The Last Seven Minutes Of THE HORROR OF DRACULA Are The Best Horror Movie Ever Made

Christopher Lee radiates sex appeal. As the titular vampire in Horror of Dracula, he’s stiff and controlled in the way one assumes impossibly wealthy counts to be. Yet Lee’s alpha-male dominance over his scenes causes his co-stars to shrink in his shadow, and it makes Count Dracula seem on the verge of turning feral. It’d only take a moment for him to open his mouth, snap out at his victim’s neck, and draw blood….

As the Count for Universal Pictures, Bela Lugosi lacked sexuality. You could imagine Lugosi as the bloodthirsty supernatural ghoul, sure — but Dracula is as much a seducer as he is an otherworldly killer. When Dracula first appears to Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) in his dark, palatial home, he’s at the top of a flight of stairs, Lee’s tall, slender body and night-black cloak filling the doorway. In those first 30 minutes, Lee cements his as the definitive take on the character, combining the three facets of Dracula — count, demon, and seducer — in one eerie being.

Ultimately, it’s Lee’s singular work as Dracula, as well as the efforts of Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing and Terence Fisher, the director, that makes Horror of Dracula one of the greatest horror films of all time. Or — the last seven minutes are, at any rate.

The First 75 Minutes

The 1958 Hammer Films Productions adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula mythos dials up the Technicolor blood and gore in a way that audiences at the time had never before seen. Remember, the last major adaptation of the property was Universal’s string of black-and-white features. But here, in ’58, crimson blood streams from Lee’s mouth after he feeds. It’s on the stake Harker drives through Dracula’s wife (Valerie Gaunt). And it’s on Van Helsing’s hand after he kills another vampire, brutally hammering the wood into the creature’s heart.

This shock value is the star of the show for the first 30 minutes of the film, as Harker explores the Count’s castle and narrates his dark purpose — to kill Dracula once and for all — as he logs his tale in a journal. These scenes culminate with Harker being bit, whereupon Dracula entombs him in the crypt and flees the home.

Van Helsing discovers the undead convert Harker and stakes him through the heart to put an end to his vampiric suffering. But he knows that back in England, Harker’s fiancée, Lucy Holmwood (Carol Marsh) isn’t safe — Dracula is coming for her next, as compensation for his murdered wife. Van Helsing resolves to help the Holmwoods prevent Lucy’s death and keep Dracula at bay.

So pass the remaining 30-odd minutes, as Dracula kills Lucy and turns his advances to her mother, Mina (Melissa Stribling). All the while, Van Helsing’s austere erudition and graven countenance prove to be one step behind the archangel machinations of Count Dracula.

The film has slowed down considerably in this middle segment. The mood has changed completely from the tense, frantic opening third with Harker — the pace has slowed down to something resembling a TV-budget chamber-piece drama.

One especially slow scene finds Van Helsing conducting a blood transfusion. It’s one long, unbroken shot, probably owing to the relatively low budgets and tight production schedules Hammer horror movies had to deal with. While the scene’s a welcome reprieve from all the lunacy, were it to be excised from the film, virtually nothing would change. But we instead watch the entire blood transfusion process, nearly grinding the storytelling to a halt.

When I first saw Horror of Dracula, I didn’t know what to make of these scenes. The pace slowed, though, and I remember calling the middle segment “boring” and “stuffy.” Yet in reality, the scenes’ functions are preparatory. The film’s final seven minutes wouldn’t be so utterly transcendent without them. You need the lull in the middle to make the explosion at the end pop.

The Final 7

“We have it in our power to rid the world of this evil. And with God’s help, we’ll succeed,” Van Helsing tells Mina’s husband, Arthur (Michael Gough). Their plan is to use Mina to lead them to Dracula, setting her up as bait and waiting for the winged demon to arrive.

