It’s Bela Lugosi’s birthday, and it never fails to blow my mind to think about how the culturally ubiquitous “vampire voice” for the past 90 years is just an impression of one guy’s Hungarian accent. Not many performances have that sort of impact.
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It’s remarkable in general that our ideas of what vampires, werewolves, mummies and Frankenstein’s monster look like are mostly taken from a handful of Universal horror films from the 30s and 40s
One of my favorite what-ifs is to imagine how differently pop culture would have developed had Lon Chaney lived to play Dracula as Browning intended. Probably a safe bet he’d have been Frankenstein, too.
I know he did a couple other similar vampire roles but it blew my mind to learn he only played Dracula twice. And one of those was an Abbott and Costello movie!
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We wisely dumped the decaying German Nosferatu for this charisma magnet and never looked back