Astra Film

The film follows the biography of the actor Bela Lugosi from his birth and early childhood in a small Transylvanian town, his early days as an actor when he played Jesus on the stage of the National Theatre in Budapest, and the years of glory after playing Dracula, the “mysterious count of the Carpathians”. He ended up being identified with his character, and never really escaped the Dracula label. Bela Lugosi is introduced in the film by people who knew him: close friends, family, oponents, directors and script writers he worked with (among them Bela Lugosi Jr., director István Szabó, actor Boris Karloff, historian Gary Rhodes). The documentary also investigates the influence of Bela Lugosi’s Transylvanian origin in the process of creating the character that made him famous.