DRACULA has had the edge filed from its fangs after more than eight decades of faster, scarier horror films, and the pace of this antique ground-breaker may lull you into a nap. But there is still—and for always—Bela Lugosi, as the Transylvanian gentleman with an appetite for arteries. Lugosi has been out-acted, but never duplicated. His courtly Count is creepy not because he’s vicious like Christopher Lee, seductive like Frank Langella or icky like Gary Oldham, but because he seems depraved. I mean, you can Twilight-it from here to eternity, but vampires want to slurp your blood, and if that’s sexy to you, you might want to experiment with something like a suntan or ice cream. The opening sequences—with the cobwebby castle, the baroque stairways, the sheepish victim played by Dwight Frye—still hold sway.

                        “Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.”

Beyond these nostalgically musty bits of Gothic European weirdness, there is a lot of stage-bound talk, and an anti-climactic final section. Short, at 75 minutes, directed by Tod Browning, with Helen Chandler, Edward Van Sloan and David Manners. Made for $341,000, it was the 8th most popular picture of 1931, grossing $4,300,000.

Frankenstein, released later the same year, holds up better (and outpaced it, claiming #3), while joining the party in spot #15 was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Bela speaks: “The studios were hell-bent on saving money–they even cut rubber erasers in offices in half–everything that Tod Browning wanted to do was queried. Couldn’t it be done cheaper? Wouldn’t it be just as effective if…? That sort of thing. It was most dispiriting. But we still enjoyed making it; the cast, technicians, everyone. It was a good deal of fun, if you can believe that of such a movie. We knew we wanted our public to scream with terror, as on a rollercoaster, and that’s what we aimed to do. There were a lot of movies like that at the time. I was lucky to be part of what you nowadays call a “genre”. I might have grown angry with the vampire forever putting me in such an evil mould, but it was a living–or a dying in its way. And in a way, though no Spencer Tracy, I was a kind of star.”