This is a great movie to use as a measuring stick to see just how much your tastes can change from when you were a kid. I mean, I never thought this movie was fabulous but I must say I did overlook some gaping flaws. My modern self, gives this film a break for the fact that this was made right at the cusp of the start of talkies and they still hadn't gotten very coordinated with using sound in a film. You can also see how this was adapted from a stage play right down to the very acting, which for modern-day movies seems a bit overly dramatic but that was in fact how the director would have wanted it. One of the flaws (or debated flaw) is the scene when Dracula first comes into Mina's bedroom and you see a piece of cardboard sticking against the lampshade. When you see it you are like, WTF is that there for?

Another thing that amuses me about this film is its lack of a score. I mean, this is supposed to be the quintessential, original horror classic and it doesn't even have a score? A horror film without a score is practically an oxymoron by today's standards but the score has been a intricate ingredient to successful horror films for a LONG time. The Shining and Psycho come to mind. But this film has...nothing. I noticed that the old Universal horror classics used the Swan Lake theme in a couple of their films but that's all you get in Dracula. The lack of music in the film is glaringly obvious. So much so that I do believe there are versions out there with either using existing scores from other modern film or writing a new score altogether.

But to me the worst part of the film is the way the story just clunks along. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with the way they pretty much copy and pasted the stage script. I don't like the way it transitions from scene to scene. There is no sense of realism and everything seems to happen one event after another without a proper sense of the passing of time. Even the way the film ends seemed unsmooth and anti-climatic.

But even after saying all this I musta seen the film 20 times. Just watched it today as a matter of fact and no matter how many more mistakes I noticed it with each viewing I still can't bring myself to say its an awful film. I mean, this is Dracula goddamn it!