Dracula is a 1931 United States horror film directed by Tod Browning and starring Béla Lugosi as the title character. The film was produced by Universal and is based on the stage play of the same name by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, which in turn is based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.

Trivia:

• Universal Studios commissioned a new musical score from composer Philip Glass. It premiered at The Brooklyn Academy of Music on 26 October 1999.
• When Universal purchased the rights to the 1927 Broadway play, Lon Chaney was considered for the title role. However, Chaney died on August 26, 1930, and the role went to Bela Lugosi.
• A Spanish-language version, Drácula (1931), was filmed at night on the same set at the same time, with Spanish-speaking actors.
• Cinematographer Karl Freund achieved the effect of Dracula’s hypnotic stare by aiming two pencil-spot-lights into actor Bela Lugosi’s eyes.
• The Royal Albert Hall sequence of the movie was filmed on the same stage where The Phantom of the Opera (1925) starring Lon Chaney had been filmed.
• The large, expansive sets built for the Transylvania castle and Carfax Abbey sequences remained standing after filming was completed, and were used by Universal Pictures for many other movies for over a decade.
• Among the other actors mentioned as possible candidates for the role of Count Dracula were John Wray, Paul Muni, Conrad Veidt, Chester Morris, and William Courtenay.
• Bela Lugosi was so desperate to repeat his stage success and play the Count Dracula role for the film version, that he agreed to a contract paying him $500 per week for a seven week shooting schedule, an insultingly small amount even during the days of the Depression.
• The spider webs in Dracula’s castle were created by shooting rubber cement from a rotary gun.
• Bela Lugosi played the role of Dracula on Broadway in 1927 before touring the country with the show. The American performance of the British stage actor Hamilton Deane’s adaptation of the book was a smashing success. Soon after the play began touring Universal started to express interest in the script.
• Due to studio demands to cut costs, the film was shot in sequence.
• Similar to the prologue in Frankenstein (1931), the original release featured an epilogue with Edward Van Sloan talking to the audience about what they have just seen. This was removed for the 1936 re-release and is now assumed to be lost.
• After the death of Lon Chaney, one of the first actors considered for the title role was Ian Keith.
• While it is rumored that Bela Lugosi, could not speak English very well, and had to learn his lines phonetically, this is not true. Lugosi was speaking English as well as he ever would by the time this was filmed.
• There was no real musical soundtrack in the film because it was believed that, with sound being such a recent innovation in films, the audience would not accept hearing music in a scene if there was no explanation for it being there (e.g., the orchestra playing off camera when Dracula meets Mina at the theatre).
• Several famous elements often associated with Dracula are not visible in this film. At no point does Dracula display fangs. Also, the famous vampire bite mark on the neck is never shown either (though it is visible in the Spanish version).
• Although it was his most famous role, Bela Lugosi played Dracula only once more on screen, in the comedy Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). However, he played Dracula-like characters in movies such as The Return of the Vampire (1944) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).
• This Universal production became the most famous and successful film to pair David Manners with Helen Chandler. The pair had made two films at Warner Brothers/First National and one at Fox.
• The peasants inside the inn are praying The Lord’s Prayer in Hungarian.
• Bette Davis (who had a contract at Universal at the time) was considered to play the part of Mina Harker. However, Universal head Carl Laemmle Jr. didn’t think too highly of her sex appeal.
• The opening music to this film is from Act 2 of Swan Lake.
• In the scene where Dracula and Renfield are traveling to London by boat, the footage shown is borrowed from a Universal silent film called The Storm Breaker (1925). Silent films were projected at a different frames-per-second speed from that later adopted for sound films, accounting for the jerky movements and quicker-than-normal action of these shots.
• In the first scene, the young woman reading from the tourist book was played by Carla Laemmle, niece of Carl Laemmle, founder and head of Universal Pictures.
• When Carl Laemmle moved Universal to California in 1914, a version of “Dracula” was one of the first projects being considered. It was over fifteen years before this version was produced.
• The movie’s line “Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.” was voted as the #83 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100).
• When Bela Lugosi died in 1956, he was buried wearing the black silk cape he wore for this film.
• Universal’s original plan was to make a big-budget adaptation of “Dracula” that would strictly adhere to the Bram Stoker novel. However, after the stock market crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression, Universal chose not to risk an investment on such a sprawling film. Instead, it adapted the much less expensive Hamilton Deane stage play.
• Universal acquired the film rights to “Dracula” from Bram Stoker’s widow and the play’s writer Hamilton Deane for $40,000.
• Before he was cast as Count Dracula, Bela Lugosi acted as an unpaid intermediary for Universal Pictures in negotiating with the widow of author Bram Stoker in an attempt to persuade her to lower her asking price for the filming rights to the Dracula property. After two months of negotiations, Mrs. Stoker reportedly lowered her price from $200,000 to $60,000. This, however, further demonstrated to Universal how desperate Lugosi was to repeat his stage success as Count Dracula and secure the film role for himself.
• Apparently morose over the loss of friend and collaborator Lon Chaney and in the midst of severe alcoholism, the normally meticulous Tod Browning was said to have been sullen and unprofessional during the shoot. Among his actions were to leave set, leaving cinematographer Karl Freund to direct scenes. He would also recklessly tear pages out of the script if he felt them to be redundant.
• The original Broadway production of “Dracula” starring Bela Lugosi opened at the Fulton Theater on October 5, 1927 and ran for 261 performances. Also in the original cast was Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing. These were the only two actors from the original 1927 Broadway production to repeat their roles in the film.
• Although he lived for 67 years after the film was released, David Manners (John Harker) claimed he never watched it.
• Edward Van Sloan and Dwight Frye also appeared in the horror classic Frankenstein (1931). They are the only 2 actors to have appeared in both films.
• Bela Lugosi never blinks even once throughout the film.

