HORROR-FILM BUFFS raised on a diet of maniacal slashers and exploding entrails may find it hard to fathom, but when it appeared in 1931, Dracula sent viewers fleeing down the aisles in terror. So realistic were its creepy effects for the time that Dracula was banned in several American cities. And so convincing was Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in his lead role that he was forever identified as the bloodthirsty count, to his considerable dismay.
Tod Browning's now-classic film may be less effective at scaring modern viewers than, say, Scream or Halloween, and its leisurely, stagy production lends it an antique feel. Still, it remains a benchmark of the horror genre, peerless in many respects--no one, for instance, has yet bested Dwight Frye in depicting mayhem and madness.
Last year, Universal Pictures, mining its vast archives, reissued Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy, horror films that made the company's fortune in the early 1930s. Studio executives offered a commission to composer Philip Glass to write a score for any one of those films, which, like many of the time, were released with little or no incidental music.
Glass agreed to compose a score for Dracula, a favorite film of his childhood. "I would have liked to do all three," he says, "though I was only asked to do one. I was torn between Dracula and Frankenstein, which came in a very close second. The scenes where the villagers chase the monster by torchlight, and where the monster throws the little girl into the lake, are fantastic. But I was completely taken by the power of the story of Dracula, and I chose it."
A few days after he accepted the commission, Glass recalls, he had dinner in London with David Harrington, first violinist for the Kronos Quartet, with whom Glass had worked on the score for Paul Shrader's 1985 film Mishima and several other projects. "I asked David if he wanted to do Dracula with me," Glass says, "and he was very enthusiastic. I got to work right away."
Within three months, Glass had completed his composition, working with Kronos over the phone between a recording studio in Los Angeles and his vacation retreat in Nova Scotia. The composition is vintage Glass, full of signature elements like rapid arpeggios and reiterated themes. Still, the Dracula score emerged as a far more reserved piece than the sometimes overpowering compositions for Mishima and Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi, preserving the cavernous silences between spoken lines that are a source of much of the film's atmospheric creepiness.
"I chose a very romantic idiom for the character of Dracula," Glass says. "I kept away from the usual horror-movie effects. I was fascinated by Bela Lugosi's performance, and I didn't want to look at him as just another horror character. Instead, I wanted to look at him in a more human way, as a tragic figure. The string quartet helps to do that: The orchestration is very compact, very intimate and dramatic, and it has a 19th-century feel that evokes Bram Stoker's original novel. I think Lugosi's Dracula comes off as a more interesting character, though still quite frightening."
Frightening he is, and Glass's score does much to underscore the power of Tod Browning's eloquent film.
Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet will perform his composition at a screening of Dracula at the UA's Centennial Hall at 8 p.m. on Friday, October 20. Tickets range from $16 to $28. For more information, call 621-3341.
