Fort Stockton Film Society Presents Dracula (Spanish-language)

Monday, October 31, 7 pm (doors open at 6:30 pm)
Nelson Street Theatre 102 S Nelson Street

Admission is free, donations are gladly accepted.

Dracula is a 1931 American horror film directed by George Melford. The film is based on both the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker and the play Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. The film is about Renfield (Pablo Alvarez Rubio), who travels to Translyvania to visit Count Dracula (Carlos Villarías). He is drugged by the Count and becomes his minion. The two travel to England, where Dracula begins to seduce Lucy Westenra (Carmen Guerrero) as she becomes his first victim. This leads to Professor Van Helsing (Eduardo Arozamena) to investigate, who confirms that Count Dracula is a vampire.

Dracula was made as part of Hollywood studios’ attempts to make films for foreign-language audiences. By 1930, Universal had focused primarily on developing Spanish-language films for the foreign market. Filming began on October 10, 1930 where it was shot on the same sets as Tod Browning’s production of Dracula. Director Melford watched the footage of the same day and applied what he saw to film his own version.

The film was released in Cuba in 1931 and for a long time was forgotten, only mentioned briefly by some horror film historians in the 1960s and 1970s. It received greater attention after a print for the film was found in New Jersey. A screening at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978 led to a popular home video release on VHS in 1992. Critical reception to this film often compared the two versions of Dracula with some critics weighing the pros and cons of both based on the explicitness of the Spanish version with its costumes and scenes, the film’s length, and the performance of Carlos Villarías as Count Dracula. In 2015, Dracula was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.