Back in February I wrote an article saluting the 1931 horror landmark Dracula on the 95th anniversary of its Valentine’s Day debut. Tod Browning’s eerie shocker starring Bela Lugosi is probably the most popular vampire movie of all time. What most people don’t know is that, for the last 90 years, they haven’t been able to watch the film the way its director intended. A recent discovery, however, will change that.
At the climax of Dracula (SPOILER ALERT!), Edward Van Sloan’s Professor Van Helsing stakes Lugosi’s undead Count in his coffin, putting an end to his evil schemes. Reunited lovers Mina Seward (Helen Chandler) and Jonathan Harker (David Manners) ascend an absurdly long staircase and the end credits roll. For the first few years that it played theatres around the country, though, there was an additional scene.
Van Sloan, still playing Van Helsing, stepped out from behind a curtain and, in an early fourth-wall break, addressed the audience. “Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen! A word before you go. We hope the memories of Dracula and Renfield won’t give you bad dreams, so just a word of reassurance. When you get home tonight and the lights have been turned out, and you are afraid to look behind the curtains and you dread to see a face appear at the window, why, just pull yourself together and remember that, after all…there are such things as vampires!”
Well, that undoubtedly gave more than one impressionable customer shivers as they left the movie house. And it probably inspired Universal and director James Whale to have Van Sloan perform a similar “word of friendly warning” in the opening sequence to Frankenstein later that year. The goosebump-inducing coda was cut from prints of Dracula following the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, in 1934. The reasoning–for lack of a better word–was that Van Helsing’s speech implied a belief in the supernatural. As such, it could be viewed as sacrilegious, like Colin Clive’s lines in Frankenstein which went missing for nearly half a century.
So it was that, through its many re-releases in the 1940s and ’50s, the late-night TV and Saturday evening “monster movie” show airings beginning in 1957, and all its home video iterations, Dracula concluded with Mina and John and that stairway to nowhere. A British Film Institute print still had the excised scene, but Universal felt the footage, filled with jump cuts, wasn’t usable. A snippet of it was shown in the 1999 “making of” documentary Road to Dracula.
In what horror fans might have thought was an April Fool’s joke, earlier this month film buff Ray Faiola announced that the missing scene had been found on a 16mm silent print and was being restored. Van Sloan’s dialogue was combined from various sources and added to the footage, giving fans the chance to be told “there are such things as vampires!” for the first time in nine decades.
At present Universal’s home video arm hasn’t announced if a new version of the complete Dracula will be released, so stay tuned. Now, can some intrepid folk out there please track down the missing reincarnation scenes from 1932’s The Mummy, or the giant spider sequence from the original King Kong, or maybe Browning’s London After Midnight with Lon Chaney?