The table has been set for an absolutely killer finale — and it is indeed one of cinema’s greatest endings, I maintain. The film cleanly, efficiently establishes the locations, the characters, their motivations, and the stakes, both wooden and otherwise. We know Dracula’s rulebook — he must return to a coffin filled with his homeland’s soil to sleep at night; he’s allergic to sunlight, garlic flowers, and crucifixes; and while he might appear to be a nobleman, Lee’s vampire will go to any barbarous lengths necessary to steal Mina away as revenge. There’s also the added wrinkle that neither Arthur nor Van Helsing knows where Dracula’s coffin is.

As night fast approaches, the pair retires to the study, where Arthur insists Van Helsing finally get some sleep and drink some wine. “Greta, will you fetch another bottle?” he asks their housekeeper (Olga Dickie).

Greta tells him she cannot. “You know what happened last time I disobeyed Mrs. Holmwood’s orders.” When Arthur asks for clarification, Greta explains: “Well, sir, madam told me the other day that I was to on no account go down into the cellar.”

There’s a perfect beat as the two men tense up and look at each other and it sinks in that Dracula’s new resting place is in the cellar of Arthur and Mina’s home, and suddenly, the spring that’d been tightly coiled for the last 60 minutes shoots open. The final minutes are wall-to-wall action as Van Helsing barges through the door to the cellar, spots Dracula’s coffin in there, tears off the lid, and finds it empty.

The camera’s pulled back — there’s no time to cut in for a closeup — and the door to the cellar opens again. Dracula races in, sees Van Helsing, hisses, and bolts. Van Helsing plants a crucifix in the creature’s coffin and then vaults over the bannister on his way upstairs — Mina’s gone, scooped up by Dracula and spirited away in a carriage.

The film squeezes in just enough time for a joke involving the border guard (George Benson) fixing the crossing after Dracula rams it, only for Van Helsing and Arthur to speed along and destroy it again.

What’s most frightening in these scenes is Lee. We’ve seen him be sexy, refined, like a master of disguises. But all his pretensions are falling apart as he’s growing more and more frantic. He kills his coach driver in an attempt to get to his castle as fast as he can. Now there’s a ticking clock — Dracula’s resting place had been compromised, and he only has a few more minutes to bury Mina and make it back inside his castle before the sun rises.

The sun’s nearly up — light is peeking over the tree-line — as the men arrive at Dracula’s castle. They see Dracula drop Mina’s limp, still-alive body into the grave, and he starts throwing dirt on her to bury her before the sun comes up to consume them both.

Van Helsing chases Dracula inside, and the two grapple in the castle, eventually finding themselves in the dining hall. But Van Helsing sees a glimpse of light shining through the tall window at the end of the table. Daybreak.

And in the greatest moment in horror cinema history, Peter Cushing leaps onto the table. Dracula grabs for him, in vain. Cushing charges down, scattering plates and cups, and then he throws himself at the curtains, grabs them, and falls to the tile floor, tearing them off with him.

The light hits Dracula, and Dracula immediately doubles over in agony. Screaming, collapsing, Dracula falls to the floor as Van Helsing looms over him with a crucifix made of candlesticks. Dracula begins turning to ash, his hands going grey and decomposing, all 600 years of artifice blowing off of Dracula’s sad, withered body and blowing away in the breeze.

It’s the perfect animalistic ending to a film that so prioritizes the sex appeal and rich royalty of Dracula, the perfect grotesque modern interpretation of one of the most iconic works of American literature. And it has the quintessential final horror scene, too — one in which Van Helsing stands over the corpse of his sworn enemy, unable to say anything, merely in awe that it’s finally over.

And we’re delivered something satisfying that we so infrequently see in modern horror: closure. As Van Helsing watches, a breeze blows Dracula’s ashes away, revealing his golden Aquarius ring there on the tiles of the ancient, cursed castle, the last corporeal evidence anyone will have that the vampire ever existed in the first place.

What’s your favorite Dracula adaptation? What’s your favorite movie ending? Is the answer to both Horror of Dracula? Let me know in the comments below!