Dracula (1958) aka Horror of Dracula, directed by Terence Fisher, BFI restoration, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original theatrical stereo, commentary track, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051554/

Video encoded in two-pass 10 000 kbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English subtitles OCRed, proofed and corrected.

Note : After a slump in the Dracula business throughout the late 40s and most of the 50s, Hammer Films and Christopher Lee brought him back in style in 1958 with this adaptation, which drops the slow-moving talky style of the original Universal film for a more action-oriented approach, but also significantly alters the plot, making Jonathan Harker a vampire hunter working with Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) from the start, completely cutting characters like Renfield, and setting the whole thing in a small area in Central Europe. The result is a brisk-moving affair that's more exciting than previous adaptations, but is strangely coy about using its main asset, Christopher Lee's menacing, sexy count.

The story is familiar, but compressed and changed, Jonathan Harker comes to Dracula's castle ostensibly to work as a librarian, but really wants to kill Dracula, he succeeds in killing Dracula's bride, but is himself killed in turn, and his colleague Van Helsing, who turns up to look for him, has to stake matters into his own hands. Harker was engaged to Lucy, who is now ill anemia, which turns out to be the result of Dracula's predations, when she dies, it falls to Van Helsing to protect Mina, her sister in law, and try to end Dracula once and for all.

This BFI remaster is fairly good looking, reasonably clean, although I could have wished for a slightly sharper image, as well as a bit more saturation. Commentary track is a little dry, but informative.

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