Dracula

Universal bought the play's rights, not the book's, and the film shows it in every scene. Balderston is credited on the screenplay, Lugosi came straight from the Broadway production, Renfield again makes the journey to Transylvania in Harker's place, and the picture spends most of its running time in rooms because that is where the play had to spend its. This is the film that fixed what a vampire looks like. Evening dress and a Hungarian accent read as Dracula rather than as anything Stoker wrote, and every later vampire film is answering it.

Murnau's film established what a vampire looks like ON SCREEN nine years before Universal's, and it did so as an unlicensed adaptation that Florence Stoker had the courts order destroyed. What survived into 1931 is atmosphere rather than plot: the arrival by ship with a dead crew and a log nobody lived to finish, the castle sequence as a mounting series of wrongnesses, and the idea that the vampire should be filmed as an infestation. Filed MEDIUM. Browning's film is made from the Deane and Balderston play, not from Murnau, and the two are opposite in style; the debt is to what Nosferatu proved a camera could do with the material.

The Universal film, adapted via the 1924 Deane and Balderston stage play rather than straight from the novel, which is why it drops the ship, the asylum sequences and most of the last act. It is the version that fixed the count's evening dress, accent and manner in popular memory, none of which is in the book.