Dundead Halloween: Dracula (1958, 4K Restoration)

Certificate: 12A
Director: Terence Fisher
Country: UK
Year: 1958
Duration: 95m
Distributor: Hammer / Dave WoodwardHammer horror is almost a genre unto itself. Two words which conjure up a bonafide British filmmaking institution, a world of the gothic and the macabre, of candles, heavy curtains and leather armchairs, red-poster-paint-blood, smoking jackets, clipped diction and the supernatural, always shot with thrifty ingenuity, headlined by either Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing, or sometimes both.1958’s Dracula was the film which put Hammer on the tea-stained, hand-drawn map. Cushing is Van Helsing opposite Lee’s dashing, vicious Count.Lee would play Dracula for Hammer no less than seven times. For a generation or more, it was the role for which he was best known, at least until Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings gave him a late-career renaissance.While Bela Lugosi’s Dracula still looms large in the pop culture consciousness, so too does Hammer’s version of the Count. According to some historians, it was here that Dracula first appeared with canine fangs (Nosferatu’s vampire famously had fangs out in front). The fangs in Hammer’s Dracula were so shocking, and their employment in a moment of blood-letting so violent, that the film fell foul of the censors. The cut footage was lost to the annals of history until recently. This newly-rediscovered footage has been reinstated into a stunning brand new 4K restoration, allowing audiences to see the film fully uncut for the first time since its release. The recovered material has never been released before in the UK, and was previously only seen by audiences attending the film’s original Japanese theatrical release in 1958.Dracula remains one of horror’s most iconic and enduring characters, and one who is regularly adapted, reconfigured and remixed to fit and reflect time periods, or moods, or tones. While there is never a bad time to revisit the classics, perhaps the success of Robert Egger’s Nosferatu could give us an indication that audiences are looking for adaptations that hark back to more classical modes of film-making. So come and see the film that launched one of the definitive portrayals of a classic horror character.