 

 

An American Werewolf in London is a 1981 American-British comedy/horror film, written and directed by John Landis. It stars David Naughton, Griffin Dunne, and Jenny Agutter. The movie won the 1981 Saturn Award for Best Horror Film and an Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup. The film was one of three high-profile werewolf films released in 1981, alongside The Howling and Wolfen. Over the years, the film has accumulated a cult following and has been referred to as a cult classic.

Tagline: John Landis – the director of Animal House brings you a different kind of animal.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3FTkAS15zk]

Blending the macabre with a wicked sense of humor, director John Landis (National Lampoon’s Animal House) delivers a contemporary take on the classic werewolf tale in this story of two American tourists who, while traveling in London, find their lives changed forever when a viscious wolf attacks them during a full moon. Featuring groundbreaking, Academy Award-winning make-up by Rick Baker (The Wolfman).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZogmO2aqQq0]

The film was followed by a 1997 sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, which featured a completely different cast and none of the original crew.

John Landis came up with the story while he worked in Yugoslavia as a production assistant on the film Kelly’s Heroes. He and a Yugoslavian member of the crew were driving in the back of a car on location when they came across a group of gypsies. The gypsies appeared to be performing rituals on a man being buried so that he would not “rise from the grave.” This made Landis realize that he could never be able to confront the undead and gave him the idea for a film in which a man of his own age would go through such a thing.

John Landis wrote the first draft of An American Werewolf in London in 1969 and shelved it for over a decade. Two years later, Landis wrote, directed and starred in his debut film, Schlock, which developed a cult following. Landis developed box-office status in Hollywood through the successful comedy films The Kentucky Fried Movie, National Lampoon’s Animal House and The Blues Brothers before securing $10

million financing for his werewolf film. Financiers believed that Landis’ script was too frightening to be a comedy and too funny to be a horror film.

Michael Jackson cited this film as his reason for working with Landis on his subsequent music videos, including Thriller and Black or White.

The various prosthetics and fake, robotic body parts used during the film’s painful, extended werewolf transformation scenes and on Griffin Dunne when his character returns as a bloody, mangled ghost impressed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences so much that they decided to create a new awards category at the Oscars specifically for the film – Outstanding Achievement in Makeup. Since the 1981 Academy Awards, this has been a regular category each year. During the body casting sessions, the crew danced around David Naughton singing, “I’m a werewolf, you’re a werewolf…wouldn’t you like to be a werewolf, too” in reference to his days as a pitchman for Dr Pepper.

