Bela Lugosi s performance in this film will always, in my mind, represent the consummate rendition of Dracula. He wasn t good looking by any stretch of my imagination, but he emanated old world sophistication and a kind of reptilian combination of repulsion/compulsion. And those hypnotic eyes! I once heard that he couldn t speak English at the time he was cast in the film and memorized and recited his lines phonetically. That may or may not be true, but he did easily and correctly give you the sense of someone attempting to fit into a culture and time in which he felt very foreign and removed. Others in the vampire genre have certainly been interesting, but this remains for me the classic version of a timeless horror story.