967 when the last known copy was destroyed in a fire. I know it seems a bit odd that I’d include a film I couldn’t possibly have seen in this list, but the image of Lon Chaney as “the man in the beaver hat” is so iconic and so powerful that it felt wrong not to include at least a tip of the hat to the film that every horror fan worth his salt with give his left bollock to see. Rumors have been circulating for years about a private collector owning a copy of a print exisiting somewhere in England under the name The Hypnotist, but nothing has ever come of such rumours. We live in hope.

9. THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1924)

Directed by Robert Weine and Conrad Veidt, The Hands of Orlac could’ve easily have been Caligari Mk. II, but it’s a great film in it’s own right. Some have suggested that it’s even better than Caligari, but I remain unconvinced. For my money the 1935 remake (titled Mad Love) starring Peter Lorre and Colin Clive is the better movie, but the original remains a fascinating film.

8. THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920)

Paul Wegener had a bit of a thing for Golems. He had three Golem movies between 1915 and 1920 all directed by and starring himself in the title role. The original is a lost film, the sequel is a silly comedy and the third is a prequel. It is the third movie that most horror fans are familiar with and that most influenced the work of directors like James Whale, Robert Florey and Rowland Lee. Interestingly, at least one person who saw it have described Bela Lugosi’s test makeup for Frankenstein (yes, Bela Lugosi: the Hungarian actor was Universal’s first choice to play the Monster) as “Golem-like.”

7. THE LOST WORLD (1925)

Author of the novel “The Lost World” and creator of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle showed test footage from the forthcoming movie version of his novel to a group of stage magicians (including Harry Houdini) in 1922. They pretty much crapped their pants. That’s how groundbreaking this movie was upon release. The first dinosaur movie that was a big hit and possibly the first movie to use stop-motion animation, the effects may look crude now but every dinosaur movie from King Kong to Jurassic Park owes its very existence to The Lost World. An interesting side note: The Lost World was the first ever in-flight movie, being shown on a 1925 London-Paris flight.

6. THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923)

The film that most fright film fans consider the first of the classic Universal Studios horror movies, Lon Chaney’s 1923 classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame not only made the studio a metric fuckton of money but solidified Chaney’s reputation as the “Man of a Thousand Faces.” A pretty faithful retelling of the Victor Hugo novel, the film is notable not only for Chaney’s (as always) great performance but also for the breathtaking scope and scale of the production – Universal contructed a full scale replica of Notre Dame on the studio backlot for the film (they got their money’s worth though, the same set turns up in Phantom of the Opera). The stuntwork is breathtaking for its time too with the legendary Joe Bonomo standing in for Chaney.

5. FRANKENSTEIN (1910)

Considered lost for many years, a print of this remarkable film turned up in the seventies and is now available on DVD (on a special edition disc pairing it with Nosferatu). Dubbed “the world’s first horror film” the 1910 Frankenstein may not be the world’s first monster movie, but it is certainly the world’s first screen adaptation of “Frankenstein” and to this day remains both fascinating and unsettling. While many of the shock scenes of early horror cinema have lost their edge with time, the shots of Charles Ogle’s Monster leering though the bed curtains are actually pretty creepy – and if they’re pretty creepy in 2010, they must’ve been bloody terrifying a hundred years ago. The creation of the Monster scene is a masterpeice of early trick photography as the Monster comes to life in a vat of bubbling chemicals. I hear a new DVD is planned for this year to celebrate the film’s centenery – well worth picking up if you haven’t already seen it.

4. DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1920)

You don’t need me to tell you that special effects in 1920 weren’t what they are today. To make something like Avatar back then would’ve taken Lon Chaney, Jack Pierce, John Fulton, Kenneth Strickfadden and Willis O’Brien and a crew numbering in the thousands. Today all it takes is a spotty kid with a mouse and some nifty software. The transformation from man into monster then was hard to do convicingly in the early days of cinema. Sure Lon Chaney’s makeups were great, but he never went from man to monster live on screen in real time – in 1920, that was impossible. Impossible, that is, until John Barrymore came along and did just that. In what still ranks as one of the greatest horror scenes ever shot, John Barrymore’s initial transformation from Jekyll to Hyde was done in a single shot, with no cuts and no makeup, relying soley on the actor’s ability to contort his own features. The change is incredible as Barrymore, before our very eyes, becomes a monster. Rumor has it that he could dislocate his own jaw and did just that to aid his transformation, but however he did it, it is a remarkable (and geniunley scary) bit of movie magic in a remarkable film.

3. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920)

When I was minus-sixty five, it was a very good year… 1920 was a banner year for silent screamers, with The Golem, Jekyll and Hyde and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari all coming out within months of each other. For my money, Jekyll and Hyde is the best of the bunch but on terms of style and influence, Caligari has gotta be placed higher on the list. From Son of Frankenstein to “Count Duckula” (yes, really) Caligari’s influence can be seen everywhere. Hell, Tim Burton has made an entire career out of ripping off the wierd shadows and dream like atmosphere of Caligari. Conrad Veidt turns in a great understated performance as Cesare, the sonambulistic killer and slasher-movie-villain prototype whilst Werner Krauss turns in a typically great performance as the deomic Caligari – so good in fact, one can almost forget the fact that later in life he became a card-carrying member of the National Socialist party. Almost.

2. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)

If Quasimodo in Hunchback was the role that made Lon Chaney’s reputation, then Erik in The Phantom of the Opera was the role that made him immortal. The makeup, designed as always by Chaney and kept hidden from the public until the film was released, is one of the all time great horror makeups and, by all accounts, was uncomfortable as hell to wear, giving Chaney headaches and nosebleeds aplenty. Perhaps the most faithful adaptation of the original novel (well, until the ending anyway), Chaney’s Phantom is by turns terrifying and tragic, the living embodiment of the “death’s head” described in the book and one of the few screen Phantoms to use the descriptions in the novel as the basis for his makeup. The subtleties and nuances in Chaney’s performance carry the entire film and make it a stone cold classic. A masterpeice.

1. NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR (1922)

I’ve written about Nosferatu before on this site and I’ve not got a great deal to add to what I’ve already said. Nosferatu was the first “real” vampire movie (as far as I’m concerned) and to this day it’s one of the top three best vampire movies ever made. Starkly expressionistic (not quite to the extent of Caligari, but still) and referenced in everything from Salem’s Lot to the video for “Thriller,” Nosferatu is one of the most famous silent movies ever made, and also one of the most frightening. Wether it’s the rat-like Count Orlock stalking the plague ship or the insane Knock throwing stones from the rooftops, the grainy, flickering images of Nosferatu are among the most memorable and eerie in horror cinema. It has become fashionable in recent years to look at Nosferatu as an anti-Semitic film, with the hook nosed Orlock being a metaphor for the Jews, but as far as I’m concerned that’s nonsense. It’s an unquestioned masterpeice and fully seserving of it’s reputation as the greatest of all silent horror movies.

Honorable mentions in no particular order to the following films. These are not strictly “horror” films, but they have horrific themes and are certainly of intrest to fans of the genre.
1. THE UNKNOWN (1927)
2. THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (1928 – if you’re a Batman fan this one’s well worth your time)
3. METROPOLIS (1927)
4. HAXAN/WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES (1922)
5. THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927)
6. THE BAT (1926 – again, fans of Batman should check this one out)
7. THE MONSTER (1925)
8. A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)
9. ALARUNE (1928)
10. DANTE’S INFERNO (1924)

Demented and deformed composers, inhuman vampires, tragic hunchbacks, rampaging dinosaurs, sleepwalking serial killers and man made monsters – the silent screen had them all. As with the Universal list, if you’re a cinemaphille or a horror movie fan, all of these movies are worth checking out if you’ve not already seen them. All of the main list are available to view on YouTube (including a reconstruction of London After Mindnight) so you’ve no excuse for not having a look. Open your mind to the nightmarish world of silent horror films and be sure you don’t watch them alone. End transmission.