Call it the Anti-Twilight double bill. Creepy Classics returns on Thursday, Dec. 3 with Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) at 7 p.m., followed at 9 p.m. by a contemporary retelling of the Victorian tale with Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Bela Lugosi’s performance as the Transylvanian count helped usher Universal’s horror films into the sound era. Several movies followed: Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Bride of Frankenstein and Werewolf of London. But by 1937, partly due to a British ban on the genre, horror films were on their way out, and type-cast Lugosi was desperate for work. In 1938, a shot in the arm came from the struggling Regina Theatre in Los Angeles. It ran a round-the-clock triple bill of Dracula, Frankenstein and RKO’s Son of Kong, which, according to Greg Mank in his book Bela Lugosi & Boris Karloff, became an overnight success. Universal jumped on the bandwagon by nationally circulating newly minted prints of their films and returned to horror productions with Son of Frankenstein, featuring both Karloff as the Monster and Lugosi as the hunchback Ygor – a role he later claimed as his favourite. In Toronto, Son ran as a Saturday matinee to a new generation of young horror lovers. But these kids would be the last to see the thrills of Universal’s original canon of Monster movies on the big screen. The films would meet a new audience on television in the 1950s and Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland publication would keep kids thirsty for more. Soon, they could assemble plastic model kits of their favourite monsters while condensed “digests” of Universal’s films could be screened on home projectors. Nowadays, Universal’s Classic Horror films are rarely shown in theatres. We know about them, thanks to home video or for some – myself included– late-night television (believe it or not, at midnight on the CBC). For their original audience, though, these films were released at a time when the word “horror’” wasn’t yet in the Hollywood lexicon. The local press referred to Browning’s film as a “sensational mystery thriller.” Although the film’s content might amuse rather than terrify us now, the Tivoli Theatre’s management thought Dracula was no laughing matter when their ads claimed: “No children’s prices – Dracula is a picture for the adult mind only!” For the Creepy Classics audience, we offer a pre-Twilight sparkle-free vampire guarantee. R Thursday’s screening of Dracula will be preceded by a 16mm preshow featuring mummies and swashbuckling vampire killers! Our repeat screening on Saturday, Dec 5 will be a double-feature including another Lugosi film, The Return of Chandu.