By Nicholas Goodhue.
As far as I can discover, none of the commentators on the film have satisfactorily explained the meaning and importance of the film’s Latin passage…. However, the passage does in fact provide the basis for Van Helsing’s conclusion regarding his analysis of Renfield’s blood.”
About thirty minutes into the 1931 film Dracula is the scene in which Professor Van Helsing analyzes Renfield’s blood. He pours a liquid from a test tube into another vessel containing a dark liquid, and the resultant mixture becomes milky. He then says to his assistant, who is seated before a large open book: “Read, Dummkopf, where I have marked” [See Note 1]. The assistant then reads aloud a passage from the book. The passage is in Latin, and no translation of it is provided, but Van Helsing clearly regards it as confirming his suspicions about Renfield’s blood, for he announces to the others at the table, “Gentlemen, we are dealing with the undead … the vampire.” (The corresponding scene in the Spanish-language version of the film does not contain this experiment or reading.)
As far as I can discover, none of the commentators on the film have satisfactorily explained the meaning and importance of the passage. It seems to be generally regarded as simply a bit of Latinity included solely for atmosphere, much like the “Black Mass” recited by Karloff in The Black Cat (1934), which consists merely of a string of familiar aphorisms and maxims [See Note 2]. However, the passage does in fact provide the basis for Van Helsing’s conclusion regarding his analysis of Renfield’s blood.
The text reads: “Deinde cum extractum vespertilionis sanguini mixtum est, sanguis puniceo colore amisso lacteus fit” [See Note 3]. I translate this: “Then, when extract of bat has been mixed with blood [infected with vampirism], the blood becomes milky, the red color having been lost.” Van Helsing then announces that “we are dealing with the undead,” presumably basing that conclusion on the test he has just conducted, the significance of which is elucidated by the quoted text. Evidently we are to understand that the text is part of an explanation of how it is to be determined whether a particular person has been infected with vampirism: if someone (such as Renfield) is suspected of such infection, one is to mix a sample of his blood with extract of bat [See Note 4], and if the resultant mixture turns milky, that proves that the blood is indeed infected. The blood referenced in the Latin passage must be blood infected with vampirism rather than simply blood in general; for if the meaning were simply that blood in general turns milky when mixed with extract of bat, the test would have no significance.
The significance of the test and the text is now clear: The dark liquid in the vessel in the holder is Renfield’s blood; the liquid in the other vessel is extract of bat; Van Helsing pours some of the extract of bat into the vessel containing Renfield’s blood, which then turns milky, thus proving that the blood is infected.
The Latin saws that make up Karloff’s chant in The Black Cat (1934) are simply a series of traditional proverbs, maxims, etc. Most likely the producers decided they couldn’t afford (or couldn’t be bothered) to do the research to come up with a suitable authentic chant or to engage a Latinist to concoct one that would at least be relevant to the ceremony, concluding that as far as the impression on the audience was concerned, it didn’t matter what the actual meaning of the Latin words was as long as Karloff intoned them in a sinister and atmospheric manner since most of the audience wouldn’t understand them anyway.
By contrast, Tod Browning evidently engaged a Latinist to compose a text for his Dracula that would actually relate to and explain Van Helsing’s experiment. Yet it seems fair to say that the Latin in both films, whether a string of saws having no relevance to the action as in The Black Cat or a text that actually does relate to the action as in Dracula, would be unintelligible to most of the audience, and that the impression conveyed would be what the audience, not understanding the text, could infer from the action and other dialogue of the scene. As one author writes, “we see the blood in the test tube become transparent [actually, “milky”] but do not learn the significance of this transformation, and we are never told the meaning of the Latin reading, which presumably confirms a connection between Renfield’s blood and the practices of the vampire” [See Note 5]. The reading does confirm that connection, as explained above, but Browning, while presumably realizing that those who could understand the Latin would have a better comprehension of the scene than those who could not, must also have realized that the latter category of viewers far outnumbered the former and must have thought that the lack of that added level of understanding would not significantly detract from the general impression that the scene would make on the average viewer.
A discussion of the scene here under consideration appears as chapter 2 (“Dr. Van Helsing’s Experiment”) of Mark C. Glassy’s Biology Run Amok! [See Note 6], but it does not mention the Latin reading, which definitively explains what Van Helsing is doing and obviates the need for conjecture or surmise as to the nature and purpose of the experiment.
That Browning considered it worthwhile to secure for his film a correctly composed Latin text that accurately describes and explains the action on the screen may be added to the wealth of evidence presented by Gary D. Rhodes in his Tod Browning’s Dracula [See Note 7] that, contrary to a common misconception, Browning’s film is in fact the product of careful planning and attention to detail.
Notes:
[1] YouTube, https://bit.ly/3XY1KNq (correct “Diende” to “Deinde” in the title), accessed 9 June 2025. This clip includes the non-diegetic music added to the 1999 re-release of the film. The word “Dummkopf” is barely audible in this clip, but it is in the published version of the shooting script, the Movie Scripts transcription, and the dialogue transcription cited in Note 3 below and is clearly audible in the 75th anniversary edition of the film on DVD.
