This is the movie that set the horror genre into action. Sure there may be a few campy scenes that look like they might be out of some high school play production (the rubber bats and armadillos in Dracula's castle come to mind), but there is an unmistakable suspense and eerieness about the film. If you are lucky enough to find the DVD reissue from 1999, you have three great versions: the original 1931 version with basically no background music, the 1999 rescoring of the movie by composer Philip Glass, and the extremely interesting Spanish version, made at the same time as the original (with totally different actors). If you have this DVD, watch the movie twice: once with no soundtrack and once with the Glass rescoring.... totally different movie. Glass' score is great, but it doesn't really help the movie at all (it actually hurts it in many cases). But the utter silence in Browning's original just makes my skin crawl! The acting is actually quite great (Lugosi is, of course, phenomenal as is Dwight Frye as Renfield). The fear, the suspense, and, believe it or not, the sexuality, combines for a great movie that was an unbelievable success in its first release ($700,000 in it first US release, $1.2 million worldwide). Not bad for a movie made 72 years ago!
