Dracula (1979 Film) - Critical Response

Critical Response

In 1979, three major Dracula films were released simultaneously around the world: Werner Herzog's arthouse re-telling Nosferatu the Vampyre, John Badham's Dracula, and the comedy Love at First Bite. The success of the jokey Love at First Bite, starring George Hamilton, may have had something to do with the muted response Badham's film would subsequently experience.

The film performed modestly at the box office, grossing $20,158,970 domestically, and was seen as something of a disappointment by the studio.

Some critics reacted positively toward the film, such as Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who gave gave it 3½ stars out of 4 and wrote: "What an elegantly seen Dracula this is, all shadows and blood and vapors and Frank Langella stalking through with the grace of a cat. The film is a triumph of performance, art direction and mood over materials that can lend themselves so easily to self-satire. There have been so many Draculas (Bela Lugosi played him two times, Christopher Lee eight) that the tragic origins of the character have been lost among the gravestones, the fangs and all those black cloaks. This Dracula restores the character to the purity of its first film appearances, in F. W. Murnau's 1923 Nosferatu and Bela Lugosi's 1931 version." Others reacted less positively, such as Janet Maslin of The New York Times, who wrote: "In making this latest trip to the screen in living color, Dracula has lost some blood. The movie version ... is by no means lacking in stylishness; if anything, it's got style to spare. But so many of its sequences are at fever pitch, and the mood varies so drastically from episode to episode, that the pace becomes pointless, even taxing, after a while."

In the home video market of the early 80's, John Badham's Dracula became a very popular title (making it into Variety's All-Time Horror Rentals - published 1993), but it eventually seemed to fall into relative cinematic anonymity for several years (partly due to it having a very limited video release outside of the USA). In more recent years, however, the film has undergone a bit of a revival, thanks to being made widely available on DVD and shown often on cable television, enabling new audiences to discover the film.

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