Dracula Week Day 4: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

As they say, vampires suck

OK, so here, as the saying goes, is the thing. Calling your movie Dracula will always indicate that you are, in some way, trying to adapt the Bram Stoker novel of that title. Nobody is naive enough to think that a movie called Dracula will guarantee total fidelity to Stoker’s vision, but you do assume that there’ll be some basic elements of the story in the film.

Now, if you call your movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you are going a step further. You are not saying, “Here is my spin on Bram’s story”. You are saying, “Here IS Bram’s story, brought to life by someone truly dedicated to doing justice to this classic novel.” In a nutshell, naming your film Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a big flashing sign saying “This is the most faithful adaptation, THIS is what Bram Stoker would have wanted”.

Make no mistake, that is what Francis Ford Coppola wanted to do with Bram Stoker’s Dracula - not to make a faithful adaptation of the book, but to convince people that he had. Which is why many people who’ve never read the book, and indeed many people who have read it, but don’t remember it very well, truly believe that this version of Dracula IS definitive.

These people are wrong. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a very bad movie on its own merits, but the fact Coppola tried to pass it off as faithful to the novel is more than just bad filmmaking, it’s a positive urination on Bram Stoker’s grave. The writer would, I am confident in saying, have been utterly nauseated by what Coppola did to his story, not just in terms of quality, but in terms of shamelessly spitting in the face of the novel’s entire point.

We’ll get to the incompetence, but let’s look first at the adaptation issues.

Superficially, this film is closer to the book than most others. It includes all the book’s main characters, including Quincey P. Morris of Texas, who is excised from almost all other adaptations. It also portrays Dr John Seward as the head of the lunatic asylum and a young suitor of Lucy Westenra, as opposed to the elderly medico that others, when they include him at all, do. And Arthur Holmwood is there, engaged to Lucy, rich and noble as in the book. Renfield starts the movie in the asylum, and Jonathan Harker starts the movie travelling to Castle Dracula to seal the purchase of Dracula’s house in London, leaving his fiancee Mina Murray behind. After he goes through his ordeal and escapes the castle, Jonathan and Mina are indeed hastily married in Eastern Europe, and after Lucy falls victim to the mysterious attacks of the vampire, the whole gangs gets together with Dr Abraham van Helsing to hunt down the Count, culminating in a chase through the snowy Carpathians to Dracula’s final doom.

So, yes, there’s a lot of plot elements that have survived from book to movie, all characters present and correct and numerous scenes that happen roughly as they do in the novel.

But as I observed in my review of 1958’s Dracula, there are movie that follow the story, and there are movies that are Dracula-y. And this movie is NOT Dracula-y. It is a total rejectoion of Dracula-iness. It’s the least Dracula-y movie ever to have the name “Dracula” in its title, and several that don’t still have it covered.

In Coppola’s version, you see, Dracula is not an insatiable demon, preying upon humans and looking to extend his hellish dominion over mortal-kind. Instead, he is a lovelorn medieval prince, whose wife died tragically when he was away at war, and who therefore decided to reject God and be a vampire etc. He’s spent centuries pining for his lost love, who happens to have looked like Winona Ryder, and when he comes across Mina Murray-Harker, who also happens to look like Winona Ryder, he is convinced that she is the reincarnation of his dead wife, and pursues her with romantic passion.

This would be bad enough. But know what’s even worse?

It turns out that Mina IS the reincarnation of his dead wife. And she FALLS IN LOVE WITH DRACULA.

I don’t mean she falls in love with the handsome foreign aristocrat that Dracula is pretending to be, but then when she finds out that he’s the undead monster who murdered her best friend and tortured her husband to near-death, she sees sense and joins the effort to exterminate him. I mean she falls in love with the handsome foreign aristocrat that Dracula is pretending to be, but then when she finds out that he’s the bundead monster who murdered her best friend and tortured her husband to near-death, she remains in love with him, chooses him over Jonathan, begs him to turn her into a vampire, and then actively tries to sabotage the effort to exterminate him. At the very last, she remains declaring her love for the Count - and remembering her past life as his wife - and he dies in her arms as she weeps for the poor lovelorn baby-killing hellbeast.

