Dracula (1931), Tod Browning.

Ladies, you are each worth 33% of my value and your stock is falling.

I haven't looked at Bram Stoker's novel Dracula since I was in high school, but a vivid passage has always stuck in my mind:

"With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast.  When blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck  and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the...Oh, my God!  My God!  What have I done?"  ... Then she began to rub her lips as though to cleanse them from pollution. -Chapter 21.

I pictured his finger nail as jagged, running across the white unliving skin -- the whole passage left me nauseated.  By contrast, the biggest threat Bela Lugosi's Dracula poses is that he's on the prowl for your woman!  The first we hear of Dracula, we are told he has wives, plural, and is up to no good.  Why does Dracula want to lease Carfax Abbey in England anyway?  Is it because it is conveniently located next to the Seward Sanitarium, run by a physician who just happens to have a fetching daughter?   And that this daughter Mina has little Jazz Age slumber parties with her pretty pal Lucy?

"I dunno, the accent - it's so dreamy!"  "Oh, Lucy, you have the weirdest crushes!"  

Dracula delegates almost all unpleasantness offscreen, which has a bit of a disjointed effect:  Lucy died?  When did that happen?  You never see him actually walk out of his coffin (how undignified); the camera politely averts its gaze and only returns once he is standing.  I am told Lugosi's moans during his staking have been restored to the 75th anniversary edition version I watched but were never originally heard in theatres.  It's interesting to observe that this landmark vampire film doesn't contain all the elements we consider to be part of the "canon."  Most troublingly, Dracula seems never to need an invitation.  In fact, the film's climax has the entire household attempt to keep Lucy in her own bedroom and Dracula out.  Oh, this heart-breaker Dracula -- someone get the shotgun!

As they are in the Swedish "coming-of-age" vampire film Let the Right One In (2008), the more disturbing themes found in the source material are downplayed. The freakish, the revolting are smoothed over.  In Let the Right One In, the vampire is a friend and secret weapon to a bullied boy more than a predator looking for her next human servant.

I told [Harker] exactly what had happened and he listened with seeming impassiveness, but his nostrils twitched and his eyes blazed as I told how the ruthless hands of the Count had held his wife in that terrible and horrid position. -Chapter 21.

Jonathan Harker's response to the description of his wife's forced interaction with Dracula is that of one whose wife has been, well -- the blood drinking ceremony is basically a Victorian metaphor for rape, right?  Mina's horror at having been made impure becomes a regrettable wayward crush onscreen.  Lugosi is elegant - hypnotic -- something all young wives and fiancees might be forgiven for falling for.  He's like a Carnegie Hall Mormon - who wants to be #4, girls?

No, Eliza Doolittle - NoooOOOOoooo!