le another man stabs him through the chest with another knife. The long but very necessary chase that builds to this climax would be rather tedious in a film version, and the effects would be expensive and hard to translate to the screen. Therefore, this ending is completely omitted in every film version.
In Nosferatu, the first movie version of the novel, the director added something to the already abundant vampire folklore with his version of the destruction of Dracula. In this version, a woman must freely give her blood to the vampire and stay with him until the coming of the dawn. In the film, the first rays of the sun entering through the window turn the horrible creature into a wisp of smoke and flame. This addition to the legend has become standard in movies and stories (Glut 106), but Dracula moves about freely in the daylight hours in Bram Stoker's novel. He loses the power to transform himself, but he is not destroyed by the sun. Still, in both The Horror of Dracula and Dracula (1979), the king of the vampires is destroyed by sunlight. In the anti climactic finish to the 1931 version, Van Helsing comes upon Dracula as he is sleeping unprotected in his coffin. Van Helsing drives a stake through Dracula's heart and the movie ends. All these films claimed to be based on Bram Stoker's novel, but it is obvious that they were only very loosely based on the novel.
The three films after Nosferatu, with audible dialogue, all contain very dramatic and important direct confrontations between Professor Van Helsing, the first to deduce Dracula's true identity, and Dracula himself. This confrontation is very similar in the 1931 and 1979 versions. The two contain some of the same critical lines. In the film made in 1931, Dracula says, "For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Van Helsing" (Dracula 1931). The line is almost indistinguishable from a line in the 1979 version that was obviously borrowed from ...