Dracula in Istanbul!

32 Days of Halloween XVII, Day 1
Trailers for Sinners & Nosferatu
Carmilla (1940)

Well, yes, we’re back. Because honestly nobody stepped in to stop me, so when it comes to this–the seventeenth freaking year of 32 Days of Halloween–I blame society. I encourage you to do the same.

Let’s get right down to business because there’s a couple of films coming out over the next few months that I can’t wait to see. They both look amazing. So let’s launch with trailers for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.

So while we started with talking about vampires for Day 1 here, let’s duck back to 1940 and an episode of the Columbia Workshop. This is an adaptation of Carmilla by Lucille Fletcher, who was a hellaciously successful writer back in the day (Wednesday). She wrote “The Hitch-Hiker” radio play for Orson Welles (which later became a Twilight Zone episode) and “Sorry, Wrong Number” (which later became a feature film).

So now it’s time for something around thirty-one perfect different: a Turkish version of Dracula. This was based on a novel which was basically Stoker’s original novel given a few tweaks and translated into Turkish. According to Wikipedia, which is always right, it’s the first sound screen version of the story to show Dracula with fangs. As far as non-English movies, you have the original Nosferatu, the Spanish Dracula that Universal produced, and then this one from 1953. Prior to Nosferatu, there was a rumored Russian silent film in 1920 that may have been just a rumor and a Hungarian film that was released sometime between 1921 and 1923 and has since been lost.

So here is Drakula ?stanbul’da. Now, assuming you know English and not Turkish, you might want to turn on subtitles. There does not seem to be a way to force an embed to show subtitles, otherwise I would turn them on for you.