Now, you can write a movie about a romantic vampire who yearns for his lost love and ends up reuniting with her in a stirring story of how love can survive even death. But you can NOT call that movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, and expect not to get called out on your bullshit. Because this is BULLSHIT.

In the new remake of Nosferatu, Count Orlok has a great line. “I am an appetite, nothing more,” he says, and that is perfect. That’s what Dracula is: an appetite. He lists for blood, he lusts for power. He can hold humans under his spell, and get them to do his bidding, but this is against their conscious will. He controls them, he doesn’t win their heart through his charm and gentlemanly manner. You can invent a vampire who does, but that vampire isn’t Dracula. It sure as hell isn’t Bram Stoker’s Dracula - Stoker was extremely clear in his novel that Dracula is a hideous beast, incapable of love, devoid of human feeling, bent on nothing but destruction. He is a force of malevolence. He’s not Heathcliff. He’s not Mr Darcy. He’s not Ryan Gosling in The Notebook.

And then there’s Mina. Mina gets a strangely raw deal in most Dracula adaptations, usually depicted as a bosom-heaving damsel in distress whose job is to swoon and fret and be overwhelmed by the vampire’s power until the men come to her rescue. Stoker, in a far less enlightened age, wrote a much more proactive and assertive heroine: Book Mina is a victim of Dracula, to be sure, and the men do come to her rescue. But she’s an active participant in her own rescue as well, and is portrayed as intelligent and level-headed - often more so than the men. When the vampire hunters make their plans, Mina is in the thick, and though the men get most of the action, it’s Mina’s mind as much as anyone’s that formulates Dracula’s downfall.

In Coppola’s version, Mina is even worse than a helpless victim: she takes Dracula’s side. She doesn’t need to be bitten or hypnotised to do so: she does it because Dracula is sexy and she’s in love. The fact that she’s married to a man who has gone through absolute hell and nearly died to return to her - all his suffering caused by Dracula - is no match for how hot Gary Oldman looks in old-timey sunglasses. The fact that the man she loves raped and killed her best friend doesn’t really seem to register either.

As to the other characters, well…including them doesn’t mean doing justice to them. Arthur Holmwood, played by Cary Elwes, is wet and ineffectual. Quincey P. Morris, played by Billy Campbell, is only in the movie so Coppola can say he’s being “faithful” to the novel, and has absolutely no purpose. Dr Seward is a confused mess of a character, and a waste of the wonderful Richard E. Grant. He’s introduced as a bumbling suitor, his love of Lucy doomed to disappointment by his clumsiness. The next time we see him he’s a deranged morphine fiend, shooting up in his office and then facing off against Renfield in a scene that seems meant to convey the message that the doctor is just as insane as his patients. There is no sign of this insanity in any succeeding scene, as Seward proceeds to just tag along behind van Helsing for the rest of the movie, his bizarrely inconsistent character traits now abandoned entirely.

In none of these three male characters do we get that quite important facet of the novel: that these are men driven by their devotion to good, hatred of evil, and most importantly by love - their love of poor doomed Lucy, and the platonic love they grow to feel for the heroic Mina - to brave terrible dangers to destroy Dracula. In the movie they’re just some guys, and frankly some pretty whiny ones.

As to Lucy herself, well…it’s quite a feature of the story of Dracula that Lucy Westenra is a pure and innocent young woman who changes character when bitten by Dracula, her growing vampirism turning her voluptuous and wanton. In this movie, she’s voluptuous and wanton from the start, obsessed with sex and laughing about the way she manipulates the men who are in love with her. In other words, there’s no great change in her personality after being bitten - only in her skin tone. What on earth is the point of this, Francis?

As to van Helsing, for a little while it seems as though, in the capable hands of Anthony Hopkins, this character has survived intact from the text, an eccentric but caring and compassionate father figure guiding the frightened young folk through vampire lore. But no, quickly Coppola seizes the opportunity to turn van Helsing into an obnoxious maniac, and it’s a full house for the obliteration of Stoker’s characters.

