Dracula Lives (7 page)

“Your shooting schedule certainly doesn’t leave any margin for error,” Quinn said. “Minutes are going to count. Which means the sooner we get started with the tour, the sooner I can give your proposal my full consideration.”

“Fair enough. We will begin by screening Lon’s short. It is a vital link in the chain of events that have led to my Dracula obsession.”

He started to rise but stopped, again fixing his guest with his Dracula stare. Quinn stared back, fascinated, as he watched Markov almost imperceptibly transform himself into a stand-in for Lugosi.

I am not an impressionist. I am a re-creationist.

In his uncanny imitation of the actor’s distinctive voice, Markov recited another of Dracula’s lines to Renfield: “I trust you have kept your comink here a secret.”

Quinn played along and gave him Renfield’s slightly effeminate response. “I followed your instructions implicitly.”

Markov picked up his cue. “Excellent, Mr. Quinn. Excellent.”

He stood and beckoned for his guest to follow. As they exited the study, Markov spoke in his own voice. “Now I will show you the Dracula that never was.”

Markov’s screening room was a large modern theater that rivaled any state-of-the-art multiplex at a mall. Its sense of spaciousness was enhanced by a floor plan that was more square than the typical rectangular design.

“I don’t like long narrow rooms,” Markov said. “They feel claustrophobic.”

Quinn caught the obvious implication—that he shared Dracula’s aversion to being enclosed in coffinlike spaces—but dismissed it as another example of his movie-influenced flair for melodrama. Instead Quinn focused on the details of the nicest home theater he had ever seen.

Everything looked new. Plush carpet covered the floor and walls, no doubt to enhance the acoustics. Several speakers embedded along each side wall meant surround sound. The floor was empty, save for two leather recliners on either side of a low table, about two-thirds of the way back from the screen. “Many more seats can be added when necessary,” Markov said, “but … it has seldom been necessary.” He gestured toward the rear of the theater. “First we must get our refreshments. No matter how dark life becomes, it can always be brightened with popcorn.”

“Amen to that,” Quinn said, following him to a small, fully-stocked refreshment counter. Several kinds of movie candy were neatly arrayed in a glass case, behind which gleamed a soda dispenser. Markov started a popcorn machine. “It will only take a few minutes. Help yourself to some candy and soda while I set things up.”

Markov disappeared up a carpeted stairway behind the counter.

Quinn poured himself a large Coke and got a box of Sno-Caps. Popcorn never seemed to smell as good as when it was popping at the movies, and that smell hit him full force now. It triggered a sense memory of all those Saturdays when he was a kid, happily munching popcorn and candy while watching monsters stomp through cities and eat people.

Markov reappeared and went straight to the popcorn machine, which had just finished popping. “Butter?”

“Of course.”

Markov filled two large tubs, then got a soda and a box of Raisinets for himself. He led the way to the seating area and took the recliner on the right. A black console attached to the floor beside it had several buttons on top. “My control panel,” he said.

“You can start the film from here?”

Markov nodded.

“Won’t you still have to get up to start the projector?”

“No. I have digitally remastered my film library onto Blu-ray discs.”

“You mentioned Morbius from
Forbidden Planet
in one of your e-mails. Apparently you share Morbius’s genius for technology.”

Markov waved away the compliment. “Mere child’s play, as Morbius said about having ‘tinkered’ Robby the Robot together.”

When they were settled into their seats, Markov gave a brief introduction.

“Lon made this during the shooting of
London After Midnight.
He shot it on one of the sets after everyone had gone home. He and Tod had long wanted to do
Dracula.
They had been very impressed by Murnau’s unauthorized version—
Nosferatu
.”

So were you,
Quinn thought.
You changed your name to Schreck and named your son Max. And your belief in destiny….
Had he adopted that belief after watching
Nosferatu
? At the very beginning of the film, Harker is accosted by a man who tells him he cannot escape his destiny by running away….

“Max Schreck is unquestionably the creepiest Dracula,” Quinn said.

