Blood IS the life!, 31 December 2004 Author: Hal-900 from WA, USA The vampire film that established the ideas that countless of subsequent films will try to explore. I consider the film groundbreaking and influential, but a vocal minority seems to disagree with my statement. I honestly think these people have misunderstood the movie. Some viewers complain about the film's slowness and strange, interminable pauses, but I have always taken these "deficiencies" as the strongest assets of the film. I don't really find Browning's direction lacking in terms of imagination, I feel that the director adapted (brilliantly) the tempo of the film to his star's enigmatic performance. Bela Lugosi's malignant aristocratic persona, is a truly odd fiend. The way he walks, his strange mannerisms, his slow speech pattern, they all contribute to make him a unique presence among the group of actors he is performing with. Browning seems to have adjusted the film around Lugosi's peculiar acting choices and the immediate result of this approach is that one feels Dracula's presence even when he is absent from the screen - character and story have become one thing. After all, this is a story where the main character has a limited amount of scenes and lines, so it is interesting that throughout the film, we cannot get out of our heads the creepy feeling that Dracula is somewhere hidden, looking at us. I think this film is more than a milestone in the horror genre, it is an effective machine of pure horror that none of the subsequent versions of the story have been able to surpass.