Coppola’s complete corruption of the character of Dracula, and the character of Mina, and…well, the rest, isn’t the only brutality inflicted on Stoker’s story. One thing about vampire stories is that they tend to have a powerful sexual subtext. The nature of vampiric feeding - the biting of the neck, penetration of the skin, the preying on mostly young women - contains obvious overtones of sexuality that can be played with in all sorts of ways.

When you take the sexual subtext, and you just turn it into softcore porn, it doesn’t enhance the power, it greatly diminishes it. The dark, seductive shadows of the Dracula story are now just fucking, and you’re getting punched in the face with it all. There’s a strong impression that one of Coppola’s main motivations for making this movie was to slap as much female nudity on the screen as he could. The brides of Dracula who prey on Jonathan in the castle are naked, Lucy is naked - only Mina doesn’t have to get naked, because she’s played by Winona Ryder who has the clout to refuse.

Coppola’s obsession with turning Dracula into a cross between a porno and a 1980s heavy metal video results in some genuine absurdities. Lucy might’ve had her libido supercharged by Dracula’s bite, but that doesn’t mean that a young woman in 1890s England is going to sleep in a stripper’s costume. As she sleepwalks, her wispy red almost-dress fluttering in the breeze, it’s completely comical. And then…

Well, and then she has sex with Dracula, who for some reason takes the form of a wolfman to do the deed. In the book, Mina discovers Lucy lying unconscious on a bench in her nightgown, seeing from a distance a sinister black figure leaning over her. This is called restraint, atmosphere, the building of suspense. In the movie, Mina discovers Lucy wildly copulating with a hairy man-beast as Coppola inserts whatever fevered fantasy he feels like into the narrative.

Dracula in this movie, in fact, keeps turning into various weird monsters that have neither precedent in the novel, nor point in the film. Dracula can reputedly turn himself into a bat, a wolf, a rat, an eerie mist…but whence comes the idea that he turns into grotesque humanoid furballs, or gigantic veiny goblins? And given the answer is that it seems to have come straight from Francis Ford Coppola’s brain, what purpose does this serve? In no scene where Dracula turns into a horrid freak is it more effective than had he just stayed in human form.

Of course, when in human form he sometimes looks pretty stupid too. Gary Oldman gives a pretty good performance, but in the opening scenes at the castle, with his famous red cloak and weird bulbous hairdo, he looks more like he’s cosplaying a Star Trek alien than a scary vampire. Of course, this sequence is also wildly inconsistent: at the castle he’s played as entirely evil, a cruel monster who literally feeds babies to his brides. We’re supposed to then accept him, later on, as a tragic hero who just needs to be loved. Frankly, piss off with that, Francis.

Even without the aggressively insulting approach to the book, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a shoddy piece of work. Choices like Lucy’s night attire, the cheesy sight of big Dracula eyes hovering on the horizon, or the self-consciously funky camera angles in the asylum, bring about a distinctly tacky aesthetic and speak to a director much more intent on hurling eye-battering images at the audience than telling a story well. There’s also the fact that almost all the special effects look cheap and unconvincing.

Then there’s the problem of the acting. Oldman, obviously, is fine: he has some shocking lines to say, but he strives with might and main and his considerable talent to make the best of it. Same with Hopkins, who’s lumbered with a dreadfully-written van Helsing but makes something OK of it. But then there’s the Harkers…

Winona Ryder is rubbish at doing an English accent. Keanu Reeves is even worse. Ryder is incapable of anything but histrionics, while Reeves is wooden even by his own standards. Therefore the characters of Jonathan and Mina run the gamut from laughable to intensely annoying. This isn’t helped, of course, by the fact that Mina is written as a woman who chooses a vampire over her own husband - and indeed the rest of the human race. The only reason we feel any sympathy for Jonathan is that he’s been so colossally screwed over: even when we’re feeling sorry for him we’re still praying he’ll stop talking.

Given that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a hit, and has endured as a favourite by many, I was pretty shocked, when I got around to actually watching it, to find just how astoundingly bad it is. But badness could be forgiven: lying to the audience by calling this kick in a dead novelist’s nuts Bram Stoker’s Dracula can’t be.