A Film Canon

 

 

Dracula initates the Universal Horror cycle in its systematic engagement with the 'return of the repressed' as a supernatural, historical and sexual phenomenon. To this end, Browning emphasises the incongruity of the vampire to a much greater extent than occurs in German Expressionism, mainly by encouraging Lugosi to adopt an acting style that is itself too supernaturally and sexually hyperbolic - or, in a word, too historic - for the sound medium. This ruptures an otherwise naturalistic aesthetic, revealing that the natural world, received history and conventional sexuality are inherently uncanny, as evinced in Browning's use of pans and tracking shots to emphasise the reality and continuity of a space that is fundamentally unreal - Dracula's castle, here figured as a kind of nascent haunted house, replete with mirrors and spiderwebs. It also explains the pervasiveness of the insane asylum which, like the circus in Browning's previous films, both represents a space in which people rehearse and repeat everyday behaviours so as to render them strange, and emphasises the contemporaneity of the action, to the extent that it feels as if the real return is ultimately not of a supernatural, sexual or historical phenomenon, nor of a primitive form of silent acting, but of the entire pre-Freudian world, such that Browning is cannily able to use the logic of psychoanalysis against itself, exploiting its disturbing magnitude while neglecting its particular conclusions. Hence the panoramic, ambiguous gaze of Lugosi - and the degree to which Browning prioritises bulging eyes in his symptomatology of vampirism - as well as the anxiety about discourse itself, encapsulated in a series of prototypical, self-defeating discussions about the proper objects of 'science'.