Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Dracula
1958 · Terence Fisher · Dracula on Sightlines
A shadow stands at the top of a staircase. Jonathan Harker waits in the hall below, and the figure up there could be anything. Then Terence Fisher cuts, and the shadow becomes a tall man in black coming briskly down the steps, courteous, well lit, every inch the host. For a few minutes Christopher Lee's Dracula is a perfect gentleman, and that turns out to be the most frightening thing about him.
That cut is the key to the whole film. The shadow on the stairs belongs to the old horror, the kind built from half-seen things and from a gradient of light and dark in which objects seem to carry a strange life of their own. Deleuze called that tradition expressionism, and Universal's 1931 Dracula lived inside a version of it, with its cobwebbed ruin and Bela Lugosi's slow, hypnotic count. Fisher holds the shadow for a second and then switches on the lights. In Jack Asher's Eastmancolor photography, dread comes mostly from what you can see plainly: a castle hall in daylight, a coffin in full view, a Victorian bedroom warm with firelight. Hammer couldn't legally borrow Universal's look, so it built a style out of not having it.
What kind of image is this? Deleuze's first cinema book sorts films by how they connect what a character sees with what a character does. In what he calls the action-image, the engine of classical Hollywood, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the editing serves that chain. Dracula is the action-image in its large form. A situation that encloses everyone in it, which Deleuze calls the synsign, presses harder and harder until someone has to act decisively. Jimmy Sangster's script throws out Stoker's letters and diaries and the sea voyage. Bill Lenny's cutting goes from incident to incident with hardly a pause. The whole thing runs about 82 minutes and plays like a chase across a pocket-sized Europe.
The lens gets interesting here, because the film's two opponents belong to two different kinds of image.
Peter Cushing's Van Helsing is the action-image in a frock coat. He is crisp, English and scientific. He dictates his findings into a phonograph and lays out the "facts" of vampirism like a lecturer at a medical school. For him, seeing leads to a procedure and the procedure leads to an act. Cushing moves through rooms fast and always knows what his hands are for. Deleuze calls the shape this gives a story the binomial: force against force, the duel.
Lee's Count is something else. He has a handful of lines, nearly all of them early, and then he more or less stops talking. What's left is appetite: red eyes, a bloody mouth, a hiss. Watch the reverse-angle cut to his snarling face after Harker's encounter with the vampire woman. The gentleman from the staircase is gone. Deleuze placed a darker image between feeling and action and called it the impulse-image. It belongs to cinema's naturalism, a world where raw drives break out beneath a respectable surface and everything slides toward exhaustion. Its signs are symptoms and fetishes, which he describes as fragments of a body or objects charged with compulsive force. In this film the fetish is blood. Earlier horror kept it gray. Fisher shows it red, and that red becomes what Deleuze would call an affective color, one that soaks up the feeling of every scene it touches.
So the film pits a man who acts against a creature who only hungers. That is a good reason to watch it through Deleuze. It is more than a monster movie. It shows two modes of moving image fighting over the same rooms.
And the rooms matter. Bernard Robinson dressed Bray Studios' small spaces as the Holmwood house, all warm Victorian clutter. Deleuze describes the naturalist setting as a "derived milieu," a concrete social world that turns out to be the thin surface of something older and more savage. That fits this house exactly. Evil doesn't storm it. It gets in through the bedroom window and the cellar, the two places where a respectable house keeps what it doesn't talk about.
Notice how Fisher handles that window. He doesn't explain anything. We watch Lucy get ready for the night and open it, and the gesture tells us about a whole situation we are never shown. Deleuze calls this an index of lack: an elliptical act from which we infer what lies offscreen. Fisher uses it to let us know, without a word of dialogue, that Lucy is waiting for someone and wants him to come. Carol Marsh and Melissa Stribling play respectable women whose change appears as languor and expectation, small movements gathering across a face. Deleuze calls this kind of face a potisign, a face poised on the threshold of desire. In 1958 these faces were the real scandal. The women want the vampire.
The film's ancestry is easy to read. Fisher learned his method as an editor at Gainsborough on costume melodramas like The Wicked Lady: period decor, a clean moral split between virtue and sexualized transgression, and pacing driven by plot. The Curse of Frankenstein gave him the team, the studio, the Cushing–Lee pairing and the Eastmancolor blood, and Dracula refines that template. Behind both stand Nosferatu and the Universal film Hammer was consciously answering. The film's descendants came fast. The Brides of Dracula brought back Cushing's athletic Van Helsing, now improvising even more physically, at one point burning out a vampire's bite with a hot iron. In Italy, Mario Bava's Black Sunday moved into the space Hammer had opened for on-screen bodily horror, with its spiked-mask prologue and in-camera decay.
What did the film do to the art? Deleuze's story says the action-image went into crisis after the war, as characters lost the ability to act on what they saw. This British studio picture, made in a converted country house on a modest budget, rebuilt the action-image at full strength and gave it a body that bleeds in color. It moved horror out of the shadows into lit rooms. It made the monster a matter of appetite rather than atmosphere, and it gave the genre the tempo of an action film.
One question stays open, and it is worth carrying into the film. The story clearly sides with Van Helsing, the man who acts. But look at where the color goes, where James Bernard's three descending notes go, and where the women's faces turn. Which of the two images does the film really love? Watch the windows and the doors. Watch the moment Lee stops talking.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — Sangster's compressed script and Lenny's incident-to-incident cutting turn Stoker into a tight chase in which a pressing situation demands decisive action
- the encompasser — Dracula's predation spreads through Harker's fiancée's family and their house, an enveloping situation that calls Van Helsing to act
- binomial (the duel) — Cushing's rationalist, physically decisive Van Helsing set force-against-force with Lee's fast, predatory Count
- impulse-image — After a handful of early lines, Lee's Dracula becomes pure feral appetite: red eyes, bloodied mouth, hissing, sudden lunges into frame
- fetish — Blood shown in vivid Eastmancolor red, the part-object charged with the film's compulsive force
- affective colour — Asher's saturated reds against dark wood and stone; blood as red rather than gray, the film's key break from 1930s horror
- derived milieu — Robinson's warm, cluttered Holmwood house, a respectable domestic surface that evil enters through the bedroom window and the cellar
- index of lack — Lucy opening her bedroom window for her visitor, a gesture that suggests her complicity without spelling it out
- icon of power — Marsh's Lucy and Stribling's Mina register their change under Dracula's influence as languor and expectation, a desiring face on the threshold