Hello!

A good Saturday to you … we were made aware of an interesting link at The Classic Horror Film Board. Board member Ray Faiola has put together a missing bit of picture and sound from the original release of a prime Universal horror picture.

The interest is built-in. We all know that the Karloff Frankenstein begins with a ‘word of warning’ from Edward Van Sloan, but we had forgotten that similar clip had been trimmed from the official version of Bela Lugosi’s original  Dracula.

We’re not quite sure what we’re looking at. “It’s a reconstruction of the long-missing Edward Van Sloan curtain speech from Dracula that syncs up a 16mm silent print with audio from a Vitaphone disc.” But are they saying that that’s what we’re hearing?   They elsewhere ask if some collector has a Vitaphone disc for the last reel of Dracula.  Online, some are theorizing that the track we hear may have been created by AI. I don’t know enough to have a coherent response to that.

But the clip itself sounds pretty cool:

And Joe Dante is circulating a link to this article from Architectural Digest written by Michele Duncan and posted on April 22, 2026.

The title says exactly what it is. The pictures show the family man and happy daddy Orson doing the domestic thing, and Duncan’s text has interesting things to add. The explanations for the photo images are more than illuminating. Welles fans get to see where he lived and worked. We’re told that his neighbors were Greta Garbo and Shirley Temple.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson