No Category for the Cape

Dracula didn't get a single Oscar nomination, and costume design wasn't a category yet anyway. On Saturday the Academy's own museum puts Lugosi's actual cape on display.

The Academy Museum opens The Horror Show this Saturday: six themed galleries, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers standing around in full costume, the original Psycho storyboards, a mask from Creature from the Black Lagoon. In the Gothic room, according to the exhibition rundown, there's Bela Lugosi's cape from Dracula, freshly restored.

Dracula came out in February 1931. Lugosi was paid $500 a week for seven weeks, $3,500 for the whole job; Helen Chandler, playing Mina, got $750 a week. When the Academy handed out its awards that November, for films released through July, Dracula wasn't on the list anywhere. Nobody could have nominated the cape even if they'd wanted to: costume design didn't get its own Oscar until 1949.

Lugosi kept the cape. He went on wearing it for stage shows and personal appearances until he died in 1956, per the Academy's own announcement of the acquisition. He was buried in a Dracula cape too, just not that one — his son, Bela G. Lugosi, has said he and his mother Lillian made that call. The movie's cape stayed in the family for more than eighty years. In 2011 it went up at Profiles in History with a $1.2 million opening bid and didn't sell. In 2019 the museum announced it had it, a partial gift from the family, and the curator, Jessica Niebel, said it was important to the museum “to be able to restore and safeguard this artifact.”

This March, Sinners took a record sixteen Oscar nominations and won four. Objects from it are in that same Gothic gallery. The film that made the cape famous got zero.

Hollywood did hand out an Oscar with Bela Lugosi in it, eventually. It went to Martin Landau, in 1995, for playing him in Ed Wood.