The Goreyist Adaptation of Dracula

Horror moments, Edward Gorey Edition

My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the current series on Edward Gorey here and browse the full back catalogue of horror moments here.

Edward Gorey was no stranger to the stage having produced some bizarre and deliberately-unwatchable plays with the Poet’s Theatre as I described in my first article in this series. Much later in his career, when he had established himself as an illustrator, mainstream theatre came knocking (like a solicitor at a Transylvanian castle door…)

Edward Gorey on set. Photograph by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images.

Gorey loved Dracula. It had been one of his favourite childhood books and he’d apparently read it several times before the age of seven. No surprises that this great illustrator of the gothic and macabre was a monster kid whose early memories were filtered through moonlight and the flurry of bat wings.

Bats and bat-like creatures are a recurring motif in Gorey’s work, including my favourite panels from The Object-Lesson (1958), a surreal take on the Victorian teaching books which used everyday objects to convey clear morals:

But I think the human form of Count Dracula fits just as neatly into Gorey’s crosshatched world, full as it is of sinister aristocrats and dandies with dark intentions. In 1927, two years after Gorey was born, the great Bela Lugosi starred as Dracula in a Broadway play (which had transferred to the US after a 1924 premiere in London.) By 1931, when our precocious Stoker fan had probably just starting his third read-through of the novel, Lugosi starred in Todd Browning’s film adaptation and set in stone many of the tropes we know and love today.

Bela Lugosi and Helen Chandler in Dracula (1931)

Lugosi’s performance drew out the captivating qualities of the vampire but also the inherent campness of the gothic source material. His effete mannerisms, his theatrical delivery, that intense hypnotic stare…it all made for a Dracula who was compelling because of his excess, teetering always between being seductive and silly, looming in and out of some very stage-y set designs with his cape and his oversized candle, saying things like “listen to them! children of the night, what music they make.”

In 1973 a theatremaker called John Wulp decided it was time to revive the stage play that had originated Lugosi’s version of the Count. He acquired the rights and dared to try his luck asking Gorey to design the sets and costumes. To the surprise and delight of everyone involved, the illustrator said yes.

In his biography of Gorey, Born to be Posthumous, Mark Dery describes what made Gorey’s choices so ground-breaking:

“Brilliantly, he conceived the drop curtain, proscenium, and backdrops as blown-up illustrations. By doing so, he put the scenery in knowing quotation marks, renouncing realism for an aestheticism that emphasised the play’s affinities with the gothic novel and Victorian melodrama.” (p.320)

The whole production was like something from one of his picture books. Everything was black and white (with occasional red details, of course) and the living actors moved like cut outs in a cardboard theatre. Incidentally, you can buy your own Gorey Dracula pop-up theatre. I’ve got one and it’s great.

You can tell from his designs that it is the 1931 film that Gorey has at the forefront of his mind, it is Lugosi’s Dracula that he is summoning rather than the more recent Hammer Horror version with Christopher Lee from 1958. He recreates the framing, the silhouettes, the monochrome starkness of the black and white film and, of course, the camp excess. That it all fits so naturally into his usual illustrative style is evidence that Lugosi’s Dracula is a key part of Gorey’s origin story; this is not so much Dracula by way of Gorey, but Gorey’s return to the Dracula that shaped his own artistic world.

When a rival producer tried to manoeuvre Wulp out of the rights for the play in the wake of its extraordinary success, Gorey refused to let his illustrations be used on Broadway by anyone other than Wulp. Since this was the gimmick that had distinguished the production, no Gorey meant no ticket sales: he had leveraged his influence to protect his fellow creatives.

Edward Gorey on set at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1977. Photo by Jack Mitchell.

Oddly enough though, amidst all the praise, Gorey himself wasn’t convinced by his final designs. He was used to seeing the intricate details of his illustrations in their original size and there was something bizarre about having them taken away and distended to enormous proportions. He won a Tony for Best Costume Design, yet described it as ‘the cross I had to bear’ a permanent reminder of a project that had jarred with his usual sensibilities (there’s got to be a vampire/crucifix joke in there somewhere…)

A final footnote to this story is that one of the actors who starred as Dracula against Gorey’s set was the brilliant Raul Julia who is my favourite Gomez Addams. Sherlock Holmes fans will appreciate seeing Jeremy Brett in the same role, both looking like they’re having a whale of a time.

(Left) Raul Julia, photo by Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. (Right) Jeremy Brett, photo by Kenn Duncan, 1978

After this adventure, Gorey shrank back from stage design and returned to his own smaller scale world of weirdness, which is where we will find him next week as we discover how to appease an insect god. Until then, happy nightmares everyone and do check out this version of Dracula ‘freely adapted by Darcy Sullivan’ with the toy replica of Gorey’s set.

Horror moments are published on Thursdays and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.

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