In honor of the late Christopher Lee, whose June 7 death
was reported yesterday, I took a first look at the first of his series of
iconic career-defining roles as Dracula. Lee is best known to modern audiences
as the wizard Saruman in The
Lord of the Rings and The
Hobbit trilogies or as the Sith Lord Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones. But in the 50s and
60s, he starred in many of Hammer Films’ British horror films.
His first turn as the vampire was in Dracula, which was re-titled Horror
of Dracula in the United States to avoid confusion with the Tod
Browning-directed version from 1931 starring Bela Lugosi. The Hammer Films
series was the second big iteration of attempts to bring Bram Stoker’s novel to
the screen. Universal had made the Lugosi film and a few follow-ups, but Lee
became a new generation’s face of Count Dracula for several years. Since the
late 70s pop culture has been inundated with vampire stories ranging from the
grotesqueries of John Carpenter and Stephen King to the comedy of Once Bitten starring Jim Carrey and then
finally landing at teenage soap opera thanks to Stephanie Meyer by way of Anne
Rice.
