Hammer’s first Dracula adaptation juggles around the basic elements of Bram Stoker’s story and loses Renfield and Dracula’s boat trip to England in the act, but holds up just fine as an entertaining horror tale. Peter Cushing is Van Helsing and Christopher Lee is Count Dracula and that’s all you really need to know. Every other character in the film barely gets anything to do, with the exception of Michael Gough as Arthur Holmwood, portrayed here as Van Helsing’s stuffy sidekick.
As with Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein from the previous year, this film contorts itself like a carnival sideshow performer to avoid having too many parallels to the Universal film from 1931, and it works. For one thing, it’s a paced a lot faster. Cushing’s Van Helsing is a livelier man of action than old coot Edward Van Sloan was and he pretty much owns the film. Christopher Lee plays second fiddle again (he’s got about, oh, six lines of dialogue here), but memorably strikes the screen as a most suave and sexy Count Dracula.
Lee would play Dracula in eight more films. Cushing would play some variation of Van Helsing four more times.