It was, of course, a fait accompli that the great success of Bride of Frankenstein, Universal’s first horror sequel, was going to quickly lead to a follow-up to Dracula. It is perhaps nothing more than a lazy quirk of history that this film would even follow the same route of adding female relative to the […]

The massive success of 1931’s twin gods, Dracula and Frankenstein, left no doubt that Universal Pictures was Hollywood’s home for terror and the paranormal, and the studio flung itself into the burgeoning new genre with glee, whatever lingering moral qualms Carl Laemmle, Sr. might still have nursed. The next two years bore witness to the […]

When Dracula became a huge hit for Universal in the winter of 1931, this much at least was clear: Universal would be spending a lot more time making horror movies. Not that they hadn’t dabbled in the genre before, of course – some of the most important American horror pictures of the 1920s came out […]

The modern American trend of remaking successful foreign language films on the grounds that “nobody likes subtitles” is insulting, but unlike so many moviegoing insults, is not a terribly new development; it is indeed as old as sound cinema itself. And frankly, the current guise of that trend – a blink-and-miss-it limited release followed after […]

The 1931 adaptation of Dracula is a classic if ever a film has deserved that name: an incalculably important film, just about every single horror picture made in the last 78 years – and certainly, every vampire picture – owes it some debt, if only a small one. Its influence has extended far beyond even […]