portrayal is widely regarded as the definitive Dracula. Lugosi had a powerful presence and authority on-screen. The slow, deliberate pacing of his performance ("I bid you… welcome!" and "I never drink… wine!") gave his Dracula the air of a walking, talking corpse, which terrified the movie audiences at the time, compelling with no dialogue, and the many close-ups of Lugosi's face in icy silence jumped off the screen. With this mesmerizing performance, Dracula became Bela Lugosi's signature role, his Dracula a cultural icon, and he himself a legend in the classic Universal Horror film series. However, Dracula would ultimately become a role which would prove to be both a blessing and a curse. Despite his earlier stage successes in a variety of roles, from the moment Lugosi donned the cape on screen, it would forever see him typecast as the Count. Browning would go on to direct Lugosi once more in another vampire thriller, Mark of the Vampire, a 1935 remake of Browning's lost silent film London After Midnight (1927) starring Lon Chaney. Also, the film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: 2001: AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills – #85 2003: AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains: Count Dracula – #33 Villain 2005: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes: Count Dracula: "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." – #83 Influence on other notable Draculas The actors who followed in Lugosi's shoes in playing Dracula, and who achieved significant fame in that role, had different attitudes to Lugosi's portrayal. Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in a series of Hammer movies, said: "Anyhow, about the Lugosi Dracula. I was so disappointed. I absolutely had been wanting to see it for a long, long time. There are aspects of it, for instance, that I considered ridiculous. Dracula is played too nice at the beginning. Practically no menace in the character .. There is no shock or fright in it. Lugosi’s hands too ... He held them out stiffly... making him look like a puppet. His smile was not always sinister, either". While thinking that Lugosi was in his younger days a wonderful looking man, who had tremendous presence and personality, Lee also thought that Lugosi "was not the right man to play Dracula from the point of view of nationality. Because Transylvania is in Romania and he was a Hungarian from the town of Lugos, hence his