As to Van Helsing’s addressing his assistant as “Dummkopf,” see Stefan Keppler and Michael Will, eds., Der Vampirfilm: Klassiker des Genres in Einzelinterpretationen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), p. 22, Google Books, https://bit.ly/4iRBKwy (Internet Archive, https://bit.ly/3BJy4wm), accessed 9 June 2025.
[2] The “Black Mass” recited by Karloff is quoted and translated in the Wikiquote article “The Black Cat (1934 film),” https://bit.ly/400Viro (Internet Archive, https://bit.ly/3VXALky), accessed 9 June 2025.
[3] The text is quoted a number of times on the Internet, but not entirely correctly. One might have expected to find it in the published version of the shooting script, MagicImage Filmbooks Presents Dracula: The Original 1931 Shooting Script, production background by Philip J. Riley (Absecon, NJ, 1990), Google Books, https://bit.ly/4051s9Y (Internet Archive, https://bit.ly/4gUx6wg), accessed 9 June 2025, but at the point where it would have appeared, one finds only the notation “ASSISTANT (reads in Latin to be filled in later)” (Internet Archive, https://bit.ly/3ZUfqva, accessed 9 June 2025). The most frequently found version, as in Movie Scripts SQ (https://bit.ly/3XZ94Iv, accessed 9 June 2025), has vesiculionis in place of vespertilionis and sanguine in place of sanguini, omits the final e of colore (elided in the oral reading of the text in the film but a necessary part of the written form in a transcription), and doubles the t of lacteus.
That vespertilionis is the correct transcription is verified not only by simply listening closely to the word as spoken in the film but by reference to the dialogue transcription in the USC Cinematic Arts Library (Dracula, “Dialogue,” Box 13/Folder 03278, Universal Collection), a copy of the relevant page of which was provided to me by the late Ned Comstock, who I regret will not see this acknowledgment of his kind assistance. The text appears there (p. 7) as “Diende [sic], cum extractum Vespertilionis sanguini nixtum [sic] est, sanguis puniceo colore amisso lacteus fit.” See also the partial quotation of the passage in Franco Pezzini and Angelica Tintori, The Dark Screen: Il mito di Dracula sul grande e piccolo schermo (Rome: Gargoyle, 2008), p. 196, quoting the first part of the text, viz. “Deinde … mixtum est,” correctly transcribing vespertilionis but mistranscribing sanguini as sanguinis (Google Books, https://bit.ly/480C8Ut, accessed 9 June 2025). The ablative sanguine would be grammatically correct here, but the speaker clearly says the dative sanguini, which is also grammatically correct and is the form appearing in the dialogue transcription. I thank Dr. Leena Löfstedt for drawing it to my notice that sanguini is correct here and properly construable with mixtum.
A discussion of the text in the Hungarian website latinóra is based in part on the mistranscription vesiculionis and does not explain how the text supports Van Helsing’s conclusion: https://bit.ly/3zF7TpD (Internet Archive, https://bit.ly/3P6C795), accessed 9 June 2025. As the latinóra discussion itself notes, there is no such word in Latin as vesiculionis.
[4] On extract of bat see James Robertson, The Complete Bat (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), pp. 58, 61, Google Books, https://bit.ly/4gqVxBs, accessed 9 June 2025 (only snippets of those pages available then).
[5] Angela Smith, Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 53, Google Books, https://bit.ly/3Yl3hhC (Internet Archive, https://bit.ly/3DDrAzF), accessed 9 June 2025. In the film it is evident that the mixture is milky, not transparent or clear. The published shooting script specifies that when Van Helsing pours the liquid in one test tube into the other tube, the liquid in the latter tube “changes from its dark, vicious [sic; read “viscous”] composition to one of milky whiteness” (Internet Archive, https://bit.ly/47V36gr, accessed 9 June 2025).
[6] Mark C. Glassy, Biology Run Amok!: The Life Science Lessons of Science Fiction Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2018), pp. 28–30, Google Books, https://bit.ly/4heKXhU (Internet Archive, https://bit.ly/3Dw3Aye), accessed 9 June 2025 (only snippets of those pages available then). The author refers to the resultant mixture of the liquids as “clear,” whereas it is in fact milky (above, Note 5).
[7] Gary D. Rhodes, Tod Browning’s Dracula (Sheffield, Eng.: Tomahawk Press, 2014), Google Books, https://bit.ly/3DHjZAn (Internet Archive, http://bit.ly/3HDOzwP), accessed 9 June 2025.
Nicholas Goodhue has degrees in Latin (M.A.) and law (J.D.) from UCLA. He practiced law for a year and a half before becoming a freelance researcher and manuscript editor. He has published a book and several articles in the field of classical archaeology.