“Unquestionably. Tod and Lon wanted to make their version of Dracula much creepier, but since they couldn’t get the rights,
London After Midnight
was their rather watered-down attempt to do as much of it as they could get away with without getting sued. Lon’s sawtoothed vampire had scared people to death, but he wanted to come up with something that would outdo Schreck’s Nosferatu.”

“A tall order.”

“Indeed, but the Man of a Thousand Faces was the man for the job.” His hand went to his control panel. “Judge for yourself. This short was Lon working out some of his ideas to show Tod and the Laemmles, in case they ever got those rights. Without further ado, then.” He stabbed a button and the house lights went out.

As they stared at the black screen, a single shivery violin tremolo created an air of creeping menace. The opening titles slowly materialized, indistinguishable at first until they became stark white lettering on the black background:

Sound?

The first talkie,
The Jazz Singer
, had come out just before
London After Midnight
, but Browning’s film had been silent. And it couldn’t have been an accident that Chaney used Bram Stoker’s original title for
Dracula
. Chaney was known for thorough research that always included reading the literary sources for his projects, if there was one.

The title faded in on an opening shot of Chaney sitting in a director’s chair, smiling for the camera. Quinn had been prepared by the “Sound” credit, but it was still startling when Chaney opened his mouth and spoke with a mysterious-sounding, Eastern European accent that hinted at British:

“I am Lon Chaney. I bid you welcome.”

A sweeping hand gesture invited the viewer in. That shot dissolved into a long shot of a man in a cape with his back to the camera. He stood in the center of the study of the haunted estate from
London After Midnight
. Beside him, a wine glass half-filled with dark liquid sat on a table.

The man slowly began turning his head at the same time that the camera crept in for a close-up. When the face reached profile, the camera was still too far away to pick up any detail, but it was close enough to see that the face was deathly pale.

A sound like a groan of evil erupted from the speakers—the single sustained note of a cello. In the same instant, the man’s head whipped full front and the camera shot forward until his face filled the screen.

Quinn flinched and felt his heart pounding. After the initial jolt, the full horror of the face burrowed into him.

Chaney’s Dracula was more hideous than Max Schreck’s Nosferatu. Chaney had concocted a makeup that showed the putrid decay of death that lay just beneath a ghastly veneer of life. His vampire brilliantly captured the idea of a demonic creature from the netherworld between the living and the dead.

Bits of bone were visible under skin that looked thin and taut, as if unable to regenerate itself enough to completely cover the skull. Swollen veins zigzagged along each temple and both sides of the neck. He had taken the goggle-eyed effect from
London After Midnight
much further.

Rather than applying the dark circles around the eyes that had become the stereotype for movie monstrosities, he had encircled them with orbits of bone, creating an effect of eyes staring from the empty sockets of a decomposed corpse. Beyond the mesmeric pull of the stare was a bloodless face, whose furrows and wrinkles had been darkened into an expression of jaded contempt. The thin black lips formed into a sardonic smile. They parted to reveal a set of teeth that, in such a hideous decaying face, were jarring in their perfection. He held this grin while the camera pulled back to reveal his hands, folded across his chest in the manner of a corpse.

Like Nosferatu, he had made the fingers long. But unlike Nosferatu’s rotting clawlike fingernails, Chaney’s were polished black and perfectly manicured into long points. Still grinning, he drummed his fingertips playfully against his chest to showcase the fingers, then lifted a hand and pointed toward his mouth.

Two fangs suddenly popped down—curved white needles like the fangs of a snake. He moved his finger to point directly at the camera.

“You, who try to steal what is left of my soul with your magic box. Come here.”

He beckoned with the finger.

The camera began shakily advancing. It stopped and steadied several feet short of Chaney and waited. “Leave your magic box behind,” he said. “I have an earth box that will give you a much more satisfying immortality than your little picture show. Come.” He beckoned again.

The camera jiggled slightly but kept running from the same spot. Seconds later the cameraman came into the shot, facing Chaney, back to the camera.

