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.

The first authorized adaptation of the novel, and the reason there was one at all: Florence Stoker had just sued Nosferatu out of existence for adapting her husband's book without permission, and Hamilton Deane's play is what she licensed instead. It toured England from 1924 and reached the Little Theatre in London in July 1927. What Deane did to the novel is most of what later audiences think Dracula is:

• The epistolary structure goes, and with it the sense of a story assembled from documents by people who never quite see the whole
• Transylvania goes, along with roughly the book's entire second half
• Renfield rather than Jonathan Harker is the one who made the journey, so the asylum becomes the centre of the plot instead of a subplot
• The Count acquires evening dress and drawing-room manners, because one set and a cast of nine is what a touring production could carry

John L. Balderston rewrote it for Broadway in 1927, where the Count was played by Bela Lugosi in his first major English-speaking role.