Bela Lugosi and Dracula are inseparable images from the heyday of Hollywood. More than any other actor in film history, Lugosi is the master of the macabre, the king of the vampires, and the cult hero of horror movies. And yet he was also a man who fought in wars and revolutions, who married five times, and who mastered stagecraft and film arts in Hungary, Germany, and the United States. He remained an enigma in Hollywood even as his career dwindled into the weird worlds of drug abuse and filmmaker Ed Wood. Lugosi’s fusion with the famed vampire became more permanent than ever when he was buried in his Dracula cape in 1956. LUGOSI: HOLLYWOOD’S DRACULA unravels the truth behind the legendary star by interweaving rare film footage from 1918-1956, home movies, and previously-unseen photographs with narration by Lugosi costar Robert Clarke and Lugosi fan Rue McClanahan. Numerous on-camera interviews span family members like his son and widow, Academy Award-winning director Robert Wise, legendary film producer Howard W. Koch, and a host of Lugosi’s costars and personal friends.
The film has won awards and accolades at film festivals and theatrical screenings across the globe. Film historian Michael H. Price, author of FORGOTTEN HORRORS, has proclaimed that "Gary Rhodes’s LUGOSI: HOLLYWOOD’S DRACULA is the first life-story to give Lugosi his generous due, to treat Lugosi as something greater than a martyr, and to mingle an academic thoroughness with an unabashed enthusiasm towards its troubled and majestic subject."
