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Dan Curtis took a different approach to portraying villains on film
"Sometimes you actually end up feeling sorry for him."
While Dan Curtis is predominantly known as the creator of the 1966 series Dark Shadows, horror fans are also well familiar with his roles in films like Trilogy of Terror and The Night Stalker. If there's a movie about spooky things that go bump in the night, you can bet that Dan Curtis probably had a hand in it.
But one of the things that Curtis is commended for as a writer, director, and producer, is his depiction of the villain, an icon in the horror genre. While many creators work hard to make their villains as frightening as possible, Dan Curtis tries to provoke a deeper exploration of an antagonist.
In Produced and Directed by Dan Curtis, Mark Dawidziak wrote that Curtis himself confessed, "In most of my horror films, I try to find an additional dimension to the monster. Sometimes you actually end up feeling sorry for him."
Curtis's 1974 adaptation of Dracula is a great example of this. Richard Matheson, who wrote the film, stated, "It aired as a two-hour movie and turned out quite well, I thought, but it was even better at the three hours originally shot. I wrote a script for three hours and Dan shot a three-hour version, but the network would only give us two hours. So Dan had to edit it down. I would have loved to have seen it at three hours. It was the first one that tried to follow the book and the first one to use the Vlad the Impaler material. To this day, I think we came the closest."
Curtis stated, "This is the best Dracula that was ever made. In all my horror films, my monster usually is more than something there to kill people." He continued, "Dracula was an interesting monster because he was an interesting person. You were interested in the code and great past of this noble warrior. Barnabas was always regretful. You certainly felt sorry for Dr. Jekyll." He added, "And I always tried to find ways to put humor in, and that's not easy."
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