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Sunday November 10th 2024

Dracula | 1979

Dracula film location: St Michael's Mount, Marazion, Cornwall
Dracula film location: Dracula's castle: St Michael's Mount, Marazion, Cornwall | Photograph: Wikimedia / Sheila Russell

Dracula (1979) film location: Cornwall
Dracula film location: Seward’s asylum: Camelot Castle Hotel, Tintagel, Cornwall

Photograph: Camelot Castle Hotel

2008 Best Actor nominee Frank Langella sprang to fame in the Seventies playing Dracula on Broadway, and recreated the part on screen – with Laurence Olivier wielding the garlic and stake as Van Helsing.

Like Bram Stoker’s book, this lush, romantic melodrama is set in ‘Whitby, Yorkshire’, in the north of England but the film was shot in the far southwest, around the dramatic landscapes of Cornwall.

The asylum, run by Dr Seward (Donald Pleasence), is now the Camelot Castle Hotel, Tintagel, the legendary birthplace of King Arthur, on the north Cornwall coast.

Dracula (1979) film location: Mevagissey, Cornwall
Dracula film location: the harbour: Mevagissey, Cornwall

The village, where Dracula tries to board ship, is Mevagissey, a fishing village on the south coast, five miles south of St Austell.

Count Dracula’s castle is St Michael's Mount, half a mile offshore – it’s connected by a causeway – from Marazion, three miles east of Penzance, towards the southwest tip of Cornwall. Home of Lord St Levan, the 17th century castle is a National Trust property and open to the public.