Dracula

Universal wanted Conrad Veidt first, then Lon Chaney, who died before shooting; Carl Laemmle Jr. resisted Bela Lugosi, who had played the part on Broadway. Lugosi chased it and settled for $500 a week across seven weeks. The best paid of the cast was Helen Chandler at $750 a week. The look that carries Tod Browning’s name was largely left to the cinematographer Karl Freund, who by many accounts ran much of the shoot. The change from bat to man happens off camera. The storm at sea was lifted from a Universal silent, The Storm Breaker, and shot at silent speed, which is why it still looks sped up. No score was ever written for the picture; Philip Glass supplied one in 1998, the Kronos Quartet played it, and Universal’s discs offer both soundtracks. During the first run Edward Van Sloan told the audience that there really are such things as vampires; that curtain speech was removed for fear of encouraging belief in the supernatural. A good fit if you want fright assembled out of stillness, lighting and the rhythm of one actor’s delivery instead of make up or a transformation effect. Not for anyone who needs pace; the story moves on two intertitles and a close up of a newspaper, and the playing belongs to the silent era.