Unless you’ve been trapped in a castle crypt for the past week or so, you should hopefully be aware that the Limited Collector’s Edition of Dracula (1958) is available to pre-order now. The individually numbered version has already sold out which suggests this highly anticipated release is flying off the shelf faster than a bat out of Klausenburg.

To celebrate the launch of Hammer’s Dracula in its most complete form ever presented, Hammer News paid an extended visit to Steve Rogers and quizzed him about the film itself, its legacy, and what superb additional features fans can look forward to enjoying.

In part one of this Q&A Steve went into detail about how and why ‘…Dracula can now be seen as Fisher and Hammer originally intended.’ And in part two we look at the work’s importance, discuss what makes it such an enduring classic, and offer a sneak peek into the wealth of new and archive material that comes with this very special Limited Collector’s Edition. We started with the basics, little knowing it would quickly lead us to Buffy the Vampire Slayer…

Christopher Lee and John Van Eyssen as Dracula and his guest. But Harker the Vampire Slayer will soon discover his undead opposition is no Angel…

Hammer News: I think pretty much everyone knows the basic premise of the character of Dracula, and many horror fans will have enjoyed Hammer’s adaptation of Stoker’s novel multiple times. But there’ll be many people who won’t have watched it, or maybe haven’t seen it for quite a few years. Can you give a quick outline of the movie, assuming absolutely zero prior knowledge of it?

Steve Rogers: A librarian arrives at a castle somewhere in Europe to catalogue the owner’s books – only the librarian is a vampire hunter and the castle’s owner is his target. Actually, it just struck me that maybe the reason that Giles is a school librarian in Buffy is because Jonathan Harker was one in Sangster’s adaptation of Stoker’s book...

HN: The road to Sunnydale started in Bray? I like it. And kind of along the same lines as that last question, Dracula is quite rightly regarded as a classic and tends to attract words like iconic and seminal. I know this is a bit of an essay question, but why is it rated so highly?

SR: Because it changed the game for what a horror film could be. The previous year Hammer had made The Curse of Frankenstein and, for a variety of reasons, that had lit the blue touchpaper and brought Hammer, Cushing and Lee to the attention of the major film distributors. Frankenstein was just a prologue, however, to what came next. Dracula’s powerful mix of eroticism and horror sparked a protracted debate with the censor as to what could be allowed – but, even in its censored form, it proved too powerful for some people’s tastes.

Director Terence Fisher stated many times over his life that “everything just worked” on the film; performance, music, cinematography, set design – they all combined to create a heady, sumptuous-looking, transgressive rocket of a film that kicks off in the first frame and doesn’t stop for 82 minutes. There’d never been anything like it before and it’s just as powerful nearly seventy years later.

Writing for The Movie Buff, Lee Adams commented that as Dracula, Lee, ‘…radiates charisma and gloomy sexuality, making it completely understandable why women would tremble at his approach.’

HN: We’ve previously looked at Lee’s performance as the Count in great detail, including a deep dive into that famous introductory scene, but his performance is so central to the film’s success that it’s maybe worth touching on again. What makes Christopher Lee so captivating in his first outing as Dracula?

SR: His simmering sex appeal, basically – combined with his innate bearing and a finely judged performance that veers between aristocratic and feral at a second’s notice. Lee has very few lines in the film – and they’re out of the way in the first few minutes once he says goodnight to Harker – but throughout the story everyone is either discussing him, waiting for him, in fear of him or determined to kill him (and at certain points all four). This builds up such a level of anticipation that Lee’s Byronic revenant is invasive throughout every minute of the film, even though he’s actually in very few of them. This gives his performance maximum impact every time he appears.

HN: And same question, but for Peter Cushing as Van Helsing…

SR: Cushing’s innate ability to create mesmerising and compelling characters from whole cloth. If you read Dracula’s shooting script, the Van Helsing portrayed there is not the one you see onscreen – what you see onscreen is the result of a superb actor synthesising the scripted character into one that is by turns reserved, powerful, deadly, considerate and as obsessive as Baron Frankenstein in his own way. Cushing created exactly the sort of Van Helsing that Lee’s Dracula needed. It’s a relationship in perfect balance.

Reflecting on Valerie Gaunt (above) shortly after her death, Tim Lucas noted, ‘In The Curse of Frankenstein, Gaunt played Justine… But it was [her] final performance in Dracula that was truly revolutionary.’

HN: Those two male leads are terrific, but for decades reviewers focussed almost solely on their input, arguably to the detriment of the women involved in the production. That’s changed in later years and we recently ran The Women of Dracula which addressed the significance of the female characters. Valerie Gaunt, Carol Marsh and Melissa Stribling are all superb, aren’t they? Can you talk a little about what they bring to the movie?

SR: All three give superb performances in this film – each one very powerful in its own way. Valerie Gaunt plays the unnamed Vampire Woman who fancies nibbling on Jonathan Harker and finds out that such actions come at a hefty price. The shot where she’s on the floor, bearing her fangs at Dracula and licking Harker’s blood from her lips is truly transgressive. How that escaped censorship is anyone’s guess.

