Bela Lugosi 🧛 140 Years (Still Undead)

Bela Lugosi - there was so much more to him than just Dracula. 

Cultpix was at the Marché International du Film Classique (MIFC) in Lyon in October to buy and sell film rights. We had 26 meetings, which will result in lots of great films for Cultpix next year, as well as hanging out with some great friends and colleague, including a lot of film institutes from Central and Eastern Europe. The Poles and the Czechs were super cool, but a special shout-out to the Hungarians, who right there promised us a science-fiction from 1942 that we had spotted last year that they will restore just for us.

It was during MIFC that we congratulated them on one the 140th anniversary of the birth of one Hungary’s greatest ever film exports: Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, better known as Bela Lugosi. And they reciprocated by showing us a clip of the earliest ever known silent film clip with Bela. So that took us down a rabbit hole of discovery about this truly incredible actor.

We have over a dozen Bela Lugosi films already on Cultpix, so we wanted to offer something new and not just a film. This is why we did a daily episode ‘drop’ last month of "The Phantom Creeps" (1939), a 12-part cinema serial where Bela plays a mad inventor planning on releasing an army of robots to rule the world - “It can make me the most powerful man in the world.”

Bela Lugosi controls a giant evil looking robot with remote control on his arm - what could go wrong?

This was shown in cinemas on a weekly basis to get patrons to come back and see what would happen in the next episode. (We also released the 12-part “Radar Men From the Moon” (1952) last month.) The robot that Bela control is so iconic that you might have seen images of it, even if you have not seen the serial. And if that wasn’t enough, this is one of the few times you see Bela with a beard!

To find out more about Bela, we dug deep into the archives (OK, did a search on YouTube) and found some amazing footage of Bela other than his films, including several very funny, interesting and revealing talks that he gave on camera. In this interview Bela talks about being born in Hungary but now being an American, as well as how playing Dracula depresses him.

He had to leave post-war Hungary for starting an actors' union and remained politically active, but also an American patriot. Here is a short clip where he is encouraging people to donate blood during World War Two. Yet because of his accent he not only played Central European bloodsuckers but also Nazis, for example in "Black Dragons" (1941), a quickie thriller in the style of "The Manchurian Candidate" that is one of the best and most interesting films of his on Cultpix.

Sexy and suave - why Bela Lugosi will always be the ultimate Dracula. 

Bela newer won an Oscar but he did win recognition as "one of the finest actors to come out of Europe," in this 1951 interview, where he talks about being typecast and the kind of roles he had back in Hungary. Later he gave this very candid interview after he was in rehab in 1955 to deal with opioid and alcohol addiction. Yet his son Bela George Lugosi Jr has spoken about addiction being “the biggest misconception about his father” and a “focus on negative aspects” of his life.

Part of the reason for this misconception about him is Tim Burton's film "Ed Wood" (1994), which imagines how Ed Wood first met Bela Lugosi in this scene. Johnny Depp's Ed Wood is in awe of Bela, though he himself feels he is a has-been. “Now, no one gives two fucks for Bela.” In this clip Martin Landau discusses the process of becoming Bela, a role that won him an Oscar, and his admiration for him. “In junk movies he was BRILLIANT." Even the cameo in what became his last film “Plan 9 From Outer Space” (1959) there is still that unmistakable… Bela about him.

Although he was typically type cast as vampire or ghoul, Bela did get to play comedy in one of our favourite films, “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla” (1951), with nightclub comedians Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo in roles approximating Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. (It is one of the films you can watch for FREE.) While he has great comedic timing, you can also tell that Bela had great dignity even in a silly comedy such as this. And he never, ever, phones in a performance, but gave it his all. Search out his films on Cultpix and enjoy a great actor.

We end the Cultpix Radio podcast about Bela with up with a mashup of the classic punk-goth song “Bela Lugosi's Dead”, both the original Bauhaus version and the loungey Nouvelle Vague version and the live version by Massive Attack.

Bela Lugosi enjoying a more refreshing type of drink.