Throwback Thursday: Tod Browning, the Kentuckian who directed Dracula and filmmaker equal to Edgar Allan Poe

In October 2022, the Warren County Public Library hosted an evening with Dacre Stoker at the
Capitol, the nearest living relative of the man who wrote Dracula. We told the real story behind
the Count, one of horror’s oldest villains. This week, we tell the story of Tod Browning, the
Louisville native who directed the 1931 Dracula, the first ever and most famous Dracula film,
starring Bela Lugosi. Tod Browning was one of the most famous vaudeville, circus carnival freak
show actors and directors who ever lived, and was often called the film version of Edgar Allan
Poe, this season’s most famous literary giant.

Tod Browning was born in July 1880 in Louisville. His birth name was Charles Albert Browning,
Jr., but he changed it soon after running away from home at 16 to join the traveling
circus. Tod is the German word for “death,” and he was obsessed with the macabre, unusual,
and unsettling. He spent over a decade traveling in sideshows around the county, learning
contortionism, acting, and discovering truths about the freaks and weirdos associated with the
darker side of the performances. At one point, his live burial act was deemed “The Living
Corpse,” and he was a sad clown for the famous Ringling Brothers circus.

He signed his first major movie deal in 1913 with famous Hollywood director D.W. Griffith, five
years his senior, also a Kentuckian, and the man whose name has become synonymous with
intolerance thanks to his Birth of a Nation 1915 film about the Ku Klux Klan. Ironically, Griffith
and his wife showed up at the Verna Garr Taylor murder trial in September 1937 to watch what
happened to the accused former Warren County Judge Henry Denhardt, who we featured last week.
The films Browning directed were mostly melodramas featuring themes of the exotic, the
bizarre, criminals, or mysteries. These were all familiar things, as Browning spent his life
surrounding himself with the unusual, often dangerous. Browning had a terrible drunk driving
accident where he ran his car into a train and killed a passenger, and that experience would
bring out particularly deadly and horrifying themes in his directing.

The 1931 Dracula film was the first horror movie to have sound. The “talkie” Browning directed
and produced starred Bela Lugosi, the man who would become the forever face of Dracula, the
original and most feared version. A Hungarian-American actor, Lugosi would play Dracula over
the next two decades in many other films, some dramatic and even some comedies, like the
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello comedies where they meet Frankenstein, played by Glenn
Strange of the original Frankenstein films, the Wolf Man played by Lon Chaney, Jr,, and Dracula
played by Lugosi. Lon Chaney, Sr. appears in ten of Browning’s films. His best include
The Unholy Three, The Unknown, Dracula, Freaks, and Mark of the Vampire.

Browning’s final 20 years were spent as an alcoholic recluse in Malibu. His wife died in 1944
and he never remarried or went out into the social circles or industry again. He developed
cancer of the larynx in 1962 and died alone at home that year.