Carol Marsh gets the chance to transform from a slightly wet, bedridden victim into a secretive, sexually-charged libertine and ultimately becomes a visually-unsettling, child-drinking monster – her scenes are short-lived but they allow her to play love, loss, deception, addiction, lust, predation and fear in short order. It’s often an overlooked performance and it really shouldn’t be.

Melissa Stribling remains best known for her role in Dracula, but she also featured in the classic thriller, The League of Gentlemen (1960) and appeared in iconic TV series including The Persuaders! and The Avengers.

HN: And Melissa Stibling?

SR: Well, she seemingly has the most thankless role, that of a strait-laced Victorian lady in a strait-laced Victorian marriage. But Dracula’s reinterpretation in this film as both predatory hunter and sexual enabler allow Stribling to build some striking character development into what could, in lesser hands, have been a secondary performance. Actually, her character development was so striking that some of it fell foul of the censors.

HN: We should also mention the score by James Bernard. It’s not bad, is it?

SR: It’s a dynamic and sensually-propulsive score that is not only the key engine driving the narrative’s frenetic pace but also a masterclass in emotional cueing through music. Just look at the scene where Lucy is waiting for Dracula to arrive – the anticipation and the addiction to that anticipation are there in the performance, of course, but Bernard’s score reinforces the emotions and builds to such a crescendo that the effect of the final reveal is as powerful as anything else in the film.

HN: Just pulling back from its components in isolation for a second, and looking at Dracula as a phenomenon… From a Hammer point of view, could you explain the film’s importance to the studio? Actually, what effect did its success have on Hammer and cinema in general?

SR: It was a gamechanger for both. After The Curse of Frankenstein, major distribution companies had begun to take notice of Hammer but there was some concern that Frankenstein’s success could be a one-off. Dracula not only conclusively proved otherwise, it also set off a chain of events that saw Hammer entering into production deals with pretty much all of the major British and American distributors over the next two decades. Additionally, it showed every filmmaker in the world that there was money to be made mining this genre in this way, and it set off a gold rush of imitators and tribute acts – some good and some not so much.

The Limited Collector’s Edition of Dracula includes You Look Like a Teddy Bear Now which features Janina Faye (seen above right as Tania, alongside Melissa Stribling) in conversation with Wayne Kinsey.

HN: I’d say this release is the most ambitious you’ve undertaken to date, so let’s wind the clock back for a moment. When you first embarked on this project, what were you hoping to achieve with it?

SR: Hammer releases of Hammer films are definitive – that has been our mission statement from day one. We set a new benchmark last year with our award-winning release of The Curse of Frankenstein but we knew that Dracula, being first among equals, had to exceed that. Thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people, we are very proud of what we have created.

HN: Let’s talk about it for a moment. Can you give me some idea of the size of the Dracula Limited Collector’s Edition? I’m trying to get a sense of the scale of this thing…

SR: For anyone who’s bought our collector’s editions before, it’s even more substantial than what has come before (seven discs, 200-page book, 50ish-page comic, double-sided poster, lobby cards). For anyone who’s not bought any of our collector’s editions before, you’re in for a bit of a shock.

This new release includes The Measure of a Hero, a video essay examining Peter Cushing’s bravura performance as Van Helsing in the first of Hammer’s Dracula movies.

HN: Ha! In a good way, we should add! And I think you’re being modest. This release is unique and incredibly comprehensive. It presents five versions of the film, including the editor’s workprint which I’m personally excited to see, along with about 15 hours – 15 hours! – of brand new and archive material. Actually, I won’t ask you to pick out your favourite ‘new’ feature from this release, but which do you think will surprise fans the most? And is there anything from the archive that surprised you when you encountered it for the first time?

SR: It’s the same answer to both questions: there’s an item on the set entitled "Clapperboards". There’s no actual clapperboards in it this time (see Quatermass 2 for some actual clapperboards clapping) but, due to the way that the original negatives were cut, there are mute shots at the beginning and end of reels that are needed to enable the fades to black in the narrative. Because this was controlled digitally (and not photochemically) in the new restoration it means that we can extract these fractional shots that have been lost in the fades for nearly seventy years.

HN: Sounds like the definition of ‘must-see’!

SR: There’s only a minute or so in total, and it’s just a few very short shots of camera setups, actors staring at the camera or off-stage waiting for Terence Fisher to shout, “Action!” etc, but, for those few seconds, the fourth wall is broken and you’re right there with the cast and crew, experiencing Dracula being filmed at Bray in the autumn of 1957. It’s time travel.

Thanks again to Steve Rogers for sharing his time and insight.

You can pre-order your Limited Collector's Edition of Dracula now, and browse the through the new Dracula Collection where you’ll find everything from the Jonathan Harker Diary Notebook (thanks to Inge?) to The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula Scriptbook, which we announced and discussed in a recent feature.

Finally, if all this talk of classic horror has put you in the mood for more of Fisher, Cushing and Lee at their best, you can always check out the award-winning, The Curse Of Frankenstein Limited Collector’s Edition or simply dive into the Limited Collector’s Edition range to experience a broader ocean of Hammer magic!