Dracula is a 1931 American pre-Code supernatural horror film directed and co-produced by Tod Browning from a screenplay written by Garrett Fort and starring Bela Lugosi in the title role.

[3] Lugosi portrays Count Dracula, a vampire who emigrates from Transylvania to England and preys upon the blood of living victims, including a young man's fiancée.

He starts talking about vampires, and that afternoon, Renfield begs Seward to send him away, claiming his nightly cries may disturb Mina's dreams.

The following individuals appear in uncredited roles: director and co-producer Tod Browning as the off-screen voice of the harbormaster; Carla Laemmle, a cousin of producer Carl Laemmle Jr., who appears at the start of the film as a woman in the coach carrying Renfield;[8] and Geraldine Dvorak, Cornelia Thaw, and Dorothy Tree as Dracula's brides.

Stoker's widow sued for plagiarism and copyright infringement, and the courts decided in her favor, essentially ordering that all prints of Nosferatu be destroyed.

[7] Enthusiastic young Hollywood producer Carl Laemmle Jr. also saw the box office potential in Stoker's gothic chiller, and he legally acquired the novel's film rights.

Initially, he wanted Dracula to be a spectacle on a scale with the lavish silent films The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Universal also brought Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louis Bromfield to pen the script to fit this grand scale vision.

When Veidt returned to Germany fearing his English was not good enough for talkies Universal looked to Lon Chaney, star of the studio's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Laemmle instead considered more established screen actors, with John Wray, fresh from his success in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) being announced as cast in the role.

Manners recalled about the filming: "I can still see Lugosi, parading up and down the stage, posing in front of a full-length mirror, throwing his cape over his shoulder and shouting, 'I am Dracula!'

[16] Tod Browning remembered actress Helen Chandler from the 1928 Broadway play The Silent House and based on that maiden performance chose her for Mina, the heroine, who becomes mistress to Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula.

Like some of her co-stars, despite this role becoming her most famous one, she did not care much about it: "It would be an awful fate, for instance, to go around being a pale little girl in a trance with her arms outstretched as in Dracula, all the rest of my screen career!

[19] The film's histrionics from the stage play are also reflected in its special effects, which are limited to fog, lighting, and large flexible bats.

[4] The music heard during the opening credits, an excerpt from Act II of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, was later re-used for another Universal horror film, The Mummy (1932).

During the theater scene where Dracula meets Dr. Seward, Harker, Mina, and Lucy, the end of the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg can also be heard as well as the dark opening of Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" in B minor.

I felt the score needed to evoke the feeling of the world of the 19th century — for that reason I decided a string quartet would be the most evocative and effective.

In spite of the literary credentials of the source material, it was uncertain if an American audience was prepared for a serious full length supernatural chiller.

Though American audiences had been exposed to other chillers before, such as The Cat and the Canary (1927), this was a horror story with no comic relief or trick ending that downplayed the supernatural.

When the film finally premiered at the Roxy Theatre in New York City on February 12, 1931 (released two days later throughout the U.S.),[12] newspapers reported that members of the audiences fainted in shock at the horror on screen.

Within 48 hours of its opening at New York's Roxy Theatre, it had sold 50,000 tickets,[12] building a momentum that culminated in a $700,000 profit, the largest of Universal's 1931 releases.

Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times called it "the best of the many mystery films", characterizing Browning's direction as "imaginative" and Helen Chandler's performance as "excellent".

[28] Variety praised the film for its "remarkably effective background of creepy atmosphere" and wrote: "It is difficult to think of anybody who could quite match the performance in the vampire part of Bela Lugosi, even to the faint flavor of foreign speech that fits so neatly".

[31] John Mosher of The New Yorker wrote a negative review, remarking that "there is no real illusion in the picture" and "this whole vampire business falls pretty flat".

[32] The Chicago Tribune did not think the film was as scary as the stage version, calling its framework "too obvious" and "its attempts to frighten too evident", but still concluded that it was "quite a satisfactory thriller".

[40] He concluded that although he feels the film becomes almost "overly stage bound in its middle section, the virtues of its star performance and general visual style outweigh any such deficits".

The site's critical consensus reads: "Bela Lugosi's timeless portrayal of Dracula in this creepy and atmospheric 1931 film has set the standard for major vampiric roles since".

The film features Nicolas Cage as Count Dracula and Nicholas Hoult as Renfield compositing them into the background in place of Lugosi and Frye.

Despite his earlier stage successes in a variety of roles, from the moment Lugosi donned the cape on screen, it would forever see him typecast as the Count.

In the novel and in the German silent film Nosferatu (1922), Dracula's appearance is repulsive; Lugosi portrays the Count as a handsome, charming nobleman.