- A new 4K restoration of Hammer’s Dracula arrives in theaters and on Blu-ray in October 2026
- Uncensored and with new footage that would have been lost forever
- Collected from “the best original archival materials from around the world”
Here’s a story you can really sink your teeth into: Hammer Films has “painstakingly restored” (pun intended, I suppose) the 1958 original. Draculaadding “long lost” footage and providing a full 4K uncensored cut. It will arrive in theaters and home entertainment in October 2026.
This is not a remaster. It’s a resurrection. It features footage thought lost for more than six decades and only seen by Japanese moviegoers in the 1950s. The recovered material comes from “the finest original archival materials from around the world” and has never been released in the United States or the United Kingdom, nor available for home viewing in either country.
Dracula was the second on-screen duo consisting of Peter Cushing, who plays Dr. Van Helsing, and Christopher Lee, who plays…I’m just checking my notes here…Dracula.
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Fangs for memories
There have been many Dracula films, but 1958’s delivered the definitive Drac: as Hammer Films puts it, Lee’s portrayal introduced “the bloodshot eyes, predatory fangs and visceral physicality that became the model for modern vampire mythology and whose influence is still visible in horror cinema today.” »
It’s hard to exaggerate DraculaThe influence of. Everything you want from a Dracula movie – the fangs, the swollen breasts, the wooden stakes, the suggestion that some women might actually enjoy having their necks bitten by a charismatic Count – is here, and the film has often been included in rankings of the best horror films and films of all time.
As director Terence Fisher explained to our friends at SFX Magazine, it was the film that made vampires sexy. “My greatest contribution to the Dracula mythos was to bring out the underlying sexual element in the story…The moment he bites, it’s the climax of a sexual experience.”
As you can see from the stills above, the restored version looks absolutely spectacular. And the film itself is a masterpiece. As Empire wrote in its retrospective review, “It was garish, it was sexy and it was never afraid to be gory. And with its spectacular ending – in which the Count’s flesh flakes and crumbles to dust as he is caught in the first rays of the morning sun – Dracula created one of the classic images of horror cinema.”
According to the wonderful John Gore, CEO of Hammer Films and Executive Chairman of John Gore Studios, “Bringing Dracula back to audiences in 4K is about much more than a film restoration job. It’s about recovering a piece of British film history that audiences thought was lost forever. Seeing Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing together again in such extraordinary detail is a reminder of how powerful this film remains nearly seventy years after its original release.”
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