“Listen to them. The Children of the night. What music they make.”
It’s a line embedded into pop culture and horror history. In no small part due to the lasting overall impact of Tod Browning and Bela Lugosi’s iconic adaptation of Dracula, which recently celebrated its 90th anniversary. While most of us know this particular version like the back of our hand, did you know there’s another version that also celebrates its 90th birthday this month?
By the 1920s, American film studios began to see the profitability of selling their films to international markets. While silent films could be translated to foreign markets with relative ease, the rise of the sound film era by the late 1920s proved to be far more difficult. This was long before the days of overdubbing and major audio modifications that we have in filmmaking today. As a solution, studios came up with what at the time seemed like an ingenious solution: to film an entirely separate version specifically made to be sold to international markets. The most famous of these films you ask? Dracula, directed by George Melford for Spanish-speaking markets.
Universal, in a cost saving initiative, used the same sets that Browning used on his own film. Tod Browning would direct his scenes in the daytime and in the evening Melford and company would show up and shoot their version. Essentially Universal was making the exact same movie twice for multiple markets, which in retrospect seems like a nightmare. But without the common availability and invention of dubbing, there was no other way around it.
For Melford’s Dracula, the role of the infamous vampire was given to Carlos Villarias. A native actor from Spain, Villarias brings a different energy to the role. Whereas Lugosi’s portrayal brings a sense of nuance to the blood-drinking villain, Villarias’ Count is at times a bit more unhinged. A choice that works in its own right for this unexpected adaptation. The role of Mina was reworked into Eva for the Spanish version and portrayed by the wonderful Lupita Tovar, who is Mexican Cinema royalty. Not only was she in this version of Dracula, but she was also in the film Santa, which was the first fully sound Mexican film production.
Melford was allowed dallies to the Browning production and during the day spent time studying them. Keen on making his film stand out, the Spanish-language version contains more elaborate cinematography and effects. There are less tracking shots, but overall the film is framed like a stage play (ironic, since its source material is the 1924 Broadway play rather than the novel). It’s almost like witnessing the film for the first time if you’re a fan of the more popular and accessible Browning adaptation.
Dracula premiered on March 11, 1931 in Havana, Cuba followed by a premiere in New York City on April 24 later that year. Reception at the time was insubstantial and the film was quickly forgotten to time. Or so we thought. Like the infamous Count himself, the Spanish-language version of Dracula resurfaced in 1977 where it was partially screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This inspired Universal to eventually release the completed film to home media in the early 90s where it found a new appreciation for its differences to its English counterpart. Since then it has been included as a special feature to Lugosi’s film and is widely accessible today.
Time for me to get a little personal for a moment. In the late 90s the Spanish-language version of Dracula was a way for me to bond with my late grandfather. A native from Mexico, his first language was Spanish and he struggled to understand and follow English-speaking media in his older age. Not being a fluent Spanish speaker myself, I would try to seek out subtitled movies for us to watch. One of these being Dracula. We would watch it together and he would love it; the experience was instrumental in my blossoming love for the horror genre as a whole as a kid. He’s gone now, but Dracula will always remind me of the time and experience I got to spend with him, loving horror movies together.
Though the Spanish-language version of Dracula hasn’t reached the pop culture heights of the Browning/Lugosi adaptation, it stands in its own right as a unique adaptation of the same source material. It also represents a paradigm shift that Hollywood and filmmaking as a whole were facing at the time. It exists in this strange place where we were moving from the past and into what the future of the format would be. With this version being widely accessible as a special feature of the English version, now is a good time as any to celebrate this lesser known Universal Monsters classic from the golden age of monster films.
