Horror of Dracula

Hammer followed Frankenstein with this and it is the better film. Lee's Dracula barely speaks, moves fast, and is presented as an animal with a title, which nobody had done.

Cushing's Van Helsing is the other half: brisk, athletic, and treating vampirism as an epidemiological problem to be solved with equipment. The final confrontation, in which he runs the length of a table, tears down a curtain and forms a cross from two candlesticks, was Cushing's own idea and is the best-choreographed thing in the cycle.

It is very short, has almost no fat, and moves through the plot at a speed later Hammers never matched.

Jimmy Sangster's script cheerfully discards most of the novel, including Dracula ever going to England.

Long available only in a cut form. Japanese reels found in 2011 restored footage missing for fifty years.