Today marks the 139th anniversary of the birth of Bela Lugosi – the world-famous actor who first portrayed Dracula on film, and was thereafter forever immortalised as the Count. In an era when not only horror stardom but also the very nature of popular culture has changed beyond recognition, what does a figure like Lugosi actually represent to us? What makes Bela so compelling and interesting when many of his contemporaries are not?
In many ways, Lugosi is a unique figure in popular culture – a life which spanned the pre-modern, modern and postmodern eras. Certainly, no other actor in the horror industry (with the possible exception of Vincent Price) was able to feed back into their own image and create for it a vital life of its own. By the time of his death Lugosi has begun to see the beginnings of the feedback loop between classic horror and youth culture, a loop which has as yet never ended – all the more compelling for a life that began before youth culture was even created. For all his fame for his portrayal of a character with distant roots with Byron and the Shellys at Villa Diodati, Lugosi ended up as one of the most complete cultural icons of the confusing, shallow, thrilling twentieth century.
Lugosi was born Bela Blasko in 1882 in Austro-Hungary – a name that no longer exists, from a country that no longer exists. His hometown of Lugos was a Hungarian town in Transylvania, a region in rigidly hierarchical Hungary within the Dual Monarchy, and he was born just a few short years after the Compromise that created it. This was a conservative, absolutist, mostly pre-industrial society that was about to meet – and comprehensively fail – the challenges of modernity; by the end of WW1 Austro-Hungary would cease to exist, and when Lugosi finished his military service and travelled to Budapest, his hometown would be called Lugoj and lay within Romania. This was the first of three exiles that would mark Lugosi’s life and career – the young Bela effectively leaving his name, nation, and early life in pre-modern Hungary behind.
When in Budapest he not only embraced the stratified, formal environment of the National Theatre – one of the most prestigious creative platforms in a country that took the theatre extremely seriously – but also the great political struggles of the era. Unionising the actors and committing himself to the fight for worker’s liberation, he became a figure in the brief Communist regime of Bela Kun – professional acting and professional revolutionary, the twin sides of his latent passion. But just as quickly as his red star rose, it fell – the crushing of the Budapest Soviet leading to the purges and terror from what would become Hungary’s proto-fascist regime, and in 1919 Lugosi began his second exile away as a political refugee. It was therefore a twice-rootless figure who arrived in New Orleans in 1920 to begin his American career.
Lugosi’s eventual identification with the role of Dracula was not only based on the purely practical – being there at the right time for the 1927 Broadway production and 1931 Universal movie – but also the more profound; both were Transylvanian, both fugitives, both out of their time. His strikingly formal, sleek, hypnotic portrayal of the Count was the first iconic horror performance of the talkie era, and became one of the most recognisable images in 20th century history. This had an initially devastating impact on Lugosi’s career, as the horror industry in 1930s Hollywood worked on an aspirational (some might say elitist) basis that soon left him behind, beginning his third and final exile – from the mainstream. The final 20 years of his career – that of drug addiction, divorce, rehab, debt, and decline – are indeed a sad tale of a talent discarded too early.
However, through his dogged and desperate clinging to the Count’s tailcoat Lugosi began something else entirely. His reprisals of the trope of the role (in ‘Mark of the Vampire’, ‘Return of the Vampire’, ‘Scared to Death’, and most obviously in ‘Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein’) built the Lugosi brand at the same time as re-creating Dracula as one of the first memes of popular culture. He may have died creating absolute schlock with Ed Wood, but by that point the whole edifice of the horror industry – cameo, pastiche, camp, tribute, parody – were in place. Lugosi was effectively parodying himself, and died with not just his cloak on but with one foot in the post-modern culture of today.
Few people – no one else, probably – had a life that encompassed Emperor Franz Josef, Lenin, and Vampira in equal measure, and in Lugosi’s life we see an equality of substance (activist, union organiser, anti-fascist) and insubstance (vampire, monster man) that is unique amongst the horror pantheon.
Voodoo Diplomacy 