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DIRECTED BY: Peter Wechsberg
FEATURING: Peter Wechsberg (as Peter Wolf), Lee Darel, Dudley Hemstreet, James Randall
PLOT: In a universe where everyone communicates via American Sign Language (ASL), theology student Steve Adams discovers that he is the son of Dracula and has been leading a second life as a blood-thirsty vampire with a trail of bodies in his wake.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even if it weren’t one of the first (and, to this day, one of the only) films made exclusively in ASL, Deafula’s imaginative presentation of a world where gestural speech is the lingua franca and its singular interpretation of the Dracula legend make it a movie that truly has no comparison.
COMMENTS: Let’s start with the remarkable durability of the Dracula myth. Vampires have lost none of their fascination even in our modern world (I’ve discussed this phenomenon before), and Dracula lords over them all, appearing in some form in more than 200 films. Unlike most of his classic horror brethren (werewolves, mummies, zombies, Frankenstein monsters, creatures from black lagoons and the like), Dracula is verbal, and even handsome, as likely to use seductive words as violent action to achieve his aims. So when an underrepresented community wants to tap into the mainstream, there’s probably no figure more iconic and adaptable and copyright-free than Dracula, standing by and ready to tell his tale once more. Blacula, anyone?
And so we come to Deafula, in which writer/director/star Wechsberg endeavored to give the deaf community something they had never had: a popular entertainment of their very own. He conjured up a messily layered version of the story, with the fundamental vampire-kills-people plotline frequently taking a back seat to the hero’s fraught relationship with his father, a police procedural featuring a Van Helsing substitute whom everybody hates, and a substantial commitment to themes of religious devotion and divine punishment. We do get Dracula in this movie (as an appropriately imperious and condescending figure), but he’s not our star. Instead, our hero is a pretty average, milquetoast kind of guy who, when he transforms into a villain, looks less like a demonic force and more like a low-rent Svengoolie with a ridiculous fake nose.
It is impossible to divorce Deafula from the circumstances of its creation. A drama student at Gallaudet University, Wechsberg was drawn to the power of film, and after getting into some production work, he scraped enough money to make a movie his way, with the deaf audience in mind. (He also aspired to give deaf creators their due; the closing credits specifically distinguish the hearing-impaired performers from their hearing colleagues.) His inexperience shows, especially when it comes to action. He crafts a clever introduction to reveal his hero emerging from the vampire state, but afterward gets caught up in disjointed edits and inconsistent pacing. Deafula’s savage mind-control of a would-be robber should be evidence of his power, but the awkwardly slow delivery of his revenge loses all suspense and instead becomes unintentionally comic. Scenes are intercut in such a way that you sometimes lose track of their chronological order. The use of vampire mythology is wildly inconsistent; neither sunlight nor Christian iconography seems to have any effect on our bloodsuckers, and the way vampirism is transmitted is haphazard. Sometimes this messiness hints at bigger issues that are underexplored: Wechsberg makes his bloodlusting hero a divinity student who has been raised by his preacher father since birth (the pastor gives him blood transfusions to ease his “condition”), who resolves his dilemma first by becoming a man of the cloth himself, and then turning to God himself to end it all. It’s either confused or gutsy or both.
A lot of what feels “weird” about Deafula might be better labeled as “not for the hearing.” Signing and silence are directly relevant to the way the story is told, and some of the stranger elements make more sense if you remember that the film is specifically intended for a hearing-impaired audience. For example, the film’s most notorious line of dialogue — Steve orders peanuts at a bar, and then seems to state the blindingly obvious when he tells his companions, “A moment ago, I ordered some peanuts.” — doesn’t seem so ridiculous when you acknowledge that he’s giving information to people who weren’t privy to the signed conversation. The detective treats his new assistant with utter contempt by doing the rudest thing he can possibly do: he turns his back on the little man, silencing him as surely as if he had put his hands over his ears. A sparse musical score feels melodramatic, but becomes more credible once you know that it was employed to send vibrations through the theater at key moments, speaking to deaf viewers through physical sensation. Wechsberg shows a Renfield-like character as mute and disfigured by placing tin cans on his hands, which looks like a ridiculous solution to the problem until you recognize what a potent symbol covering the hands would be to an audience fluent in ASL. Even that ridiculous fake nose that Deafula sports delivers a message to deaf viewers, marking the character as distinctly different from his blond bearded incarnation as surely as if he adapted a thick accent.
Speaking of accents, a quick word about voiceovers. If you manage to come across a copy of Deafula yourself (a genuine challenge, as we will discuss shortly), chances are that it will include a voice track to translate ASL for those of us impaired with hearing. In my research for this review, I have yet to determine whether that was a Wechsberg contribution or something added later. Regardless, it’s here now, and most present-day reviews will comment upon it, particularly the vaguely Lugosi-esque voice employed for Dracula himself. However, I feel fairly certain that these audio captions, while helpful to a hearing fellow like myself, add to the unfair characterization of Deafula as weird. They’re poorly delivered, sometimes trying too hard to match the deliberately outsized emotional notes of the signing actors. Plus, the translations are overly literal, missing the rhythms and nuance of ASL. It just further feeds the notion that the hearing population isn’t getting the same film that deaf audiences are watching, meaning that hearing viewers will find it just as odd as a movie entirely in Esperanto. Your comprehension might actually be more accurate if you turn the sound off entirely.
The film’s most intriguing scene doesn’t involve Dracula or vampires at all. It’s the slow crawl through a restaurant where we eavesdrop on multiple chats, like a silent version of Richard Linklater’s tour of a Viennese café and its multilingual patrons in Before Sunrise. In an extensive interview with the Oregon Historical Society, producer (and Dracula performer) Gary Holstrom explains that Deafula was a real hit with audiences who were finally provided with entertainment that literally spoke their language. He also reveals that the very effort to share the film with the wider world may have sunk its prospects. The production company sold several prints of the film to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for distribution. (That may also be the source of the voiceover.) However, the VHS copies of the film the government made soon spread in a blaze of piracy, killing off any potential market for the film. Now, aside from rare screenings at festivals and special presentations, those federally enabled bootlegs are the only way to see Deafula in any form at all.
Deafula is not a great movie. But as a piece of cinematic history, it absolutely deserves to be better known, and I’ll go so far as to say that Wechsberg should be remembered alongside such hardscrabble pioneers as Oscar Micheaux or Dorothy Arzner. At the very least, someone out there should give the film a proper restoration and re-release, so the deaf community can enjoy the film that was always meant for them, and the rest of us can dip our toe into a culture that is usually relegated to a single character, or enlisted to serve the narrative of a hearing character. Deafula belongs on our list because it is a film unlike any other, and it deserves to rise from the grave.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Russ. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)