The day Dracula came to Memphis
Sixty years ago this month, 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.
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. 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.
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.
An 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.
“Three thousand patrons, most of them teenagers, lined the block around Main and Beale Street, then jammed the house to capacity,” Mcelwee reported.
Memphis was chosen for this premiere after a Malco lobbying campaign and as a reward for Malco’s diligence in promoting past Universal horror movies with marketing gimmicks cooked up by Malco head Richard Lightman and — most notably — company advertising director Watson Davis, Malco’s master of ballyhoo.
A balding, unassuming-looking man, Davis two years later would become one of the city’s most beloved if scarier celebrities when he transformed himself weekly into “Sivad, your Monster of Ceremonies,” the host of the WHBQ-TV horror movie program “Fantastic Features,” which ran until 1972. (“Sivad” was “Davis” spelled backward.)
No Hammer horror stalwarts attended the premiere, but Watson arranged for the arrival of an antique hearse (much like the one he would drive at the start of each episode of “Fantastic Features”), and Malco workers dressed as
Dracula and his brides. “Graveyard dirt” and “do-it-yourself vampire kits” were sold in the lobby, alongside popcorn and soft drinks.
The movie opened in England about a month after its Memphis debut, on July 7. It began its U.S. theatrical run on Sept. 5.
The Memphis premiere of “The Brides of Dracula” might not be worth remembering as more than a footnote or a trivia question if not for the fact that “Brides” is now considered a masterpiece of its type.
One of the more successful movies produced by Hammer, England’s famed horror studio of the 1950s through the 1970s, “Brides” is a Freudian fairy tale in which a beautiful young French schoolteacher (Yvonne Monlaur) frees a fey blonde bloodsucker of a baron (David Peel) from the umbilical cord-like silver chain that has kept him a captive in his mother’s chateau.
Naturally (or unnaturally), much biting ensues (the mother is the first to go), until a climactic confrontation in a windmill between the vampires and the heroic exterminator of the undead, Dr. Van Helsing, played for the second time by Hammer stalwart and future “Star Wars” villain Peter Cushing. (Incidentally, both of the movie’s vampire “brides” have died within the past halfyear: Andrée Melly, 87, on Jan. 31, and