By Kit Rathenar
There can’t be a horror fan alive who doesn’t know the legend of Dracula. The vampire Count with his black cape, his crumbling castle, his numerous brides and his insatiable thirst for the blood of the living may be the single most iconic figure in all of Western horror. Even people who’ve never read or heard of the book recognise his name and image, and he’s been riffed on, pastiched, and reinterpreted in every direction imaginable. He’s the original, the one and only. It’s probably fair to say that every vampire you’ll ever meet in popular culture is, at one remove or another, indeed a child of Dracula.
And yet, despite the fact that typing “Dracula” into IMDb search gets you well over two hundred exact or partial title hits, it would be hard to claim that there’s ever been a truly definitive film of Bram Stoker’s original novel. While the Cliff Notes version of the plot is engraved on every fan’s memory, each new version takes away or adds something, shifts characters around, reinterprets the dynamics or changes the ending. It’s even more true to say that there’s never been a truly definitive portrayal of Dracula himself – after all, for everyone who hails Bela Lugosi, there’s a Christopher Lee fan waiting in the alley with a stake. Certainly to play Dracula as Stoker wrote him would be a hugely demanding role for any actor. The necessary combination of aristocratic grace, bestial ferocity, old-world eccentricity and dominating charisma is so complex that most attempts have been skewed in favour of one aspect or the other of the Count’s personality, or just descended into outright ham. Indeed, the best portrayals are often found in the looser adaptations – Frank Langella’s beautifully understated rendering in John Badham’s 1979 Dracula is my own favourite, but that’s a version that takes considerable liberties with the plot. To cast the perfect Dracula in a truly faithful presentation of the original novel seems, on the face of it, like an impossible challenge.
Which is why, despite the fact that I was only twelve at the time, I can still remember the excitement when rumours started to leak out about Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. The word went round in a whisper that this was going to be the greatest Dracula ever. The most extravagant, dramatic, spectacular and faithful adaptation the world had ever seen. I wasn’t going to be able to watch it for a few years, of course, but the 18 rating hanging over it just made it more scarily exciting to anticipate. What could Coppola possibly have done to make the classic Victorian tale – that I’d already read when I was barely into double digits – merit a full-on “adults only” sticker?
Well, twenty years down the line, we all know the answer to that one. Contentions that this was going to be a truly book-accurate adaptation turned out to be less than truthful, as Coppola took a repressed and neurotic horror story and turned it into an overcharged, fantastical, and shamelessly bloodsoaked erotic romance. He certainly succeeded in reinventing Dracula for a new generation, however, and the influence of his version can readily be traced all the way through the last twenty years – from the long line of sexualised, visually sumptuous vampire flicks that came out through the nineties and early 2000s, through to blockbusters like Van Helsing with its obvious visual and design nods, even to the surfacing of lines from the movie in metal lyrics and tabletop wargames borrowing the armour designs. For better or worse, Coppola’s Dracula got everywhere.
Much of the credit for the iconic quality of this adaptation has to rest of course with Gary Oldman, who does an extraordinary job of playing one of the most demanding anti-heroes in cinematic history. Coppola’s Vlad Dracula as written is a strangely damaged creature, his emotions and motivations jarringly skipping tracks from one scene to another. In Transylvania, ancient and withered by time, he’s a fawning, almost senile figure enlivened by occasional flashes of deranged fury; in London with Mina, he’s torn between the roles of courtly lover and the affronted prince fighting the desire to simply cut through the emotional red tape and take what he already considers to be his by right. With Lucy, he’s the beast of her secret dreams; when he confronts Van Helsing and his stooges, he’s an out-and-out monster. Faced with this chaotic character to make sense of, Oldman, while he does ham it up at some points, makes a sterling effort and, importantly, manages to retain his dignity when it counts the most. His romance with Winona Ryder’s reserved yet passionate Mina is, character-wise at least, the finest thing about this film by far. Their scenes are unfailingly intense, beautiful and eloquently romantic, arguably the only times when this film manages to be truly profound in its drama. If Twilight is supposed to be the perfect vampire wish-fulfilment fantasy for the modern age, Coppola’s Dracula is a grander, nobler, older version by far. And the plot twist that makes Mina into Dracula’s own beloved Elisabeta reborn only adds to its magic, after the glimpse we’ve seen of the fifteenth-century original – I’ve actually often wished that Coppola would go back and make a prequel based on the events that we see briefly in the movie’s opening flashback. Short though it is, it’s breathtakingly evocative, and hugely adds to the sense of scale and scope that the narrative possesses.
Indeed, truth be told, the leading couple are set off so magnificently against the backdrop of the supporting cast that I almost suspect Coppola of deliberately directing everyone else so as to peel our sympathies away from them all. For Dracula and Mina stand alone, as the only characters who haven’t been sabotaged by either the script or their own performances. Anthony Hopkins’s scenery-chewing Van Helsing takes the novel’s eccentric but compassionate professor and turns him into a cheerful sociopath who seems to have no awareness at all of the distress he causes with his outrageous words and actions. Seward, Morris and Holmwood, three men who in the novel all carry themselves with an almost painful level of dignity, spend their first few appearances falling figuratively (and literally in Seward’s case) over their own feet; and the less said about Keanu Reeves’s wet-behind-the-ears, damn near castrated rendition of Jonathan Harker the better, since a great deal has been said already by others. Sadie Frost’s Lucy is portrayed as a nymphomaniac nymphet whose scandalous demeanour ruins any sense that this is set in the real Victorian era, though I fault the script for that rather than her performance; Frost, despite a sometimes glassy-eyed demeanour, does her absolute best with what must have been a role as embarrassing to play as it is to watch.
And yet, despite all of this actorial shambling, Dracula somehow remains a glorious film. Aside from Oldman and Ryder’s show-saving joint performance, the cinematography and visual direction alone set this movie head and shoulders above the common herd. It hasn’t dated for the very simple reason that it’s put together out of techniques stolen from across almost a hundred years of filmmaking; practically all the effects are done in-camera, making Dracula effectively the Viking funeral of vintage special effects before the example of Jurassic Park sent everyone off down the CGI rabbithole. It was a daring decision on Coppola’s part to take the cutting edge of filmmaking and shove it up the studio’s arse (ouch) but it was absolutely the right one. The lush, dreamy, gothic visuals of this film would almost certainly have been spoiled, not to mention instantly dated, by the CGI of the time, but shooting them in the old style ties this film smoothly back into the atmosphere of its predecessors all the way back to the days of Bela Lugosi, making this a visual treat for fans of classic horror rather than a betrayal of their traditions. It’s a film I find endlessly inspirational, filling my head up with swirling images and half-captured ideas every time I watch it. No matter how cynical I can be when I’m sitting down and commenting on it after the fact, when I’m there in the moment I’m enchanted every time.
Indeed, it’s arguably more impressive for a film to be so flawed and yet so magical, than it would be for it to be merely perfect. Happy birthday Dracula – many, MANY happy returns.