[Movies] What is the best Dracula movie?

[Wintruz]

There is like ton of them and they vary in quality a lot. What is your favorite one?

My personal favorite is BW movie Son of Dracula. (aired 1943) It has classic Dracula style of hunting for blood, but main plot with the girl that invites him in seeking immortality and plotting just as much as the Count was genius idea.

This is a brutal question!

If we're isolating the performance... Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu. The intensity of presence that Kinski brings there actually charges the atmosphere around him and you can feel it on the screen: pure energy magic. That he isn't a suave, urbane Dracula makes those alien-intelligence qualities all the stronger. I love the Herzog film generally and all three of the Nosferatu films (Murnau, Herzog, Eggers) vie for my favourite vampire film (not just "Dracula" film) ever. I would count the Nosferatu films as Dracula films even with the name change.

Best film overall? I think probably Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. A lot of film-fans complain that it adds to the novel, which is the opposite of most Dracula films which strip-down the novel and change the characters around. The love story and reincarnation themes work beautifully within the logic of the story and the film itself is basically an Italian opera disguised as a Hollywood blockbuster. Some of the images from that film are so powerful they've actually become embedded in the popular psyche in much the same way Lugosi did sixty years earlier. For most people under fifty, Lucy Westenra is the Lucy Westenra from the 1992 film, vampire shadows can act independently, etc.

The first two Hammer Dracula films (Horror of Dracula - in America or just Dracula for the UK and mainland Europe - and Dracula: Prince of Darkness) have held up well in terms of looks and atmosphere. Yet they belong to a time when audiences were less openly interested in what motivates Dracula and so he ends up simply being a side-act, attacking the (far less interesting) main characters. Still, I enjoy those films.

I would give honourable mention to Zhang Wei-Qiang in the beautiful Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary and Graham McTavish's voice work in Castlevania.