After the stake, Dracula’s bride shows her true age.

Dracula’s long-censored disintegration scene has now been completely restored.

In a subterranean crypt, Harker finds two open sarcophagi that are the vampires’ daylight resting places. He first pounds a stake through the heart of the woman, whose face and form revert to those of a withered crone. The sun sets and Dracula awakes, already out of his sarcophagus before Harker can reach him. The vampire, Harker realizes, has won. The silhouette of Dracula blocks the crypt’s entrance before the heavy door clangs shut and everything is darkness.

The remainder of the film very roughly follows Stoker’s plotline. Another vampire hunter, Doctor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), looks for Harker at Castle Dracula and finds him converted into a vampire. Van Helsing releases Harker’s soul with the hammer and stake, and discovers among Harker’s belongings that Dracula has taken Harker’s keepsake photograph of his fiancée, Lucy (Carol Marsh). Dracula is already visiting Lucy, transforming her into a foul creature of the night like himself. Dracula turns his malign attention to Arthur’s wife, Mina, and abducts her back to his castle to replace the bride that Harker killed. Van Helsing confronts Dracula in the castle library and rips down a set of heavy curtains, allowing morning light to flood the room and reduce the vampire to dust.

British cultural critic Christopher Frayling has made a compelling argument that Horror of Dracula may function as an unintentional allegory about the pleasures and pitfalls of adultery—for both men and women—in postwar Britain. The “horror” of Dracula is that of a demon lover who can violate marriage beds with impunity. Like infidelity, Dracula is dangerous but disturbingly attractive. Christopher Lee was the first screen Dracula with convincing sexual magnetism, though his steely erotic purposefulness also makes him a troubling and problematic personification of sexual assault. Lee, of course, became the leading screen interpreter of Dracula in the post-Lugosi period, returning to the role in Hammer’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Scars of Dracula (1970), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973).

If you enjoyed Horror of Dracula (1958), you might also like:

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

HAMMER FILMS, 1968

A rare Hammer production that failed to recover its expenses, The Devil Rides Out—also known as The Devil’s Bride—had sufficient admirers to eventually elevate it to cult status, a perfect perch from which to appreciate a vintage tale of a satanic coven. Hammer had sat on the property for five years, worried that the censors would go on the offensive over a story of satanism and black magic, but the dawning of the Age of Aquarius in the late 1960s loosened many taboos. Adapted by Richard Matheson from a novel by Dennis Wheatley and set attractively in the 1920s, the film stars Christopher Lee as a world-famous authority on the occult who does battle with Mocata, a satanic high priest. Mocata is played by Charles Gray, best known to fright fans as the campy narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but here he is genuinely frightening. Had Gray pursued more roles of this type, he might easily have been a major horror star—a new Vincent Price or Lionel Atwill.

Mocata (Charles Gray) prepares a sacrifice to Satan in The Devil Rides Out.