Ninety years ago, two groundbreaking horror movies were made: Lugosi’s official chiller and a covert version – which might just be its superior
They came under the shadow of darkness – quite literally. Just as Dracula star Bela Lugosi was no doubt being tucked up for the night, director George Melford, cast and crew made their way on to the Universal studio lot in 1931 to shoot a Spanish-language version of the Bram Stoker 1897 horror novel, filmed using the same sets and costumes as the much more familiar Tod Browning masterwork.
Melford’s production of Dracula was what is known as a multiple-language version – AKA MLV – which was one method by which the recently developed sound “talkie” aimed to reach non-English speaking audiences. Initiated by the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer – which featured 15-minutes of synchronised singing and talking – producers created prints in which dialogue was replaced with music and foreign inter-titles – the “international sound version” – but this became quickly obsolete and close to extinction by 1931. Instead, producers began to make entirely new versions of the same film: Paramount Pictures’ Paramount on Parade, directed by Edmund Goulding and released in 1930, saw 13 different releases, with Czech, French, Dutch, Hungarian, German, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Polish, Serbian, Swedish and Spanish as well as English. But the MLV was expensive, and could rarely escape the perception that they were lesser productions.
