Five Best Movie Adaptations of Dracula

8 November 2012 · The Christian Science Monitor

Molly Driscoll

Bram Stoker Estate account

Estate summary

Molly Driscoll compares five screen adaptations: Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958), John Badham’s Dracula (1979), Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Mel Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). She follows the changing Count through Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman and Leslie Nielsen, noting the films’ stage connections, romantic emphasis, altered characters and comic treatment. The feature contrasts critical and commercial responses while showing how freely filmmakers reshape Stoker’s story. This is Driscoll’s selection, rather than an Estate ranking. Publisher metadata gives the original publication as 8 November 2012; the current pages display an update of 1 September 2022.

Source notes and excerpts

Read each part of the publisher’s feature: 1. Dracula (1931) · 2. Horror of Dracula (1958) · 3. Dracula (1979) · 4. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) · 5. Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

All five publisher instalments inspected. Molly Driscoll; publisher datePublished metadata: 8 November 2012; dateModified and displayed update: 1 September 2022. The five-part feature is copyrighted and linked rather than reproduced. The Lugosi photograph is a related Universal publicity image, not the publisher’s AP image.

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Bela Lugosi in Dracula costume, Universal publicity photograph,1931. — Bela Lugosi as Dracula in a Universal publicity photograph, 1931. Related film illustration; this is not the publisher’s AP photograph.Universal Studios; unidentified photographer, via Wikimedia Commons.