“Ah,” Chaney said to the figure, who was dressed in a cape. “I see you are already one of us. Good. A cameraman who can help me steal the souls of the living. Show the audience the eyes through which they will watch our race take over.”

The cameraman moved to stand beside Chaney, then spun around.

He was the sawtoothed vampire from
London After Midnight
.

Chaney put an arm around the man’s shoulders, then beckoned for the camera to come closer. It moved in until the two hideous faces filled the screen like masks from the Grand Guignol. The camera held on that disturbing image for several seconds, then inched ever closer until only their hypnotic eyes filled the screen. An iris fade-out began, stopping to hold on the demonic stares. In a blink the iris closed, the screen went black, and the evil cello note burst from the speakers. An instant later the final title came on:

Markov brought up the house lights and waited.

“Brilliant,” Quinn said. “Much creepier than Nosferatu. I think it’s the best makeup Chaney ever did. Scarier than his Phantom of the Opera, and that’s saying something. The scene where the Phantom was unveiled is one of the scariest moments in film history.”

“I know. I was at the premiere. You could hear thumping throughout the theater as kids flung themselves to the floor. Some people even fled the theater.”

A thrill coursed through Quinn. Markov’s statement reminded him that he was talking to the only living eyewitness to many of the pivotal moments in the history of horror cinema.

“Chaney’s Dracula would have been groundbreaking,” Quinn said. “The camera work was very sophisticated. Especially that lightning fast camera movement into a close-up of Chaney’s face.”

Pride brightened Markov’s somber visage. “I was the cameraman. Until the last moment when Tod took over so I could get into the shot.”

“That was you?”

“Yes. As I said, I was often Lon’s stand-in.”

“Very effective. In fact, the whole film was doing things that would have been groundbreaking. Sound, of course. Using those sudden musical notes to heighten the shocks. The dialogue was impressive as well. Very sophisticated. Chaney was a good writer. Those had to be the first words he ever spoke on-screen.”

“They were.”

“How did he make those fangs pop down?”

“He had them fitted onto a spring mechanism that retracted up close to the roof of his mouth. When the time came he would slip his tongue over the mechanism and press until the spring kicked in, and the teeth would pop down.”

“Way ahead of its time in depicting vampire fangs.”

“Chaney was way ahead of his time in many ways,” Markov said. “The way he immersed himself in his characters, he was essentially a method actor long before anyone had heard of such a thing. I worked with some greats.”

“You did indeed.”

“I can regale you with some of those stories later,” he said. “Now we must move to my studio. In the old days studios were called ‘dream factories.’ Mine is a nightmare factory. The place where I make my monsters.”

“Your luh-BORE-uh-tree?”

Markov didn’t smile. “Indeed.”

The flickering gaslights created a jittery shadow dance as the two men headed down the long corridor. Holding a candle lantern in front of them for added illumination in the gloomy passage, Markov led the way.

They hadn’t gone far when they came to an elaborately carved wooden door on the left. “The entrance to your bedchamber,” Markov said without slowing. A short distance beyond the door, they reached a corner where the corridor they were on intersected with another that ran to the right. Quinn stopped when he saw what was standing on a pedestal in the corner.

Shrouded in a black cowl, a grinning skeleton holding a scythe in one hand and brandishing a crucifix in the other stared from eyeless sockets.

Markov held the light closer to the figure. “One of my most prized pieces from my collection of movie memorabilia.” The strobe effect of the candlelight animated the lifeless skull.

Quinn searched the film archives in his brain for which movie this would have come from. “Is this from the opening cemetery sequence in
Frankenstein
?”

“The very same.”

“But Browning didn’t direct that. James Whale did. I would think each set would have been closely guarded.”

“They were. I didn’t take it from the set. I got it years later at an auction. I paid a king’s ransom for it, but I had to have it.”

Still holding the light in front of the skull, he said, “All of my set decorations are placed with a particular thought in mind. I added the scythe, meaning to suggest the Grim Reaper. The idea behind placing him at this intersection is that he is poised at the threshold between the living and the dead, waiting for new souls to harvest.”