Sign of the Times - The Return of Dracula (1967)

Last time around we spent some time exploring the 1975 American Sign Language movie Deafula, whose director, writer and star Peter Wolf created a version of Dracula that resonated with the D/deaf community in the US. While voiced over later, the original version was silent and designed entirely for ASL speakers.

That might sound pretty ahead of its time, but if we go back another eight years a British director was even more revolutionary – and that’s Stephen Pink, director and star of 1967’s The Return of Dracula.

By comparison to Deafula, there’s a lot less in the public domain on The Return of Dracula, which makes finding the details that bit harder. Pink spent two years from 1965 to 1967 making the movie, which was shot on 8mm film. His role effectively took in everything – not just directing and acting but also making props, set-building and more. The one thing he didn’t have was a fog machine – so all the misty shots throughout the film were taken one foggy night to catch the right sort of atmosphere for the film.

This was the first feature film ever shot entirely in BSL, which makes it even more pioneering than its later US counterpart. The movie was screened extensively in D/deaf clubs at its time, with screenings reported to have cost half a crown, which for those of us far more used to decimalisation was about an eighth of a pound.

While Pink was much hailed within the D/deaf community as a pioneer, his final TV appearance was in a 2013 documentary for BBC’s BSL Zone entitled Who Cares? The show looked at the care situation of elderly members of the D/deaf community, and even though Dracula didn't come up in conversation, the importance of being around fellow D/deaf people was very apparent in Pink’s thought process as he looked for a retirement home. Even here, at the age of eighty-eight, those matters of pride and identity are clearly visible within the documentary.

Pink may not be well-known outside of that community, but his contribution to D/deaf culture is certainly acknowledged – he was featured with a profile in a special episode of Wicked, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Remark! Film and TV Awards in 2009, a fine way to cement his legacy.

Finding a copy of The Return of Dracula to watch has not been an easy task – not helped by the existence of the 1958 US feature The Return of Dracula directed by Paul Landres dominating so many searches – so while I would love to reflect more on the movie itself, that remains a challenge until I can see it for myself! All the accounts describe it as being in the Hammer vein, which sounds plenty appealing to me. 

So for now the search goes on for now, and I hope to be able to come back at some point in this blog to tell you more in time! After all, that’s the nature of research projects like ours…