4:00 p.m.	Dracula Tod Browning (U.S., 1931)

Although “modern medical science does not admit of such a creature” as Bela Lugosi’s Dracula—or so commonsensical Dr. Seward guarantees to the occultist Van Helsing—this Hollywood-Gothic entry into the vampire canon functions as an enduring B-movie rebuttal to such sentiment. A compendium of lowbrow Victorian fixations, Dracula brings bloodsucking to the country house; mesmerism to the loge; and, in the romance of Harker and Mina, taboo courtship to the sanitarium.

—Patrick Ellis

• Written by Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Photographed by Karl Freund. With Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye. (75 mins, B&W, 35mm)


Followed by:

The Mummy

Karl Freund (U.S., 1932)
Watch the trailer

Recapitulating Dracula against a backdrop of pop Egyptology, The Mummy has the same self-destructive carnality and antagonism between the natural and the supernatural. The Mummy differs in its sympathy for the monster (the mummy Imhotep, played by Boris Karloff), who, in a flashback to antiquity, is shown to have been mummified alive for attempted necromancy with his lover. He returns to the present to resurrect Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), who has, per reincarnation, a “family tree that goes back miles”—thus is the idea of eternal love twisted into a macabre joke.
—Patrick Ellis

• Written by John L. Balderston. Photographed by Charles Stumar. With Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Arthur Byron. (78 mins, B&W, 35mm)