The film starred Frank Langella in the title role as well as Laurence Olivier, Donald Pleasence and Kate Nelligan.

Mina Van Helsing, who is visiting her friend Lucy Seward, discovers Dracula's body after his ship has run aground and rescues him.

The Count visits Mina and her friends at the household of Lucy's father, Dr. Jack Seward, whose clifftop mansion also serves as the local asylum.

Later that night, while Lucy and Jonathan are having a secret rendezvous, Dracula reveals his true nature as he descends upon Mina to drink her blood.

At a loss for the cause of death, Dr. Seward calls in Mina's father, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who suspects what might have killed his daughter: a vampire.

Seward and Van Helsing investigate their suspicions and discover a roughly clawed opening within Mina's coffin, leading them to the local mines.

Dracula escapes their attempts to kill him, bursts into the asylum to free the captive Lucy and also scolds his slave, Milo Renfield, for warning the others about him.

Van Helsing uses his remaining strength to throw a hook attached to a rope, tied to the ship's rigging, into Dracula's back.

Harker seizes his chance and hoists the count up through the cargo hold to the top of the ship's rigging, where he dies a painful death when the rays of the sun burn his body.

Locations in Cornwall doubled for the majority of the exterior Whitby scenes; Tintagel (for Seward's Asylum), and St Michael's Mount (for Carfax Abbey).

"[3] Langella wanted to explore sides of the character which weren't shown before: "I decided he was a highly vulnerable and erotic man, not cool and detached and with no sense of humour or humanity.

He thus read the novel and found the character to be "gothic, elegant, lonely, without anyone who understood his problem, which consisted of the need for blood to survive."

The original soundtrack album was released by MCA Records, followed by a Deluxe Edition encompassing the complete score by Varèse Sarabande in 2018.

The success of the jokey Love at First Bite, starring George Hamilton, may have been relevant to the muted response this version experienced.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film 3½ stars out of 4, writing: "What an elegantly seen Dracula this is, all shadows and blood and vapors and Frank Langella stalking through with the grace of a cat.

The film is a triumph of performance, art direction and mood over materials that can lend themselves so easily to self-satire...This Dracula restores the character to the purity of its first film appearances..."[9] Janet Maslin of The New York Times, stated: "In making this latest trip to the screen in living color, Dracula has lost some blood.

"[11] The movie made it onto Variety's All-Time Horror Rentals in 1993, but it fell into relative cinematic obscurity for several years, partly due to it having a very limited video release outside of the US.

Cinematographer Gilbert Taylor was prompted to shoot the movie in warm, "golden" colours, to show off the distinctive production design.

In November 2020, Black Hill Pictures and KOCH Media released a newly restored "cinema edition" featuring the 1979 colour version of Dracula on Blu-ray (Region B/2).