Classic Vampire Movies I Just Saw for the First Time

In general, there are three different looks for vampires. Each of the movies reviewed below depicts a different one. The first is the most human, both in terms of normal dress and appearance, but also in its desire to regain full humanity. The second is not quite human and may include claws or fangs that grow, distorted facial features and fur or wings, even when not shapeshifting. The third is the most monstrous and may stand taller than a human, with or without a conehead, or appear reptilian (like a chupacabra or a snake).

House of Dracula (three stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - Dracula seeks out a scientific cure for vampirism

Two years after Frankenstein's monster met the Wolf Man, they met Dracula for the second time in the House of Dracula (1945). It was the last "serious" Universal horror movie before the Abbott and Costello series (1948-1955). While it was the second time for John Carradine to play Dracula and Glenn Strange to play Frankenstein's monster, the only actor returning to a title role that had originally starred them was the (1941) Wolf Man's Lon Chaney, Jr. The real scene stealer though is an even lesser-known actress, Jane Adams, playing a beautiful lab assistant with a painful deformity. The way they reveal her hunchback is shocking enough that looking back, you might think she jumped out screaming, but all they do is show her face first and then zoom out. I'll never understand why Dr. Edelmann's hair has to get messy when he becomes a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like mad scientist. Nor will I ever understand why people get so excited for classic character team-ups or company crossovers, either on film or where they're the most popular, in comic books. I'll take my Godzilla without King Kong, my Superman without Muhammad Ali and my Aliens without Predators, thank you very much.

Mark of the Vampire (three and a half stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - a spoof of the Bela Lugosi vampire image (ironically by Lugosi himself, almost without speaking AND 60 years before Tim Burton's biopic, Ed Wood, which depicts a pathetic yet proud Lugosi in his, ahem, "twilight" years)

Say what you will about the twist ending. I loved it. I loved Lionel Barrymore's hammy acting, the foggy cemetery where a woman's nightgown gets caught on the ground directly above a grave and the scene of a vampire outside the window peering in. I loved seeing a roach infestation in a bed and a wall crawling with tarantulas. As much as I hated the Universal monster homage, Van Helsing (2004), I loved finding out that one of its unconvincing computer-generated images was possibly inspired by a very realistic effects shot in Mark of the Vampire (1935). I'm referring to a dress that transforms into giant, bat wings, worn by one of Dracula's brides in Van Helsing, or in the case of Mark of the Vampire, by Count Mora's daughter, Luna. Carroll Borland perfected the attractive-repulsive look for a vampiress at least three years before Morticia Addams appeared in The New Yorker magazine as a cartoon strip character and almost twenty years before Vampira became TV's first horror host on an ABC affiliate in LA.

Nosferatu (four stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - only a woman who is "pure in heart" can defeat a vampire, and she does this by keeping him out past sunrise

"If I were to make over the film, I should depict Nosferatu (1922) . . . not as terrible and fantastic but on the contrary in the guise of an inoffensive young man, charming and most obliging. I should like it to be only on the basis of very mild indications, in the beginning, that any anxiety should be aroused, and in the spectator's mind before being aroused in the hero's. Likewise, wouldn't it be much more frightening if he were first presented to the woman in such a charming aspect? It is a kiss that is to be transformed into a bite . . . It might be rather startling, furthermore, for the vampire to yield to the woman's charms, forget the hour . . . I can easily see him appearing a a hideous monster to everyone, and charming only in the eyes of the young woman, a voluntary, fascinated victim . . . He should become less and less horrible until he really becomes the delightful person whose mere appearance he only took on at first. And it is this delightful person that the cock's crow must kill." (Nobel Prizer winner for literature, André Gide, journal entry, February 27, 1928, as quoted by David J Skal in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, 1993)