Excerpt from piece on Hammer's 1958 Dracula with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing

Thursday 10/15/26

I've been writing a lot lately. I'll touch on what that has entailed later in these pages. Each day I put more words to things. (Or work on something that already has all its words, if you will, which can also mean putting words to something but it depends on what that work requires.) It's not enough, nor close to it. Definitely not with what I'm trying to do. Doesn't matter that it's more than anyone else could write. And as we know, the quality of all of it is irrelevant. There's no, "If you write the best thing ever written today, that will make a big difference." Or help in the tiniest bit. It makes no difference at all. Writing the best thing ever and not writing anything amounts to the same thing. If anything, writing very little and writing what you do write poorly is a better way to go system-wise in terms of being like these people and accepted as one of their sick and talentless number. Quite a few works have been written in the past several weeks, though. The following is from one I began yesterday and finished this morning. How could anyone else possibly do something like this?

Lee, ever the purist, bristled (but did he show teeth?) at not being able to play the Count as Stoker wrote him, compensating for it later by recording an abridged version of the novel on LP, which is one of the finest spoken word documents you’ll ever hear. Lugosi’s Dracula was suave; Lee’s is dignified. Projects an air of culture. He’s read books and could talk on a range of subjects. Would make an ideal dinner companion in different circumstances.

This is the movie that established the Hammer formula which had a knack for not feeling formulaic. It’s forever fall. Hammer avoids the other seasons. Summer doesn’t happen here. People are dying and leaves are, too. There’s an inn as rustic communal center where woodsmen take the chill off. Ales, plates of simple food, hearth fire. These hostelry scenes always look like you’d want them to in your imagination. They are to the Hammer film as the snug quarters of 221B Baker Street are to Sherlock Holmes adaptations. And while Fischer was no outright artiste, he was a master craftsman. You can craft your way to a masterpiece in horror with a well-designed plan, airtight design, a vibrant look, mood that essentially comes with an unlimited warranty, plus top of the line materials (sets, actors), and it’s craft that renders Dracula Terence Fisher’s Citizen Kane.

Dracula has a heartier action component than The Curse of Frankenstein, which makes for a reversal of what Universal had done with the two properties. The Victorian fabric is brocaded with Romantic textures. There’s no Quincey Morris, which isn’t that unusual, but also no Renfield, which is. But they didn’t need him with the plot tweak of Harker traveling to the castle to dispatch the Count and Van Helsing subsequently going looking for his friend. Nor does Dracula transform into bat or wolf. That was deemed unrealistic.

But the sexual aspect? Fisher wanted it in ample evidence. Dracula’s female victims were victims, yes, but also…satisfied victims. This was strange, dangerous ground. But what is Dracula the monster “about” if not conversion-via-rape? One may think of the British navy and its press gangs that would knock men out and drag them off to service at sea, with any of a number of those men then voluntarily making their living on ships after the fact, but with an orgasmic twist, going by the faces—as per Fisher’s direction—of Dracula’s coterie of brides.