Moving away from the lustful, unrepentantly malevolent vampire of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, Frank Langella’s Dracula is more romantic, more sensual, and more contemporary in artifice, sporting an opened shirt, less formal aristocratic dress that mixes perfectly into the pretty-look sensibilities of the late 1970s into the 1980s. With Laurence Olivier and Donald Pleasance, John Badham’s approach is classy and more gothic teen heart-throb in tone and mood, like Twilight before Twilight, and without werewolves.
This pressbook, courtesy of It Came From Hollywood, is even less formal. By the late 70s, the art of the pressbook had lessened, providing a minimum of promotional information. One cool item here, though, are the cut-out forms to order radio and television spots for the movie. With a minimum of newspaper ads to order, and the Promotion page that directs to “the Universal fieldman in your local area” to request the Promotion Manual, one can see the shift away from the ballyhoo and exploitation that was previously more theater-focused as given in the pressbook. Now radio, and television especially, were the stronger mediums through which movie promotion could be conducted on a larger scale.
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