My Favourite Dracula

I think I've run out of Fifties sf classics! I couldn't get the disc of The Blob to work in the machine - but if I remember rightly, The Blob's overrated.

So I moved onto horror last night. Something to put me right in the mood for my editorial work on Brenda and Effie Mystery No.5.

More Vincent Price in The House of Wax. It hit me what a fantastic physical performer he was. I always think of that purring voice of his and the faces he pulled... but in House of Wax he moves about the place brilliantly. When he's in his hat and cape, stalking his victims, he's like a great, angular spider, mincing and loping from shadow to shadow. What I love about Vincent is that he really understands how the macabre works, and how it takes great big glistening dollops of camp. This is one of those revenge movies that he excelled in: just like Theatre of Blood and the unsurpassable Doctor Phibes movies. He is always the wronged artist, brought down by irksome petty little men - critics and financiers or jury members. He exerts revenge upon them in the most baroque and spitefully ingenious ways possible. I think this strand of Price's career is much more interesting than the lauded Poe adaptations he appeared in. Much less Poe-faced. I'm not sure I ever really got to the heart of Poe's appeal.

Then - watching films far too late on a school night - 'Son of Dracula' carried me into the early hours. Lon Chaney made a very ordinary Dracula. Such a shame. He looks like a disgruntled taxi driver. He never really nails the camp. Which is a shame - given this is a story about Dracula's surviving relative moving to the 'virile' New World, setting up home with a new and very glamorous wife on a plantation in the Deep South. There's scope for whole new vistas of outrageous camp here, but the film never really chances it. It makes you long for Bela Lugosi.

There are some great visuals, though. The smoke effects are wonderful: Dracula's bride melts into a single puff on a black and gold Sobranie. The Forties fashions look terrific. You expect Joan Crawford to come stomping into the scene. I love the moment the Bride is found on her honeymoon, when she's already supposed to be dead, sitting up in bed, her face like alabaster and wearing a fluffy bed jacket. Chaney has a great moment when he glides effortlessly across a swamp towards his beloved. Dracula's best when he simply floats through it all. It's only at the very end of a Dracula story when you should see him lose his cool. That's what all the great Dracs of the past have known.

Which is my favourite Dracula? Lugosi is ok, but never elegant enough. I find Christopher Lee too bombastic, on the whole. The Gary Oldman thing was a joke. The recent BBC version with Marc Warren impersontaing Gary Oldman's version was another of their Christmas paint-by-numbers dramatisations in which they're so keen to give it a new twist they forget what was great about the original story (see: Triffids, Henry James, etc etc). The Dracula I've enjoyed in recent years was Louis Jordan in the 1977 BBC serial. Anyone remember that? The luridly bloody and sexy bits are done in montage, so that they look weirdly like pop videos or dance numbers by Pan's People.

I'd have loved to see Vincent Price play Dracula. Did that never happen? Did no one ever ask him?