Dracula is a 1958 British gothic horror film directed by Terence Fisher and written by Jimmy Sangster based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel of the same name.

[7] Christopher Frayling writes, "Dracula introduced fangs, red contact lenses, décolletage, ready-prepared wooden stakes and – in the celebrated credits sequence – blood being spattered from off-screen over the Count's coffin.

"[9] In 2017, a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine saw Dracula ranked the 65th best British film ever.

[10] Empire magazine ranked Lee's portrayal as Count Dracula the 7th Greatest Horror Movie Character of All Time.

He travels to Dracula's castle and finds it deserted, but comes across the portrait that Harker had of his fiancée Lucy Holmwood, with the photos now gone.

Van Helsing stakes him before leaving for the town of Karlstadt and delivering the news of Harker's death to Arthur Holmwood and his wife Mina, brother and sister-in-law of Lucy, who is ill.

When night falls, Lucy opens the doors to her terrace and lays bare her neck—already, it bears the mark of a vampire bite.

Mina seeks out Van Helsing's aid in treating Lucy, who begs the maid Gerda to remove his prescribed garlic bouquets and is found dead the next day.

Pursuing Dracula inside the castle, Van Helsing struggles with the vampire before eventually tearing down the curtains to let in the sunlight.

Mina recovers and the cross-shaped scar fades from her hand while Dracula's ashes blow away in the morning breeze, leaving only his clothes and ring behind.

As Christopher Lee remarked in an interview in Leonard Wolf's A Dream of Dracula: "I was always against the whole tie and tails rendition.

Surely it is the height of the ridiculous for a vampire to step out of the shadows wearing white tie, tails, patent leather shoes and a full cloak".

"[14] He also saw a certain tragedy in Dracula and tried to inject it into playing him: "I've always tried to put an element of sadness, which I've termed the loneliness of evil, into his character.

"[15] Lee also felt that it was important to stay faithful to Stoker's novel and was frustrated with his Hammer Dracula films: "The stories as I've had them given to me have had almost no relation to the book...which is my reiterated complaint."

"[12][16] When Hammer asked for an adaptation of Stoker's novel, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster decided to streamline it to fit it into less than ninety minutes of screen time, and shooting on a low budget within the confines of Bray Studios and its surrounding estate.

Working under these limitations, Sangster posited that Jonathan Harker travels to Dracula's castle intending to destroy Dracula (not to complete a real estate transaction, as in the novel) and gets killed, made Arthur Holmwood into Mina's husband and Lucy into Harker's fiancée and Arthur's sister.

The subplot of the harrowing voyage of the ship that carries Dracula and his coffins to England was also abandoned and is replaced in the film by a short hearse ride because all of the action takes place in a relatively small area of Central Europe.

"[18] Terence Fisher believed: "My greatest contribution to the Dracula myth was to bring out the underlying sexual element in the story.

Film Bulletin noted, "As produced by Anthony Hinds in somber mid-Victorian backgrounds... and directed by Terence Fisher with an immense flair for the blood-curdling shot, this Technicolor nightmare should prove a real treat.

"[22] Variety called Peter Cushing's performance impressive and wrote that the "serious approach to the macabre theme...adds up to lotsa tension and suspense.

"[21] Harrison's Reports was particularly enthusiastic: "Of all the 'Dracula' horror pictures thus far produced, this one, made in Britain and photographed in Technicolor, tops them all.

"[23] Vincent Canby in Motion Picture Daily said, "Hammer Films, the same British production unit which last year restored Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to its rightful place in the screen's chamber of horrors, has now even more successfully brought back the granddaddy of all vampires, Count Dracula.

The website's critical consensus states: "Trading gore for grandeur, Horror of Dracula marks an impressive turn for inveterate Christopher Lee as the titular vampire, and a typical Hammer mood that makes aristocracy quite sexy.

The film was released on DVD in the U.K. in October 2002 alongside The Curse of Frankenstein and The Mummy in a box-set entitled Hammer Horror Originals.

For many years, historians pointed to the fact that an even longer, more explicit, version of the film played in Japanese and European cinemas in 1958.

[30] On 29 December 2012, Hammer announced that the restored film would be released on a three-disc Blu-ray Disc set in the U.K. on 18 March 2013.