Original title: Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht

For many years, Jesus Franco’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel was touted as one of the more faithful takes on the novel. And while it’s true that it includes much that has been ignored or skipped over by all other versions, its claims to verisimilitude crumble at even the most cursory of glances. It is, in the end, no more faithful than any other version (the BBC’s 1977 version comes the closest to novel) and although it’s marred by Franco’s usual directorial tics and flourishes (one suspects that damn zoom lens got worn out through overuse), it’s not without interest,

It begins well enough – indeed the first act is rather good. Young London lawyer Jonathan Harker (Frederick Williams) is sent to Transylvania to finalise a property deal for Count Dracula (Christopher Lee). Despite warnings from the locals against continuing his journey, he makes his way to Dracula’s castle but is dropped off at the Borgo Pass by a superstitious coachman and is taken the rest of the way by Count’s own coachman. At the castle, Harker’s suspicions are raised when he sees that Dracula casts no reflection and is soon being menaced by a trio of vampires women who are lured away by Dracula with a baby he offers them to feed on. Harker eventually escapes the castle and return home to England where he finds himself in the care of Dr Van Helsing (Herbert Lom) and Dr Seward (Paul Muller). Initially, no-one believes his talk of vampires but when Lucy (Franco’s ill-fated muse Soledad Miranda), a friend of Harker’s fiancée Mina (Maria Rohm), falls ill, it becomes clear that Dracula has followed Harker back to England…

Lee had high hopes for this version of Dracula but what he ended up appearing in wasn’t at all what he was originally promised. Producer Harry Alan Towers had originally announced that Lee would be joined by Vincent Price as Van Helsing and with Lee’s old Hammer colleague Terence Fisher in the director’s chair. By the time filming began in late 1969, both Price and Fisher were gone – if they were ever actually attached at all – and the film became the last of the series of films that Towers bankrolled for Franco. Towers was able to get Klaus Kinski on board to play Renfield and the supporting cast includes Spanish horror regular Jack Taylor (as Quincey Morris), but this was a long way from the film that Towers originally suggested it would be.

To be fair to Franco, the film starts out well enough, despite the abundance of zooms, the first half hour or so having a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere (the Borgo Pass is seemingly well stocked with a variety of exotic and noisy wildlife) that promises much. Sadly, by the time Harker returns to England, things are starting to fray around the edges and the film eventually wanders very far anything that Stoker wrote. In some prints (there are multiple versions of the film, as was becoming common with Franco’s work) we get a scene of the mother of the stolen baby frantically searching for her child, rarely seen in any other version and unusually, Franco sticks to the notion that the Count starts out old and becomes younger as he drinks blood.

Kinski broods magnificently as a particularly haunted Renfield, but only gets a single word of dialogue, Lee is everything you’d hope and expect him to be, bringing real dignity to a role he was overly-familiar with by this time, clearly relishing the chance to speak some of Stoker’s actual words, and Lom does what he can with Van Helsing, eventually confined to a wheelchair by a stroke, all the better to keep him from having to take part in the finale (Franco himself turns up in one of his usual cameos as the coachman who collects Lucy and Mina from the railway station). And the reason for some of this is very likely that Lee, Kinski and Lom were never actually in the same locations together (they weren’t even in the same countries), a fact that becomes almost comically obvious as the film goes along. It’s been suggested that some care and attention was lavished on the scenes involving Lee but that once he’d finished and returned home, the budget was slashed and getting things done quickly and on the cheap were the orders of the day. Again, it’s all pretty obvious.

Though it keeps much from Stoker usually jettisoned, Franco and Towers, who wrote the script under his usual Peter Welbeck pseudonym, can’t help but add new bits and pieces as and when they feel that they need them, often to the detriment of the film. There’s a stuffed animal attack for example that probably seemed like a nice idea at the time, but when all they could come up with is a taxidermied menagerie being shaken about by just-out-of-shot stagehands, it doesn’t work so well. We don’t get to see the Demeter, there’s a lousy melting face effect at the climax and there’s remarkably little blood anywhere.

All that said, it’s certainly not the worst adaptation of Dracula (you’d have to go a long way to beat the 2006 BBC version or Dario Argento’s misconceived 3D take in 2012 in those stakes) and it’s one of Franco’s more watchable films. It has its moments, particularly in the early stages, but there aren’t really enough of them. You can sense Franco becoming bored with the whole thing (adaptations of classic Gothic literature must have seemed fairly tame compared to his usual work) just as the audience starts to tire of it. It has an interesting score from Bruno Nicolai and a great cast, but Franco was ill-suited to the subject and the result is a missed opportunity, albeit a fitfully interesting one. Its atmospherics high points are somewhat tempered by some shoddy technical moments (very poor day-for-night photography, patently polystyrene rocks being lobbed at gypsies) and a notable lack of any real sense of place. It’s mentioned that Dracula is using his crates to get from Transylvania to England, but Franco is unable – or couldn’t be bothered – to disguise the fact that the film was shot in unmistakably Spanish locations. The making of Count Dracula was documented by Pedro Portabella in Cuadecuc Vampír (1971), a remarkable experimental documentary that manages to be creepier and more atmospheric than its subject.