The lasting legacy of Bela Lugosi as ‘Dracula’...

Bela Lugosi as Dracula

Written by Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune/November 13, 2021 

Let’s go on a voyage today…

By the time I got to Budapest it was raining. No, maybe that was Vienna on a Danube River trip a few years ago. Who cares what the weather was when visiting the homeland of notorious actor Bela Lugosi.

 

Why Bela “Call Me Dracula” Lugosi now? Fully two weeks after Halloween 2021, the year almost everybody wore masks if they had an ounce of sense? But enough politics. Around Halloween I re-watched Bela on TV as Dracula in his first movie playing that blood-sucking vampire and this is my first chance to express some inspiring thoughts on it in print.

 

I was shocked, shocked in Budapest (cognoscenti like me actually pronounce it Budapescht to demonstrate our erudition) to find how big Lugosi still is in the Hungarian capital. After all, the guy left there before 1920 and died in Hollywood more than 30 years later.

 

It’d be like Duluth worshiping Bob Dylan in 2087, or thereabouts. They probably will.

 

But everywhere you go in Budapest (remember, if you read this aloud to your children, pronounce it Budapescht to get them off to a good start in life) there’s some remembrance of Bela Lugosi — statues, museums (well, just one); there’s the Bela Lugosi Day Care Center, the Bela Lugosi Laundromat, the Bela Lugosi Blood Bank (hmmmm), Saint Bela Lugosi Cathedral. Well, maybe I dreamed a few of those up, but Lugosi is big in Budapest. Take my word for it.

 

Who remembers the famous Austro-Hungarian emperor (I forget his name, but James Mason played him in the movies with huge sideburns)? Hardly anybody remembers who was emperor when all the trouble started over there leading to World War I, but you can’t round a corner in downtown Budapest without running into Bela Lugosi.

 

Sometimes I worry in writing these columns that as a registered geezer my musings will not be of interest to members of those generations with letters like X, Y and Z and so forth. All of my progeny falls into one of those categories. My generation falls somewhere between “Greatest” and “Boomer,” so we got no credit at all for ending the Great Depression and discovering Elvis.

 

But we remember Bela Lugosi, by cracky. He scared the living daylights out of me when they re-relased his 1931 classic “Dracula” and it showed up at Duluth’s Lyric Theater on a dark and stormy night when I was about 10 years old. At least I think it was dark and stormy; dark for sure, Daylight Saving Time having lapsed. I’m pretty sure. I like to be decisive.

 

 

You couldn’t view that movie at that age without being petrified, and being instilled with a lifelong fear of vampire bats, which are now accused of starting pandemics. Sometimes in the film, Dracula shows up as a bat casing the boudoirs of fair-haired young women before turning back into the black-caped-white-tie-and-tails monster about to suck her blood via her neck. That sort of thing gets your attention as a pre-adolescent.

 

Sleeping in a coffin placed in a dank catacomb during the day, he’d rise only after dark (you wonder what he thought about Daylight Saving Time) to work his hypnotic magic on his comely victims and also crazed males who have difficulty speaking without seeming to scream in a monotone, eyes wide with terror.

 

Whew, I’m getting scared just recalling his stuff. Thank heaven (heaven is not actually involved here but thank it anyway) for Dr. Van Helsing, who’s got the goods on the caped, widow’s peaked, slick raven-headed, vampire.

 

Van Helsing carries a good-sized crucifix in his suit coat breast pocket because he knows that is the one thing Dracula fears and shrinks back from. (Well, I guess heaven IS involved here a bit. What a relief.) Oh, Dracula recoils from garlic too — just like the rest of us.

 

“You know too much, Van Helsing,” says the Count (oh yes, I forgot to note that Dracula was a tangential royal in his Transylvania homeland — not to be confused with Pennsylvania). Back home in Transylvania he was known as “Vlad the Impaler.” This was several generations before the Hollywood years, although it’s the same guy. Vampires never die as long as they sleep all day. They don’t even fade away, even when a stake is driven through their hearts.

 

Oh, I can’t go on. I’m getting the shivers just writing about this.

 

I recall taking the bus home from the Dracula movie that night and my buddy and I ran as fast as we could in the dark from the bus stop to the safety of our homes and hearths.

 

Meanwhile, back in Budapest, I have a photo of me posing in touristy attire standing in front of the Bela Lugosi Museum, inexplicably painted a cheerful yellow. I didn’t go inside, though. Scared? Maybe. Also cheap.

 

Finally, remember: If you want to impress your friends, pronounce it Budapesht.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.

2012: A spaced-out odyssey...

Intimations of mortality on recollections from childhood…

By Jim Heffernan

“I get angry at the way people are being manipulated and frightened to make money. There is no ethical right to frighten children to make a buck.” – A NASA spokesman refuting recent claims that the end of the world will occur on Dec. 21, 2012. (New York Times, Nov. 17.)

Well now, who is not shocked…shocked…to hear that there are people who would try to make a buck by frightening children! Boy, how low can you go?

I only wish Walt Disney were still alive to face the music for all of the bucks he made frightening children. There are numerous examples in Disney movies, but to me the most frightening was the evil queen in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” who tries to do in sweet Snow White.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all,” the evil queen, with a widow’s peak to die for (did I say die?) and an ominous black cloak with a head-framing collar, says and then shrieks when told the fairest is poor, innocent Snow White. What child didn’t have a bad dream after that scene, and the one in which she offers good-hearted Snow White the poison apple? I shudder today.

For shame, Walt.

Speaking of making a buck frightening children, don’t forget that malevolent duo Abbott and Costello, unknown to today’s younger generations but when they showed up in the movie “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” when I was a kid there wasn’t a dry seat in the theater at the matinee. Way to go boys. Frightening children. Where did they get the ethical right to do that? And just to make a buck. A measly buck. My head shakes back and forth with disdain.

Then there were the Mummy, the Wolf Man and Dracula circulating through the movie theaters scaring the pants off of even older girls, and boys too, who heartily approved, but we won’t go there at this time.

I still quake when I see Bela Lugosi, everyone’s favorite vampire, Count Dracula, moving in on the neck of some fetching blonde asleep on a bed of roses, or flying around in the form of a bat, or opening up his casket after the sun goes down to go forth and suck the blood of unsuspecting victims. Yikes. How did the children of that era survive the shock and freight? And what for? To make a buck. Just to make a buck. It’s unconscionable.

I’m getting scared just writing this, but before I run and hide under the bed I must mention “The Thing” (The original “The Thing” of the early ‘1950s). To make a buck, the producers frightened me into regression of my personal development. I had reached the age when I could stay home alone at night when my parents were out, but after seeing “The Thing” – he came from outer space -- I needed babysitters again, if not diapers.

More likely, to avoid staying home alone, I’d accompany a parent to wherever they were going. I went to “Prayer Meeting” at our church with my mother just so I wouldn’t have to stay home alone and be murdered by The Thing for my blood. Like Count Dracula, The Thing thrived on blood; human, dog, any living creature he could get his massive, ugly hands on.

And what for? So some Hollywood studio could make a buck scaring children. For that I had to sit through adult prayer meetings and listen some skinny old bald guy who looked like Ichabod Crane (don’t get me started on the Headless Horseman in the movie “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) read the Bible’s begats? The begats! Just to make a buck. Not the begats, “The Thing.”

Oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m becoming unmoored. These repressed memories have got me on edge. I’d better quit while I’m still behind.

But wait! Is that “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” in the pool? Everybody out of the pool! Pronto.