Director Tod Browning (FREAKS) and actor Bela Lugosi established the Transylvanian count as one of the archetypal movie vampires and a monster icon for Universal Studios’ golden era of classic horror films. This adaptation of Hamilton Deane’s then-popular stage play of Bram Stoker’s novel is quite different from Murnau’s silent NOSFERATU, and from later works coming from Hammer Studios from the 1950s through 1970s and Francis Ford Coppola in 1990. Real estate agent Renfield (played by everyone’s favorite madman Dwight Frye) goes insane after visiting Dracula at his Transylvanian castle and is thereafter confined to a London asylum, though he does the count’s bidding as a hypnotized slave when Dracula comes to Britain and moves into deserted Carfax Abbey. David Manners is Jonathan Harker and Helen Chandler is his lady love, whom Dracula wants to make his bride. Edward Van Sloan, a fixture in early Universal horrors, is Professor Van Helsing.

One of director Tod Browning's earliest evocations of death, perversity and deformity, this silent masterpiece follows a crime syndicate comprised of a dwarf, a strongman and a ventriloquist (as the latter, Lon Chaney dresses up as a woman in one of the many instances of transvestism in Browning’s ouevre).

Armless circus performer Lon Chaney falls for stunning, scantily clad bareback rider Joan Crawford (who, conveniently, is pathologically terrified of men's hands) in this typically haunting Tod Browning melodrama. Burt Lancaster once praised Chaney's performance in this film as the most emotionally compelling work ever committed to celluloid.