In-Jokes:

The film was produced by Lycanthrope Productions, a lycanthrope being a person with the power to turn himself into a wolf.

The film’s ironically upbeat songs all refer in some way to the moon such as: Bobby Vinton’s slow and soothing version of “Blue Moon”, which plays during the opening credits, Van Morrison’s “Moondance” as David and Alex make love for the first time, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” as David is nearing the moment of changing to the werewolf, a soft, bittersweet ballad version of “Blue Moon” by Sam Cooke during the agonizing wolf transformation and The Marcels’ doo-wop version of “Blue Moon” over the end credits. Landis failed to get permission to use Cat Stevens’ “Moonshadow” and Bob Dylan’s “Moonshiner”, both artists feeling the film to be inappropriate. It was stated on the DVD commentary by David Naughton and Griffin Dunne that they were not sure why Landis could not get the rights to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” – a song that would have been more appropriate for the film (perhaps Landis dismissed the song on the grounds that it didn’t have the word “moon” in the title).

Landis’ signature in-joke of the fictitious film See You Next Wednesday can be seen when the werewolf runs rampant in Piccadilly Circus, playing at the porn cinema and as a poster in the London Underground train station where Gerald Bringsley is attacked by the werewolf.

References to the film have appeared in many of Landis’ other films and most notably in Michael Jackson’s Thriller as the sounds of Jackson transforming into a werewolf are from the film.

Although not part of this film, in the Masters of Horror episode entitled “Deer Woman”, directed and co-written by Landis, when the protagonist mentions “a series of freak wolf attacks in London in 1981″, a brief but clear reference to An American Werewolf in London. According to its trading card insert, “‘Deer Woman’ is a very much a part of An American Werewolf in London canon.”

Cameos and Bit Parts:

In the Piccadilly Circus sequence, the man hit by a car and thrown through a store window, is Landis himself.

As in most of the director’s movies, Frank Oz makes an appearance: first as Mr. Collins from the American embassy in the hospital scene, and later as Miss Piggy in a dream sequence, when David’s younger siblings watch a scene from The Muppet Show that was never shown in the United States.

Actors in bit parts who were already – or would become – more well-known include the two chess players David and Jack meet in the pub, played by the familiar character actor Brian Glover and then-rising comedian and actor Rik Mayall. One of the policemen helping to chase and kill the werewolf is John Altman, who would later achieve fame as “Nasty” Nick Cotton in EastEnders.   Alan Ford – later to appear in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch – plays a taxi driver. The policeman in the cinema is played by John Salthouse and the policeman in Piccadilly Circus is played by Peter Ellis. Both Salthouse and Ellis appeared in police drama The Bill.

A radio adaptation of the film was broadcast on BBC Radio 1 in 1997, written and directed by Dirk Maggs and with Jenny Agutter, Brian Glover, and John Woodvine reprising the roles of Alex Price, the chess player (now named George Hackett, and with a more significant role as East Proctor’s special constable) and Dr. Hirsch. The roles of David and Jack were played by Eric Meyers and William Dufris.  Maggs’ script added a backstory that some people in East Proctor are settlers from Eastern Europe and brought lycanthropy with them. The werewolf who bites David is revealed to be related to Hackett, and has escaped from an asylum where he is held under the name “Larry Talbot”, the name of the title character in The Wolf Man.

 

Make Up Department
  Elaine Baker … makeup effects crew
  Rick Baker … special makeup effects
  Doug Beswick … makeup effects crew
  Kevin Brennan … makeup effects crew
  Robin Grantham … makeup artist
  Tom Hester … makeup effects crew
  Steve Johnson … makeup effects assistant
  Beryl Lerman … makeup artist
  Shawn McEnroe … makeup effects crew
  Joseph Ross … makeup effects crew
  Bill Sturgeon … makeup effects crew
  Craig Reardon … makeup effects crew (uncredited)

 

Special Effects Department
  Neil Corbould … special effects assistant
  Martin Gutteridge … special effects
  Garth Inns … special effects