![]() ![]() McElwee's full story on the movie's Memphis premiere can be found at greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot. It is available on DVD and Blu-ray, and can be streamed as a rental. "The Brides of Dracula" can be streamed for free on the Peacock and Hitz networks. In 1960, The Commercial Appeal judged the movie "completely ridiculous," while The New York Times described it as "another repetition of the standard tale of the vampire bugaboo who likes to sink his oversized dentures into the necks of pretty girls." But like any good movie monster, "The Brides of Dracula" has outlived the wooden stakes and splashes of holy water tossed by dismissive contemporary critics.ĭirected with bravado and flamboyant Technicolor flourishes by Hammer you-can't-spell-vampire-without-VIP Terence Fisher, "Brides" is a movie that - according to Turner Classic Movies critic Richard Harland Smith - "gallops from start to finish" through "a syllabus rich in necromancy, necrophilia, incest, homoeroticism and all around monsterism." Wrote critic Leonard Maltin: "Dracula never turns up - but you won't miss him." (Yes, the supernatural celebrity name-checked in the title does not appear in the actual film.) This feature carries through to the so-called Brides., the only other. The premiere was a publicity stunt, cooked up by Malco and Universal, the movie's distributor in America and the studio that in 1931 launched the sound horror boom in the first place, with "Dracula" with Bela Lugosi and "Frankenstein" with Boris Karloff.Īn all but forgotten episode in Memphis movie history, the story of the Malco premiere of "The Brides of Dracula" was rediscovered a few years ago by North Carolina film archivist and enthusiast John McElwee, who chronicled the event in-depth on his movie history blog, Greenbriar Picture Shows. Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker presents an uneasy relationship with gender and traditional roles of masculinity and femininity. At the time, the theater was the Malco, the namesake headquarters location of the Malco cinema chain that continues to dominate movie exhibition in the Memphis region. In one of the stranger milestones in the history of the arts in the Mid-South, "The Brides of Dracula" took its first vampiric bow on June 3, 1960, at the Main Street movie palace now known as the Orpheum. Sixty years ago today, the British shocker "The Brides of Dracula," now regarded as a vampire classic, had its world premiere in a city more closely associated with the King of Rock 'n' Roll than with the Prince of Darkness: Memphis.
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